Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare and Language (Ch. 1-3), Schemi e mappe concettuali di Lingua Inglese

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SHAKESPEARESHAKESPEARE

AND LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE

Jonathan Hope

ch. 1,2,

CHAPTER I:

IDEAS AND LANGUAGE IN

THE RENAISSANCE

Commentators on language in the Renaissance thought

language was arbitrary and meaning was arrived at by

custom. There’s a deep connection between the form of the

words and their meaning, the structure reminds of the

essence of the word.

Languages are human creations and meanings are given by conventional custom, it’s arbitrary (people decide the meaning). All languages are equals in terms of what they can express.

ARISTOTLE

Languages are non- arbitrary, and their meanings are linked to the idea or thing they represent, something in the sound corresponds to the nature of the referral word.

PLATO

CHAPTER I:

IDEAS AND LANGUAGE IN

THE RENAISSANCE

THE MYTH OF BABEL

Before the Fall of Babel, the language was only one, given by God to Adam, and it was joined by a parallel mathematical language with one-to-one relationships between words and ideas, and the meaning was arbitrary. All languages are the production of the “confusion of tongues” after the Fall. The myth implies that the return to a single language is the best thing, but offers no basis to identify a current language as better than another. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance intellectuals searched for the remnants of Adam’s language.

He published a treatise on human capabilities where we find peculiar views on language: he explains both Aristotle and Plato’s positions, and rejects the concept of an original language taught by God. He follows the Aristotelian idea that languages represent cogitations, but he believes that languages are formulated by human devisers and are not entirely arbitrary: there’s a hierarchy of languages depending on how well the first devisers fitted the sounds to the nature of the thing. He believes words express meanings through sounds and arbitrary conventions. Overall, his position is more platonic.

JUAN HUARTE

CHAPTER I:

IDEAS AND LANGUAGE IN

THE RENAISSANCE

PEDRO MEXÍA

He is dismissive of the notion of an original language. He thinks languages are arbitrary and that speaking is a distinctive mark of what it is to be human. He uses the Aristotelian notion of tabula rasa to express that we best learn languages when we are children through imitation, and that we learn the first language we hear. Language learning is done by memory, and reason plays no role but it’s the main focus of language use. The basic ability to speak a language is not the same as the ability to engage in a discourse. He thought important to separate “voice” (ability to produce sounds) from “speech” (ability to modulate the voice in a communicative discourse).

CHAPTER I:

IDEAS AND LANGUAGE IN

THE RENAISSANCE

Grammar’s roots are found in classical rhetoric and has a central role in biblical

interpretation.

One defining shift occurred in the 1520s-1530s, when humanist scholars began writing a new

kind of Latin textbook in reaction to the scolastica , a practice that had been dominant for

three hundred years. Scolastica grammars were prescriptive (dictated the correct writing

based on ratio, logic), while the new grammars were descriptive (based their teachings on

exempla , following authors’ practice and custom). Eloquence became the ideal. By the 17th

century, a new kind of scolastica appeared as standardisation became the goal.

Error is accounted for as all languages were thought as imperfect, even Latin’s status as the

perfect language was being challenged by scholars of Greek and Hebrew, and Protestantism

was trying to demonise it as the obfuscatory language of the Catholics.

The focus was on common terms that could convey the most rather than on error, and the

most linguistic errors are intralinguistic and are made by scholars.

GRAMMAR AND ERROR

CHAPTER I:

IDEAS AND LANGUAGE IN

THE RENAISSANCE

Renaissance thinkers were aware of the ephemeral nature of the spoken world, and thought writing could save mankind from oblivion. Shakespeare’s society was in transition from a orality to literacy, it was neither fully textual nor fully oral: writings were starting to appear, and play-text were recording of performances, legal documents were recording of spoken pledges, etc. There was soon to be a shift in the conceptualisation of language (17th century).

SOCIETY AND WRITING

Questions : what does the last line mean in relation to the play? what sense can we make of it in terms of the classical mythology it evokes? what wider cultural meanings might it have? why Mercury and Apollo? why wordes and songes? Apollo is the god of music and Mercury is the god of eloquence, associated with exchange. At their worst, Mercury is considered a trickster and Apollo is prone to vengeance.

CHAPTER II:

IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE IN

SHAKESPEARE

They embody the notion that language is hard-won and artificial but it must be drawn from the raw material of poetic inspiration. Mercury is also seen destroying language, in some traditions, as he punishes those who cannot keep silence. This is still accepted by the Renaissance belief that also silence was a feature of eloquence (= mastery of language). The final line of the play. Mercury’s words are non-poetic and logic, while Apollo’s are poetic, but they are not in opposition, they are mutually dependent and two essential parts of the rhetorical-linguistic process. DISCOURSE, ARTIFICE AND SILENCE Love’s labour’s lost by Shakespeare ends mysteriously with the appearance of Marcadé , a new character who is a messenger for the women. As the four young men press for an answer to their courtship, the women have not taken their language seriously as they value deeds over words, and agree to meet the men again in a year’s time. Marcadé reminds of mar arcadia (wrecked paradise) and is linked to Mercury, the messenger of the Greek gods. They are linked in Greek mythology as Mercury was instructed to give the lyre he had invented to Apollo, and in some traditions he receives back his caduceus snake entwined stick. They are linked by the exchange of their chief attributes, and this is connected to the Renaissance belief that all artistic productions are linked. For Renaissance thinkers, Apollo represents poetic inspiration, both creative and destructive, potentially dangerous if uneducated; Mercury represents control of the language and eloquence. “ The wordes of Mercurie , are harsh after the songes of Apollo ” ( last line of Love’s labour’s lost )

Taking a historicised view on puns, the fault for unfunny puns lies within us and not in Shakespeare. His are not puns in the historical sense of the word, as it appears first as a verb around 1660. The closest word available to him was quibble (Latin quibus , which becomes quib ). Quirk may be similar but has a legal sense, it’s associated with nitpicking formal argumentation. There is no certain term in the Renaissance for what we would call a pun, although there are several terms for wordplay.

CHAPTER III:

IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE IN

SHAKESPEARE

Ex. if we take die and dye we know they are different words, but back then they were one word with multiple possible meanings (and realisations). Pre- standardisation, words involved in puns don’t resemble each other, they are each other. A pun was a play on two realisations of one word. Somewhere in the 17th century, with standardisation, there is a shift from one-word puns to a structure linking two words with different senses by a superficial similarity of form or sound. With Enlightenment came a distrust of puns and the solution was to purge them from the language. AND HIS WORDS Today, Shakespeare’s comedies are not funny, as they rely on a series of puns that we assume were perceived as witty. They are arbitrary and they involve bringing two words together. In post-Renaissance tradition, they involved resemblances between words in order to express their difference. ex. a pun on steel and steal declares their similar sound but distinguishes them as two different words. In the Renaissance, words are groups of letters marked off by spaces, but this is only the representation of language as language is only true when spoken. It could be considered then as a group of acoustic energies, but this is unsatisfactory. A phoneme is something that has no actual value, but it abstractly represents the site where realisations can be triggered, and this is useful in trying to understand puns and wordplay in Shakespeare. Before the standardisation of spelling brought by dictionaries, there was no stable basis on which to identify words of similar sounds as different words. For us , Shakespeare’s puns are not funny because they point out something that it’s obvious and uninterestng: we know die and dye or steel and steal are separate words, the link is trivial for us as we perceive the formal similarity as constitutive of the meaning.