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The vernacular is one of the central determinants of national identity, and therefore national identity is destabilised by the impurity and poverty of the language. The mother tongue is a symbol used to resist this fragmentation, to confer authority and identity to language. It pulls together language and nation through the idea of universal origin and a shared tongue. Alongside many other critics, Carla Mazzio argues that the recent expansion of the vernacular effected a sense of English nationhood.9 More specifically, the idea that Shakespeare’s drama developed and defined the vernacular to such an extent that it was partly responsible for forging a sense of English nationality has been defended by Andrew Hadfield, David J. Baker

8

Blake, Shakespeare’s Language, p. 19. Blake’s use of ‘naturalness’ clashes directly with Attridge’s uncovering of the emptiness of such a term, that naturalness is in fact supplemented and then supplanted by decorum. Puttenham tries to claim that the rules of decorum are ‘natural’ but Attridge reveals them to be constructed by an elite group. Attridge, Peculiar Language, pp. 17-45.

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and Willy Maley amongst others.10 Mazzio further aligns the rise of the vernacular and an emerging sense of nationhood with the Protestant reformers.11 She argues that the profusion of foreign languages in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, ‘can easily be interpreted as a testament to an emergent Protestant English nationalism defining itself as distinct from so much Catholic Iberian confusion’.12

But if the language was unstable and expanding, constantly absorbing ‘foreign bodies’, this must have had some impact on the ability of the vernacular to unify geographically- determined subjects living in proximity to each other. If not just English with its range of accents, dialects, sociolects and ideolects, then Scottish, Irish and Welsh posed a significant challenge to the concept of an effective relation between language and nationhood, exemplified by the characters Fluellen (Welsh), Jamy (Scottish), and MacMorris (Irish) in Henry V. Thus, the idea that the rise of the vernacular was responsible for creating a unifying sense of the English nation when the uniformity of the language was in doubt becomes questionable.

The English language was unclear or mixed at its core. Shakespeare constantly brings this to the fore and uses it self-consciously, not with anxieties of mis-meaning but experimentally, with dialogue often deviating from the matter at hand to focus on the properties of language itself. The title-page of Robert

Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall refers to ‘hard usuall English wordes’, and as Emma Smith points out, labelling the English language as hard ‘is an index of the extent to

10 _{Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994),}

and Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (2004), and David Baker and Willy Maley, eds.

British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

11 _{In the early modern period, error was associated with ‘reform’, and ‘correction’, and was drawn}

upon heavily in religious polemic during the reformation. Thus error has a strong religious component. This is discussed in this chapter with Spenser’s representation of the Catholic serpent ‘errour’. Due to limitations of space the connections between error and sin in the reformation cannot be fully covered. This, however, will be a development of the thesis as a future project, see

‘Conclusion’.

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which a rapidly expanding English was developing as a foreign language even to its own native speakers...English was becoming a language which had to be learned’: the very reason Cawdrey compiled his book.13 He teaches native people their own language, confirming the fears of Sidney and Florio (above) that the language and people will be severed from each other.

Smith argues that this sense of ‘Englishness’, to which Mazzio and others refer, is created through the image of the foreign other: ‘[t]hrough representing foreign characters in a London setting, and specifically through the representation of their accented English speech, the plays construct legible and recognizable fictions of both Englishness and non-Englishness in order to produce an idea of national

identity.’14

These historical generalizations are correct in so far as national identity defines itself by what it is not, and in particular it is invaluable to understand English and Englishness in terms of what is foreign to it. But a more complex relation seems to exist between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’, as linguistically the ‘native’ bleeds into the ‘foreign’ as the lexicon expands; the boundary of ‘English’ and ‘foreign’ is hard to identity. Where, then, does this leave national identity? It has nothing to

differentiate itself from, to define itself against. Claims of invasion or conquest suggesting victory and defeat of the kind employed by Florio and Sidney cannot be so straightforward. Although the Norman conquest would have secured the Gallic influence on the English language, its Latin and Anglo-Saxon heritage emphasise how dubious it can be to infer a sense of national identity from the English language. The myth of linguistic purity is already impure; native is already foreign.

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Emma Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 73.

14 _{Emma Smith, ‘“So much English by the Mother”: Gender, Foreigners, and the Mother Tongue in}

William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Vol.13, 2001, 165-181, p. 165.

Expression can be found of the myth of purity at the end of the sixteenth century. As Janette Dillon points out, ‘England remained at war with Spain until after the accession of James, and also became involved in the French civil war after 1589. The construction of “England” remained firmly entrenched in the definition and exclusion of otherness, whether racial, religious or political.’15 Even if a Renaissance notion of ‘Englishness’ was constructed through exclusion of the ‘strange’, as in ‘stranger’, this did not seem to be the case for many users of the English language which, far from excluding, actively invited elements of other languages. By contrast, the critically-accepted theory maintains that ‘the rise’ of the vernacular effected in turn a sense of nationality which, at least according to Dillon, was successful through its exclusion of non-native elements. But seeing language as productive of a sense of nationhood is complicated by the fact that the English verncaular frequently adopted terms rather than refused their entry. The myth of purity labels foreign interpolation as dangerous, bad and wrong.16 Yet for those who seek to promote foreign borrowing such as Richard Mulcaster (see chapter three), the division of correct and incorrect language based on foreign and native words and speakers is troubling; indeed the sense that linguistic ‘error’ is to be corrected requires reassessment.

Jonathan Hope recognises the potential for an alternative perspective on error, stating that it ‘is an interesting notion in the Renaissance. To us, a linguistic error is straightforward – the ideology of standardization has established variation as error, and culturally, grammatical variants are identified as errors, despite what linguists might say – but there was no such ideology in the Renaissance, especially in relation to the vernaculars’.17

Hope argues that because of the instability of the vernacular,

15 _{Janette Dillon, Language and Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 168-9.} 16 _{See fn.1, this section.}

17 _{Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance}

error and correction require a different conceptualisation from the current approach. He suggests that we now approach error with the impetus to correct because of a greater standardisation of the language.18 His way of considering error resists the myth of ‘pure’ language in its expansive inclusion rather than exclusion of difference. This is where the mother tongue becomes relevant, as it is not just a synonym for the vernacular but is employed to naturalise the vernacular. With the mother tongue the idea of the national purity of language is galvanised by its

intersection with the rhetoric of ‘nature’. The national language is treated as ‘natural’ through the terminology of the mother tongue, appealing almost universally to those who are born in the nation and speak its language. Its ideology, then, excludes ‘erratic’ elements. Its vehicle is womanhood, specifically the mother’s body. The mother’s body can be seen as having at least two functions. First, at the material level, its child-bearing capacity is necessary to produce the next generation, thus preserving the state. Secondly, at the conceptual level, the mother’s tongue is used figuratively as a vehicle to pass on the national, natural language. The mother’s body is thereby rendered a contested site in that its appropriation at both the material and conceptual levels conflicts with female individuality, thus excluding women from power and ownership over a language, and more broadly a national future, that they are required to deliver.

18 _{In the context of this debate, then, what does ‘wrong’ language look like? Furthermore, if}

Shakespeare was strongly implicated in creating a sense of national identity through the rise of the vernacular, what are the effects of dramatizing ‘wrong’, mistaken, erratic English? A clear example of this is Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) which is the first case study (1.1.2)