Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms: style, stylization and linguistic authority

This chapter examines the representation of multilingualism in Shakespearean dramatic dialogues, considering a historical, social and linguistic context in which the early modern English vernacular, admittedly the so called “King’s English”, was trying to adfirm its prestige in dialogue and confrontation with Latin and French. The study draws on Coupland’s framework of stylization, and and engages in historical dialogue analysis, as an investigation in a pragmatic perspective of historical speech-based texts. The representation of languages other than English recurs in Shakespeare’s plays within the specific bounds of an educational setting as a privileged frame of investigation, both for sociolinguistic and for pragmatic reasons: the classroom is a topical place where characters are assigned predetermined and extralinguistic roles of power, and multilingual scenes are inevitably accompanied by metalinguistic comments which serve to guide the interpretation of that representation of literacy. Two case studies, the Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the French lesson in Henry V, will be presented, in a close reading that investigates the ideological effects of stylization in multilingual didactic scenes.