Royal Speeches Research Articles

A response to David Jowitt's response…

I must apologise to David Jowitt for having so clearly upset him by an article that was so clearly meant to be light-hearted. It was also oriented towards the stereotypical portrayals of the language of royalty, and the ways myth and reality frequently coincide. If I did not make the distinction clear enough, I apologise; but in places I did not really intend a distinction. Moreover, it was the editor himself, Tom McArthur, who suggested I extend the term ‘royalese’ to the (alleged) features of royal speech (and also the speech of the aristocracy), instead of restricting it just to the literary or satirical representations. I decided this would indeed be an apt way of suggesting the blur between fact and fiction, between dialect and stage-dialect, as it were : hence my inevitable use of the phrase ‘literary royalese’, which still seems perfectly clear to me, despite David Jowitt's stricture.

When Kings Speak. Royal Speech and Royal Prayer in Chronicles

When Kings Speak. Royal Speech and Royal Prayer in Chronicles

When Kings Speak: Royal Speech and Royal Prayer in Chronicles

When Kings Speak: Royal Speech and Royal Prayer in Chronicles