Implementación de la metodología a través del pre experimento

Errour speaks Catholic language, suggested by her inarticulacy: her voice is only a ‘bray’ which has politico-religious implications (I.1.17). As Carla Mazzio points out, ‘In Protestant polemic, the Catholic liturgy was deemed unintelligible both for individual utterance and for communal participation.’93 James Pilkington provides a historical basis for a parallel between mumbling and Roman Catholicism with his reference to a ‘mumble-matins’ as a mocking name for a Roman Catholic priest.94

The Latinity of the Roman Catholic Mass led the congregation to repeat prayers in a language that they did not understand in a mindless iteration or mumbling. The priest ‘mumbles up’ prayers, protecting the passage of truth between him and God. The inaudibility or incomprehensibility of the prayers even permitted the possibility that the words were completely devoid of content.95 In Errour, Spenser draws upon these empty semantics to represent the vacuity of Catholic doctrine. She is pregnant with tongues, none of which can speak. Her multiple tongues represent linguistic plurality, a move away from the native mother tongue to embrace the foreign Roman Catholic Latin.

93

Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 10.

94 _{Referring to men, women and children, Pilkington asks ‘Howe can they be learned, havinge none to}

teache them but Sir John mumble-matins?’ See James Pilkington, Aggeus and Abdius Prophetes

(1562), available at EEBO ˂http://eebo.chadwyck.com˃ [accessed 30 August 2014].

95 _{As Mazzio points out, the phrase ‘mumble vp’ was first used by William Tyndale in 1528 to}

describe Roman Catholic liturgical speech. ‘Nether care they but even to mumble vp so moch every daye (as the pye and popygay speake the wote not what) to fyll their belyes with all. Yf they will not lat the laye man have the words of God in his mother tonge yet let the preistes have it which for a greate parte of them doo vnderstonde no latine at all: but synge and saye and patter all daye with the lyppes only that which the herte vnderstondeth not.’ See William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528), Sig.xiiii r. at EEBO ˂http://eebo.chadwyck.com˃ [accessed 1 August 2011]. See also Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance, p. 21.

These Protestant anxieties of speech, of fumbled communication of the sacred ‘Word’, are also expressed over women’s speech and the quality and rectitude of the language the mother grants. This is clearly discernible in Spenser’s Errour, as a sinful, debased female tongue, breeding a multitude of heretical tongues inside her. Caroline McManus argues that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century it was thought ‘that godly women should nurture their children both physically, by breast- feeding, and metaphorically, by catechizing and teaching’.96

John Craig’s The

Mother and the Child (1611) is described as a ‘short catechisme’, consisting of very

short questions and answers that provide rules for godly living and thought. It is intended to be read aloud between ‘Mother’ and ‘Child’, with ‘M. Why did God make you? C. To serve him. M. How will God be served? C. According to his word’, and so on, where each question interrogates the assumptions of the last answer, becoming seemingly irrefutable.97 McManus suggests it is possible that early modern women were responsible for the nurturing of ‘the Word’ as well as the body of the child through this type of catechism, yet this text acts more as a doctrinal script than any tool of female ‘domestic authority’.98

Indeed the ‘Mother’ holds no real authority in the text as it is not her voice that transfers knowledge: it is the ‘Child’ who

instructs any reading child and mother through the answer to the question.99 The form of the text prohibits female influence and ensures the safe transmission of doctrine from man, as the author.

McManus argues that Errour offers ‘a specifically gendered illustration of the dangerous results of (corrupt) women reading and dispensing (corrupt) spiritual

96 _{Caroline McManus, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ and the Reading of Women (London: Associated}

University Presses, 2002), p. 219.

97

John Craig, The Mother and the Child (1611), available at EEBO: ˂http://eebo.chadwyck.com˃ [accessed 1 August 2011].

98 _{McManus, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, pp. 219, 230.}

99 _{See also Catechisms written for mothers, schoolmistresses, and children, 1575-1750, ed. Paula}

doctrine’, bringing together models of the female, Roman Catholicism and falsity to reinforce the negativity of the other.100 This creates a structure of early modern gendered heterodoxy through the symbol of the mother tongue. It sharpens the misogyny around characters like Mistress Quickly, the Nurse and Cressida (explored above) and the problems they have with language. Yet these Shakespearean

characters speak in a context of irony, ambiguity and comedy, qualifying the

presentation of women as imperfect speakers, whereas Spenser’s association between women and error, even dangerous interpretation and speech is much more explicit.101

This chapter has explored the early modern meaning of the mother tongue,

evidencing four case studies where gender and error is the main theme. The mother tongue was used to create an idea of national identity by connecting the language and the nation, naturalised through the mother, according to the several permutations of naturalness discussed earlier. But the mother, who is necessary to the symbol, is also restricted from owning and controlling that language as a woman; she cannot use the power she delivers. Thus the mother tongue centres on a contradiction: in their erratical use of language, women’s language is frowned upon by purists, yet at the same time the most natural, national form of the vernacular belongs to women through the mother tongue. Mistress Quickly and the Nurse demonstrate the

tendency for error to attach itself to women, as uneducated, excessive speakers, both in contrast with male authority figures. The apogee of this is Errour in ‘The Faerie

100 _{McManus, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, p. 235.}

101 _{McManus, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, p. 235. Traub argues that the female reproductive body is}

the repressed figure upon which is based ‘the development of a “prototypical” male subject in the

Henriad’. She also acknowledges the deficiencies of reading women as instruments of reproduction,

where sexuality and subjectivity revolves around what they pass on: ‘One of the unfortunate legacies of this conflation of sexuality and reproduction is the contemporary critical impulse to collapse the whole of female subjectivity into a maternal position defined by nurturance, fecundity, and non- differentiated access to the language of the body’, begging the question where does that leave women who do not have children? Traub, Desire and Anxiety, p. 63.

Queene’: women do not just make errors, they embody it. Shakespeare, however, subverts the image of the mother tongue through Falstaff, which throws doubt upon purists’ attempts to preserve the ‘natural’ integrity of the language by excluding foreign elements. Both Shakespeare and Spenser reveal unnatural tongues, the natural language without the stereotypical mother/woman, yet for very different reasons. With Falstaff, it could be read as mocking such mythical purity, especially given Shakespeare’s positive inclination towards linguistic ‘enfranchisement’, explored in the next chapter.