Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton Tom Rutter Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness. By Margaret Tudeau-Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. ix+245 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–49373–4. The title of Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness neatly encapsulates Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s argument: that Shakespeare’s dramas stage a clash between a view of the English language (and of Englishness) that values plainness, uniformity, and restraint, and another one open to extravagance, diversity, and play. In Shakespeare’s time, this clash reflected a wider cultural shift that would ultimately produce a sense of national and linguistic identity at whose centre was ‘the plain-speaking, plainly dressed virtuous citizen’ p. 3) as opposed to the cosmopolitan courtier, the naturalized stranger, or the lower-class Englishman (still less Englishwoman). Tudeau-Clayton’s survey focuses primarily on Shakespeare’s Elizabethan plays: the second tetralogy and The Merry Wives of Windsor in particular, but with substantial discussion of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice. It is also informed by some excellent research into the history of a range of cultural tropes. One is ‘the King’s English’, whose early usage turns out to be as a means of excluding those who do not speak it. Another is the use of financial metaphors (‘clipping the King’s English’, ‘counterfeit’ words; p. 82), which Tudeau-Clayton links to the Elizabethan monetary reforms overseen by Thomas Gresham. A third is ‘the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions’ (p. 97), which she traces from Andrew Boorde’s Introduction of Knowledge (1547) through Protestant reformers and the chorographer William Harrison to the anonymous play Woodstock and [End Page 112] Shakespeare’s Richard II and The Merchant of Venice. Readers interested in the development of these notions will find Tudeau-Clayton’s work invaluable. However, she is also keen to delineate the broader cultural contest—between inclusivity and exclusion—in which they were made to serve. She identifies the banishment of the ‘extravagant, nomadic’ Falstaff in 2 Henry IV as the victory of a ‘plainness’ (p. 178) that is, in Hal/Henry, merely the cover for a cynical will to power. By contrast, she finds in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More a sympathy for the straying and the strange that is both in keeping with his documented relationships with foreigners and his own status as a migrant to London, and informed by parliamentary debates about the treatment of ‘strangers’ (p. 135). The second tetralogy, with its stress on regional, stylistic, and lexical diversity, depicts the English as ‘a nation of strangers’ (p. 146), while the early comedies evoke a Christian sense of all humanity being both pilgrims and members of the city of God. Other than a brief reference to Brexit, Tudeau-Clayton wisely soft-pedals the modern relevance of these ideas, but the hospitable, diverse version of Englishness with which she aligns Shakespeare will be appealing to many readers. However, she also notes the exclusion of Parolles in All’s Well that Ends Well and the ambivalence with which Othello’s verbal extravagance is treated, wondering if these indicate a ‘shift towards cultural reformation ideology’ as the dramatist aged (p. 130). This point left me wondering, though, whether the openness to diversity that she discusses may stem from the inherently dialogic nature of drama as much as from Shakespeare’s own attitudes. Nor was I entirely convinced by the contrast she draws between Shakespeare and allegedly more xenophobic dramatists such as William Haughton, whose Englishmen for my Money is certainly exclusionary in some respects but which in depicting ‘the triumph of three English citizen daughters’ over foreigners (p. 66) also depicts (from another perspective) the success of three daughters of a Portuguese immigrant, possibly of Jewish descent, in marrying into English gentry. Critical elevation of Shakespeare depends, perhaps, on its own acts of exclusion. Nevertheless, the vision of Shakespeare’s drama that this book offers is a timely and generous one, underpinned by careful scholarship and nuanced critical analysis. Tom Rutter University of Sheffield Copyright © 2022...