Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

No literary tradition in early modern Europe was as obsessed with the interaction between the native tongue and its dialectal variants, or with ‘foreign’ languages and the phenomenon of ‘translation’, as English Renaissance drama. Originally published as a themed issue of English Text Construction 6:1 (2013), this carefully balanced collection of essays, now enhanced with a new Afterword, decisively demonstrates that Shakespeare and his colleagues were far more than just ‘English’ authors and that their very ‘Englishness’ can only be properly understood in a broader international and multilingual context. Showing a healthy disrespect for customary disciplinary borderlines, Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries brings together a wide range of scholarly traditions and vastly different types of expertise. While several papers venture into previously uncharted territory, others critically revisit some of the loci classici of early modern theatrical multilingualism such as Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Manfred Pfister, Freie Universität Berlin:
This collection of essays celebrates what Shakespeare famously called the “great feast of languages”. It gathers together eight in-depth studies of intra- and interlingual ‘heteroglossia’, ‘code-switching’, ‘multilingualism’ or ‘interlinguicity’ and their politics. These do not only range widely across English Renaissance drama but also take in their stride a wide gamut of approaches from historical linguistics to poststructuralist translation theory. This is refreshing and makes us recognise in the early modern dialogue of languages the linguistic and cultural in-betweenness of our (post)modern literature.