Recent critics have frequently found, in the English representation of foreign tongues, anxieties about national identity or the feared superiority of continental learning. Marianne Montgomery instead argues, in her book on non-English languages and speakers on the English Renaissance stage, that the close proximity of multiple languages in plays can be productive of social cohesion and understanding of cultural difference through audience identification. This is a welcome intervention; despite extensively documented English concerns with otherness in the Renaissance, we should not assume that any evocation of difference is disruptive. Montgomery's more optimistic approach gives us a fuller view of both the cosmopolitanism of London life and theatrical audiences’ capability for nuance.
The first of Montgomery's four chapters, the only one primarily devoted to Shakespeare, draws interesting parallels between the references to Welsh in Henry IV, Part 1 and the languages of Henry V, including characterizations (or caricatures) of Welsh dialect and large amounts of French. Her reading of the Welsh lady in Henry, IV Part 1 is far more open to the possibility than most readers have been that Shakespeare intends sympathy for the lady and, through her, for Wales (whose topography, as Montgomery shows, is crucial to the scene). The Welsh lady's speech is unrecorded and probably uncomprehended by the audience; Henry V, in contrast, contains a representation of the sounds its Welsh character, Fluellen, utters. Montgomery argues that such accents “need not be taken as wholly conventional” (35); such a reading needs a careful case made for the significance of what Fluellen actually says, which unfortunately we don't get enough of here. In the case of Princess Katherine's French dialog, I am convinced by Montgomery's view that the use of French becomes a site of resistance to the play's narrative of conquest, but her belief that Fluellen's speech similarly contains significant content could be more thoroughly supported.
The second chapter considers the use of Dutch characters and language in John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, Thomas Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday. The plays are quite distinct from one another in style and theme, and what emerges is not so much a consistent English attitude toward the Dutch but the interesting variety of uses to which the language itself, as well as representations of Dutch-accented English, could be put. Montgomery shows that despite the relative paucity of English speakers of Dutch, the language and its accent could be used for more than the mockery Marston engages in, including, in Middleton in particular, genuine audience identification with Dutch characters.
The third chapter, devoted to Spanish and focusing on Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, is perhaps the most ambitious. The breadth and political significance of anti-Spanish feeling long after the defeat of the Armada is well known. Montgomery argues that these plays’ complex treatment of Spaniards and their language question the rigidity of the vengeful discourse that is frequently recorded outside of the theater. Her treatment relies on the intimacy that is created between audience and actors in large part through the conventions of the stage, whose understanding is shared between all present even when the actual language spoken may be comprehended only by a small number of the paying customers. By incorporating Spanish-speaking characters into “linguistically, generically, and sartorially familiar” stage conventions (103), a play can make order out of the confusion created by foreign languages spoken on stage.
While her reading of The Alchemist is strong, the mere two words of Spanish in The Spanish Tragedy make Montgomery's task difficult. She says of Kyd's play-within-a-play that, while it “may express anxieties about English, it aims most of its vengeful energy against unintelligibility: that is, against languages that frustrate communication, social cohesion, and the orderly administration of justice” (88). But surely such a task could be performed by any stage language if unknown to the audience. Indeed, part of the lesson of these plays, looked at collectively, seems to be that when the assumed centrality of English is insisted upon too much, the falsehood of such a xenophobic belief becomes obvious. When it does, so does the (perhaps disturbing but also inevitable) possibility that English might be equally unintelligible from another point of view, a bit like the twentieth-century comedian Michael Flanders's self-consciously absurd joke “It's knowing you're foreign that's driving you mad.”
The final chapter, on Latin, is suggestive but compressed; Montgomery concedes from the start that Latin, because of its (lingering) liturgical role, is unique, and its iconic significance present on stage. Indeed, contrary to the ordering role that language variety has in some plays, she notes that on-stage grammar-book Latin (in Merry Wives of Windsor) translates “what is imagined to be stable text into the unstable materials of theatrical exchange” (114). Thus, rather than the collision between cultures, Latin records that between speech and writing. While she notes other connections between books and plays, the textuality of Latin is far more noticeable. The topic of this final chapter, which touches on such diverse subjects as scholarship, pedagogy, pseudo-intellectualism, and of course the liturgy, seems distinct enough to be matter for a significant book in itself. Its difference from other chapters makes me wonder what Montgomery's view would be of one other European language that gets surprisingly little discussion here: Italian, and an absent playwright, John Webster. “I will not have my accusation clouded,” Webster's Vittoria says to a Latin-speaking lawyer, “in a strange tongue”: a reminder of the real personal risks at stake in the interaction of comprehension and incomprehension (The White Devil 3.2.24–25). Of course, any book on such a complex topic must leave out interesting examples, but Webster might have served as a clearer bridge between modern and ancient languages.
An afterword devoted to more recent theatrical collisions between languages—English and Irish—adds welcome dimensions of postcoloniality and modern theatricality to the book and reinforces its vivid sense of the dynamics between playgoers’ ears and actors’ tongues on stage.
