Content-based Instruction in the English as a Second Language (ESL) Classroom

Writing his Teaching Language as Communication in 1978, when methodologies considering the teaching of language via specific content were gaining momentum, Henry G. Widdowson provided an early, almost poetic and prophetic definition of Content-based Instruction (hereafter CBI):

CBI, sometimes also called, more specifically, Content-based Language Teaching (hereafter CBLT),Footnote ¹ is an umbrella acronym that defines a series of Second Language Acquisition (hereafter SLA) approaches and methodologies aimed at teaching and learning a foreign language (hereafter FL or L2) with the support of a non-linguistic subject, that is, art, business, science, and so on. The intersections between the FL and the subject matter, and their respective contribution to the creation of successful FL courses, may vary depending on the primary focus of teachers and lecturers. In this Element, I will adopt and adapt Roy Lyster’s taxonomy of CBI language courses (Reference Lutzky2007, Reference Lyster2018) to offer an accurate and solid theoretical framework within which to choose the most suitable CBLT approaches for the teaching of English as a Second Language (hereafter ESL) through some of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Lyster’s taxonomy of CBI language courses is of particular interest because it consists of ‘a range of instructional initiatives [that] can be identified along a continuum’ (Reference Lyster2018: 2), instead of considering CBLT as a group of rigidly separate methodologies. The two ends of this continuum (see Figure 1) are represented by language-driven and content-driven programmes.

Figure 1 Lyster’s continuum of CBI programmes.

(adapted from Reference LysterLyster, 2018: 2)

Language-driven courses are ‘foreign-language classes that promote target-language development by incorporating a focus on themes or topics with which learners have some familiarity in their L1. … Such themes provide opportunities for language practice but without high-stakes assessment of students’ content knowledge’ (Reference Lyster2018: 2). This is the case of technical and vocational secondary schools in some African, Asian, and European countries, where ESL syllabi establish the teaching of English for Special/Specific Purpose(s) (hereafter ESP) to pupils whose expertise and field of studies are quite technical (e.g., agronomy, food and cookery, ICT, etc.).Footnote ² ESP courses are generally delivered by language teachers/experts with varying knowledge of the disciplinary content provided.

The other end of Lyster’s continuum is represented by content-driven courses, where L2 acquisition is somehow taken for granted, and embedded in the teaching of specific disciplinary contents. Foreign language becomes the ‘medium through’ (Reference Lyster2018: 3) which content is delivered. Content-driven CBI is typical of immersion programmes in Canada or China, but also of English as (a) Medium (of) Instruction (hereafter EMI) programmes in internationalised degree courses (see, among others, Reference OrgelPecorari and Malmström, 2018; Reference Bowles and MurphyBowles and Murphy, 2020; Reference LasagabasterLasagabaster, 2022) where very advanced disciplinary content is delivered exclusively in English, thus taking for granted that students are competent enough to follow classes in this language. In most cases, instructors are content experts with a solid linguistic competence (at least B2+/C1 level).

The middle of the CBI spectrum is occupied by what I have called elsewhere well-balanced courses (Reference CiambellaCiambella, 2021: 349), where ‘students study one or two subjects in the target language, usually in tandem with a foreign language or language arts class’ (Reference LysterLyster, 2018: 2). Content and Language Integrated Learning (hereafter CLIL) has been conceived as the well-balanced model par excellence since the acronym was coined by David Marsh and Anne Maljers in 1994. Content and Language Integrated Learning is ‘a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language’ (Reference Coyle, Hood and MarshCoyle et al., 2010: 1); therefore, the dual focus on both language and content is fundamental. In the best of all possible worlds, CLIL courses should be delivered by a CLIL team comprising at least one non-linguistic-subject teacher and an English (or FL) teacher. This would guarantee that both language and content receive the same attention and are taught by experts in both fields. In most cases, however, it is the non-linguistic-subject teacher who is entrusted with language teaching in CLIL. Hence the need for training content experts to also become ‘language-aware’ (Reference He and LinHe and Lin, 2018: 162), not simply content teachers with some Knowledge About Language, as in the case of EMI courses. Being a content teacher with advanced competence in English is not sufficient to being a good CLIL instructor, which is why local governments finance CLIL training courses for non-linguistic-subject teachers, in order to educate students who are global citizens. Figure 2 summarises my integrations to Lyster’s CBI continuum.

Figure 2 Integrations to Lyster’s CBI spectrum.

(adapted from Reference CiambellaCiambella, 2021, p. 351)

In this Element, I will move from one end to the other, considering ESP courses taught by language teachers to secondary school students, and EMI programmes taught by content experts to university students. The main linguistic objective will be the teaching of pragmatics, that is, language in a meaningful context, while the principal content goals will range from English literature to the history of the English language. For each of the three sections dedicated to a specific pragmatic strategy, a double ready-made lesson plan will be created: one for secondary school students – adopting the ESP framework – and the other for university students – dealing with EMI. Nevertheless, since I have decided to adopt Lyster’s model for its fluidity and non-fixedness, both lesson plans can work perfectly in CLIL modules, if adequately adapted to the needs of teachers and lecturers.

Before moving on to consider Shakespeare and his language as a good example of content to be inserted in CBLT programmes, it is worth shedding some light on the legitimacy of literature as content in CBI. Addressing this issue is challenging because literature offers valuable content in content-based programs, yet it is also an integral part of FL curricula. The next section will try to tackle this problem, providing a brief overview of the situation, as well as solutions and suggestions.

Literature as Content in CBI

The role of literature in language courses has been acknowledged in alternating phases,Footnote ³ and always with a twofold approach: on the one hand, literature was – and still is – considered the most eminent cultural manifestation of any given nation, state, ethnic group, and so on, thus being a cultural enriching moment within FL programmes. On the other hand, language teachers have been underlining its importance as one of the most successful manifestations of historical-natural languages, an achievement to be exploited at its best from a linguistic standpoint, even in terms of imitation and reworking, as will be seen shortly.

According to Susan L. Reference SternStern (1985), the implementation of English and American literature in ESL classrooms began almost 100 years ago, between the twilight of the British Empire and the dawn of America as the first world superpower. Reference Duff and MaleyAlan Duff and Alan Maley (1990: 3) state that from the beginning of the twentieth century to the advent of the Communicative Approach in the 1980s, in ESL classes literature served as a set of source texts to be translated from L2 to L1 and as examples of grammar rules to be learned and then reapplied by students. This teaching method was known as Grammar-Translation. In the 1950s, when communication in FL became central to international scenarios, when more attention needed to be paid to all four basic language skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) equally, the Grammar-Translation Method, based on the teaching and learning of classical languages such as Latin and Greek, entered a crisis and fell into disuse, together with the implementation of literature in ESL curricula. According to Geoffrey Reference HallHall (2015: 1), this comprised a transition from ‘historical dominance’ to the ‘removal of English literature from its privileged central educational position’. While from the late 1950s to the late 1970s structuralism and functionalism almost ignored the potential of literature in ESL courses, because it was considered old-fashioned and lacking in communicative intent (Reference LlachLlach, 2007; Reference BobkinaBobkina, 2014: 249), it was thanks to the influence exerted by such scholars as Jacques Derrida, Colin MacCabe, and Raymond Williams that we ‘mov[ed] from literature to cultural studies’ (Reference HallHall, 2015: 1), thus examining literary texts as manifestations of a given culture, conveyed by a language. This cultural turn, as highlighted by Reference SternStern (1985), led to the conclusion that eliminating literature from language syllabi was detrimental for students. The problem remained as to how to integrate literature into the ESL classroom, since the possibilities offered by the Grammar-Translation Method had proved to be unsuccessful and outdated for the ever-growing communicative needs of ESL courses. I must begin by saying that abandoning the Grammar-Translation Method in favour of the Communicative Approach, as shaped by Noam Chomsky, M. A. K. Halliday, Dell Hymes, and others, did and does not mean neglecting the teaching and learning of grammar and translation in Literature in Language Education methods (hereafter LLE). For instance, recent studies by Reference Atmaca and GündayHasan Atmaca and Rifat Günday (2016) and Reference Fenn and McGlynnAnna Fenn and Rachel McGlynn (2018) propose the teaching and learning of grammar through literary texts, adopting a Communicative Approach.Footnote ⁴

Several groundbreaking works on language instruction through literature have paved the way for this field. Among them, René Wellek and Austin Warren’s seminal Theory of Literature (1942; rev. ed. Reference Wellek and Warren1956) stands out, recognising literature’s dual accessibility through both extrinsic and intrinsic lenses. This involves delving into biographical, social, philosophical, and political contexts that shape a text, as well as exploring its linguistic dimensions. Noteworthy contributions also include Widdowson’s influential Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature (Reference Widdowson1975) and Roland Carter and Michael N. Long’s The Web of Words: Exploring Literature through Language (Reference Carter and Long1987). After these works, Reference Maley, Carter, Walker and BrumfitMaley (1989) is probably one of the first scholars to explore the communicative potential of literature, thus lucidly ‘distinguish[ing] two primary purposes for “literature teaching”: 1) the study of literature; [and] 2) the use of literature as a resource for language learning’ (10, Emphases in the original).Footnote ⁵ The study of literature corresponds to what Maley defines as a critical (literary) approach, thus focusing on the literariness of the text, while the use of literature is part of the stylistic approach, with emphasis on a text’s linguistic features (11). Maley theorises a third combined approach – which he actually fails to sketch out properly – although LLE classes still tend to separate the two approaches even today, with ESL teachers focusing on either the study or the use of literature in the language classroom, and scholars – especially non-Anglophone ones – seeking an integrated/integrative approach which combines literary criticism and linguistics in the ESL classroom (see, among others, Reference TimucinTimucin, 2001; Reference SavvidouSavvidou, 2004; Reference Divsar and TahririDivsar and Tahriri, 2009; Reference DhanapalDhanapal, 2010; Reference YimwilaiYimwilai, 2015).

I believe that most of the integrated/integrative approaches that try to combine both the study and the use of literature in ESL classrooms rightly consider literature to be a specific disciplinary content to be implemented in CBLT courses (see, for instance, Reference Brinton, Snow and WescheBrinton et al., 1989; Reference ElyasiElyasi, 2013). Literature as content has its own jargon, exactly as do other non-linguistic subjects, thus offering learners the possibility of acquiring specific ‘vocabulary, grammar, paragraph structure, interactive communication skills, and types and styles of writing’ (Reference ElyasiElyasi, 2013: 13), typical micro- and macro-linguistic features of ESP (Reference GottiGotti, 2003). Moreover, since literature and language are often considered inseparable (Reference Bassnett and GrundyBassnett and Grundy, 1993; Reference VilchesVilches, 2001; Reference LasagabasterLasagabaster, 2003), in the CBI class, Reference HallHall (2015: 4) suggests integrating them as a binomial rather than positioning them as ‘two distinct fields’. Given the plethora of approaches to using literature in the CBLT classroom and the range of case studies presented by scholars, as seen thus far, I will attempt to formulate a theoretical framework which combines and integrates most of the models proposed in the scholarly debate around LLE, thus adopting Lyster’s taxonomy of CBI courses outlined in the previous paragraph (as revised in Reference CiambellaCiambella, 2021), and, moving his continuum back and forth, will also take into account Maley’s distinction between the study and the use of literature in the ESL classroom.

Another fundamental point to consider when dealing with CBI is the structure of lesson plans, and even in this case, I will refer to Lyster’s studies. I will adopt his proactive approach to CBLT, that is, ‘pre-planned instruction designed to enable students to notice and to use target language features that might otherwise not be used or even noticed in classroom discourse’ (Reference Lyster2007: 44). As developed further a few years ago (Reference LysterLyster, 2018: 15–24), pre-planned instruction comprises a four-phased educational action which corresponds to the traditional tripartition of lesson plans – mainly derived from Lev S. Reference VygotskyVygotsky’s (1978) and Reference Bruner and GolinkoffJerome Bruner’s (1983) constructivist theories – into input, scaffolding, and output, as illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3 The four-phased proactive approach.

adapted from Reference LysterLyster (2018: 16)

The input phase corresponds to Lyster’s noticing activity and ‘establishes a meaningful context related to content, usually by means of a written or oral text in which target features have been contrived to appear more salient or more frequent’ (Reference Lyster2018: 15). Lyster’s noticing activity is clearly influenced by Richard Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (Reference Schmidt1990), albeit largely criticised, according to which input becomes intake (Reference CorderCorder, 1967), that is, input that is processed only if it is noticed, that is, if careful attention is paid to it (Reference SchmidtSchmidt, 1990: 139). Therefore, the Shakespearean text selected in each lesson plan will be provided in the input/noticing phase to stimulate students’ curiosity and let them reflect on the content from the outset. Receptive skills, that is, reading and listening, are generally elicited in the noticing activity phase, to put students at ease without exposing the shiest of them, thus risking raising their affective filter.Footnote ⁶

Lyster’s main innovation is the articulation of the linguistic scaffolding into two sub-phases: awareness activity and guided practice. Although both phases focus on language, they present some differences. The awareness activity ‘encourages students to reflect on and manipulate the target forms in a way that helps them to become more aware of patterns that were highlighted at the noticing phase [through] rule-discovery tasks, metalinguistic exercises, and opportunities for pattern detection’ (Reference LysterLyster, 2018: 15). The second part of the scaffolding, that is, the guided practice, ‘provides opportunities for students to use the grammatical features in a meaningful yet controlled context and to receive corrective feedback in order to develop automaticity and accuracy’ (16). In other words, the first part of the scaffolding phase aims at letting students become aware of some linguistic features that are better contextualised and put into practice in the second part.

Lastly, focus on content returns in the autonomous practice (the students’ output), this time after students have acquired the necessary linguistic structures to work autonomously. In Lyster’s words, ‘[a]utonomous practice requires the use of the target-language features but in a discipline-specific or thematic context. There are fewer constraints, allowing students to use the features in more open-ended ways to develop fluency, motivation, and confidence’ (16). It is clear that autonomous practice involves active skills such as writing and speaking and that it refers to Benjamin Bloom’s famous revised taxonomy of educational learning objectives (Reference Anderson and KrathwohlAnderson and Krathwohl, 2001), whose highest cognitive process is ‘create’, that is, ‘a new product … coordinated [by] the students’ previous learning experiences [which] requires creative thinking’ (84–85).

As for activities to be proposed to teach language in the literature class, I will mainly – but not exclusively – refer to Burhanuddin Arafah’s list of teaching techniques (Reference Arafah2018: 31–34), which I consider a fine synopsis of the most common activities and exercises to be carried out to focus on language in literary texts. The advantages of these techniques are that they are student-centred and can also be implemented using new technologies:

• Analysing techniques: ‘The centre of attention is the linguistic expressions of the text such as lexical items and phrases’ (31). One of the analysing activities proposed by Arafah is Elizabeth B. Ibsen’s ‘strong lines’ (Reference Ibsen1990): students are required to read a passage from a literary text (a Shakespeare play in our case) and underline expressions they like or that disturb them. Strong lines are shared with the rest of the class, and the most popular becomes the title or the theme of a piece of writing/project work to be carried out individually or in a group.

• Memorising and producing techniques: Students ‘memorize some lexical items and retell the story by using the words’ (32). This is what Nguyen T. T. Reference ThomThom (2008) called storytelling.

• Completing techniques: ‘Students are required to complete a story in which some lexical items … have been omitted’ (33). Gap-filling exercises are clearly the most suitable of these techniques.

• Constructing techniques: ‘Students are required to construct a story based on key sentences given by the teachers’ (33). Maley’s ‘storylines’ falls into this kind of activity (Reference Maley2000). Students are not provided with the passage selected by the teacher at the beginning; only keywords or key sentences, that is, the storylines, are provided. Groups of students invent a story (by writing, uttering, or dramatising it) and share it with the rest of the class. Strong and weak points are discussed, and the best story is selected.

• Transforming techniques: ‘Students are asked to transform a certain literary work from its original form to another’ (34). For instance, a playtext can be transformed into song lyrics or a movie/TV series screenplay.

Shakespeare as CBI: Pros and Cons

As noted in the previous paragraph, Shakespeare’s plays will be the literary texts used to teach the pragmatics of the English language in this Element. The next section will investigate the role of pragmatics in ESL courses and the reasons why this volume focuses on this specific level of linguistic analysis. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to understand whether and how a Shakespearean text can be the ‘special guest’ in a contemporary content-based ESL programme.

We will begin by closely examining whether Shakespeare’s works are suitable literary texts to be introduced into the LLE classroom with students of varied ages and levels. To do so, it is necessary to introduce a very well-known concept in SLA theory: Krashen’s monitor model, in particular his input hypothesis (Reference Krashen and Gingras1978). According to Krashen, when learners are given an input, the necessary condition is that it be comprehensible. Language acquisition can only occur if students understand the input provided, both quantitatively and qualitatively. As will be seen in the following paragraphs, in this Element, the Shakespearean text will be used as input in the lesson plans proposed; thus, it is crucial that the scenes and lines chosen be comprehensible, especially for non-native secondary school learners, since ‘there is plenty of evidence that students’ encounters with Shakespeare are often far from the joyous experiences one might hope for, the main culprit being the language’ (Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al., 2020: 303). Few quantitative and qualitative field studies have been conducted so far on ESL or English native secondary school/university students and their actual comprehension of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English (see Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al., 2020; Reference Bauer, Glaesser, Kelava, Kirchhoff and ZirkerBauer et al., 2022). Results obtained show that the main difficulties stem from outdated grammar – especially syntax – and vocabulary (Reference CrystalCrystal, 2012: 10–15), that is, ‘overcomplicated sentence structure to say simple things’ (Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al., 2020: 303), as one student summarised simplistically yet unequivocally, and lexicosemantic peculiarities such as ‘archaisms …, items infrequently used in present-day English …, colloquial language …, malapropisms …, culturally contemporary references … and false friends’ (312).

To make the input comprehensible and to help, in particular, ESL secondary school students, one possible solution is that of grading/scaling down the Shakespearean text, that is, modernising, simplifying, or ‘rewording’ (to borrow from Reference Jakobson and BrowerJakobson, 1959: 233) it. In technical terms, this process is called intralingual translation and it is quite widespread today in the LLE classroom, although scholars have antithetical opinions about the legitimacy and necessity of such a process. To my knowledge, Paula Blank’s position towards intralingual translation of the Shakespearean text and SLA theories is one of the most lucid which summarises previous, long-standing, controversial issues about the modernisation of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English and the efficacy this process may have on language acquisition. Starting with the assumption that ‘[a]s linguists will confirm, Shakespeare’s Early Modern English is … continuous enough with our own Modern English that we cannot and do not draw formal language boundaries between them’ (Reference Blank2018: 15), Blank concludes that translating Shakespeare into contemporary English is not necessary as a ready-made output per se, since ‘most modern literary and linguistic scholars still appear convinced by Shakespeare’s continued accessibility and proceed as if it is just a matter of providing enough context on sixteenth-century English for contemporary readers to grasp and appreciate his particular uses of it’ (16). Moreover, ‘[w]e are missing an opportunity when we imagine we must either choose Shakespeare’s original language … or change it for ours’ (Reference BlankBlank, 2018: 18).

Actually, I am firmly convinced that it is necessary to adopt one position in this Element and try to answer David Crystal’s famous Hamletian question ‘To modernize or not to modernize’ (Reference Crystal2002: 15). Most studies adopt the native speaker perspective, thus raising questions about the modernisation of the Shakespearean text in English as a Native Language classes. In this case, it is rather obvious that rewording Shakespeare’s plays is not the best option, especially if one considers the widespread belief in Anglophone countries that ‘Shakespeare in other words is not Shakespeare’ (Reference MacdonaldMacdonald, 2001: 36). Nevertheless, Sean Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al. (2020) have demonstrated, through an empirical survey conducted on both native speakers and ESL students, that ‘[d]ifferences between first-language and additional-language speakers were few’ and that, what is more, ‘[b]eing multilingual … may confer advantages over monolingual English speakers in understanding Shakespeare’ (322). This is true especially in the case of learners whose first language is a romance language, given the influence of Latin on Shakespeare’s lexis, which was definitely much more evident than in modern English, for a number of well-known reasons space limitations prevent me from discussing here.Footnote ⁷

Therefore, I would argue that modernised versions of Shakespeare plays must be considered carefully in this Element. Although spelling modernisation/standardisation is desirable and a very common practice in the ESL classroom (especially in secondary school) nowadays, as pointed out by most scholars (see, among others, Reference WellsWells, 1984; Reference HollandHolland, 2000; Reference Kidnie and ErneKidnie, 2021), paraphrased and reworded versions will be avoided for two reasons. First of all, from a purely linguistic perspective, paraphrased texts can alter the understanding and efficacy of some of the pragmatic strategies and devices analysed in this Element. Secondly, from an ideological point of view, ESL students in secondary school are not familiar with intralingual translations even in the literary texts that belong to their own cultural heritage and that they study in their native language. For instance, secondary school students in Italy study Dante’s Divina Commedia in its original 700-year-old Italian language with notes and glosses to help them understand archaic morphological and lexical forms, as well as complex, obsolete syntactic structures.

Online resources such as No Fear Shakespeare (by sparknotes.com; see Table 1) or shmoop.com offer the modernised version of not only Early Modern English spelling but also Shakespeare’s morphosyntactic structures and vocabulary (effecting a real intralinguistic translation), thus sometimes making the playwright’s original language unrecognisable. For instance, here is the intralinguistic translation of the first stanza of Romeo and Juliet’s well-known chorus by No Fear Shakespeare:

Therefore, editions of Shakespeare’s plays whose spelling has been modernised and which contain an apparatus of editorial notes to enhance an understanding of difficult passages will be adopted as comprehensible input in this Element, as far as lesson plans for secondary school ESL students are concerned (e.g., The New Cambridge Shakespeare series). Intralingual translation, on the other hand, will sometimes be encouraged as a linguistic scaffolding exercise or output. Since the main goal of this Element is to teach/learn pragmatics through Shakespeare, even university students may benefit from scholarly editions of the plays containing modernised spelling only.

The pedagogy adopted to teach English with Shakespeare in this Element clearly falls into the so-called textual approach, that is, ‘“close reading” in the classroom, with the teacher translating difficult words and phrases’ (Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al., 2020: 304). Since one of the main problems with this approach is that ‘the learner is passive’ (307), I do not completely exclude either the contextual or the performance approachesFootnote ⁸ listed by Murphy et al. because, as Donatella Montini puts it (Reference Montini2013: 131), Shakespeare plays are speech-purposed texts to be performed, therefore ‘[m]ore enlightened close reading approach[es]’ are needed, which also consider their linguistic, literary, and cultural context, as well as their intrinsic performative nature.

Content, Context, and Co-text: Approaching Pragmatics through Shakespeare

Language experts will not find it surprising that most of the CBLT courses using Shakespeare as content focus mainly on vocabulary, which is certainly the most evident – yet the most obvious and shallow – peculiarity of technical and professional English. Larry Z. Reference YuleZaroff (2010), for instance, uses Shakespeare to give his premedical students some basic notions of medicine, while John F. Reference MauneMaune (2015) aims to teach the lexis of biochemistry via Romeo and Juliet, and Susan Reference MeikiMeiki (2022) inserts Hamlet in a CLIL module about filmic vocabulary.

In this sense, one of the most recent monographic studies devoted to Shakespeare’s language in the ESL classroom is Teaching Shakespeare to ESL Students (Reference Lau and Tso2017) by Leung C. M. Lau and Wing B. A. Tso. Starting with an overview of the cultural significance and the spread of Shakespeare’s plays in China and Hong Kong, Lau and Tso elaborate forty short lessons/activities to implement the study of Shakespeare’s language in non-native English educational settings. Thus, most of the activities proposed in the book deal with vocabulary and its interference with other levels of linguistic analysis, for example, pronunciation, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the latter considered especially in relation to figurative language. For example, lesson 2 focuses on onomatopoeic lexical units (5–7), while lesson 4 centres on new words coined by Shakespeare (13–14) and lesson 11 on expanding the students’ knowledge of English adjectives (35–36).Footnote ⁹

Nevertheless, in recent years, there has been a tendency in language pedagogy to move from structuralist-oriented approaches to other methodologies which privilege pragmatics. Scholars have indeed been highlighting the importance of teaching and acquiring pragmatic strategies in the ESL classroom (see, among others, Reference Félix-Brasdefer and CohenFélix-Brasdefer and Cohen, 2012; Reference Ishihara and CohenIshihara and Cohen, 2014), with the firm belief that, almost paradoxically, ‘pragmatics can be taught in the classroom from beginning levels of language instruction’ (Reference Félix-Brasdefer and CohenFélix-Brasdefer and Cohen, 2012: 650), but, on the other hand, that pragmatic competence ‘seem[s] to be difficult for EFL/ESL learners to acquire’ (Reference Sharif, Yarmohammadi, Sadighi and Sadegh BagheriSharif et al., 2017: 49). Moving from these apparently controversial yet complementary premises, Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al. (2020) reaffirm J. César Félix-Brasdefer and Andrew D. Cohen’s point that the level of complexity of the pragmatic strategies taught must be ‘congruent with the level of grammatical knowledge (and the level of linguistic proficiency) of the learner’ (Reference Félix-Brasdefer and Cohen2012: 659), and corroborate it further by stating that ‘the learner is also receiving input on the more traditional areas of linguistic proficiency, such as the grammar and the text, in addition to input on pragmatics. … a contextual approach to Shakespeare alone is not sufficient for a complete understanding of the language of a text’ (Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al., 2020: 306–07). In other words, both Reference Félix-Brasdefer and CohenFélix-Brasdefer and Cohen (2012) and Reference Murphy, Culpeper, Gillings and Pace-SiggeMurphy et al. (2020) are referring to the principle of linguistic interfaces, understood as ‘the interplay (and … the corresponding operations that take place) between different subsystems or core modules of language. The underlying idea is that … phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are per se free-standing, but actively interact with each other on a number of identifiable levels’ (Reference Catasso, Coniglio and De BastianiCatasso et al., 2022: 2).

As noted in the previous paragraphs, the core of this Element is divided into three sections, each focusing on the teaching of a specific pragmatic aspect of the English language contextualised in a Shakespeare play belonging to a different genre. Section 1, entitled ‘Shakespearean Performative Speech Acts: The Case of Richard III’, explores how performative speech acts occupy a prominent position as the main rhetorical strategies adopted by Shakespeare’s characters. This has been argued convincingly by Keir Reference ElamElam (2002: 202), Laura Reference EstillEstill (2006), and Reference Schalkwyk, Magnusson and SchalkwykDavid Schalkwyk (2019), among others, with reference to how performatives contribute to the performativity/performability of the Shakespearean text. After investigating the advantages offered by this pragmatic approach to the teaching of Shakespeare’s language in ESL classes, a lesson plan for Richard III is presented. This history play is considered one of the most pragmatic-centred of all Shakespeare’s plays (see Reference MaloufMalouf, 2017; Reference HamamraHamamra, 2019). Given the strong connection between performative speech acts and matters of performativity/performability, oral skills will be privileged in the output. In Lesson Plan 1, students will be asked to identify and distinguish performative speech acts in the play: university students will use different taxonomies elaborated by pragmaticians, while secondary school students will be introduced to the most common ones. Secondary school students will be instructed in using online tools such as the Cambridge Dictionary (available at https://dictionary.cambridge.org) or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (available at www.merriam-webster.com) in order to investigate which speech acts are still used in contemporary English and which sound obsolete and need to be replaced by current equivalent expressions. They will also be helped by the footnotes in the New Cambridge edition of Richard III and in the modernised versions of the play available online (e.g., Shmoop, Sparknotes, etc.). Creative spoken outputs will be encouraged in the form of modernised versions of Richard III’s dialogues, role play activities highlighting similarities and differences between early modern and contemporary performative speech acts (e.g., interviews with characters from the play), or debates, a methodology that is spreading at an incredible pace in schools and universities today (see Reference CinganottoCinganotto, 2019).

Section 2 is entitled ‘Teaching Shakespearean Discourse Markers with Romeo and Juliet’. Discourse markers (hereafter DMs) are one of the most important structures ESL students should acquire to produce coherent and cohesive written outputs. Drawing on studies about DMs in Early Modern English, this section presents some examples of Shakespearean DMs and their influence on contemporary English. Romeo and Juliet will be considered a suitable case study for a lesson plan on Shakespeare’s DMs, due to its great popularity among ESL students and its richness in these pragmatic devices (as highlighted in Reference Busse, Busse, Suhr and TaavitsainenBusse and Busse, 2012). In Lesson Plan 2, both secondary school and university students are asked to identify them in the tragedy and contextualise them in the different situations in which they are inserted. Written skills will be privileged as output: for instance, secondary school students will be instructed to rewrite some dialogues as WhatsApp conversations/email exchanges, thus modernising some DMs, while university students will be required to write a piece of creative writing in order to reproduce such pragmatic devices in different, creative contexts (e.g., ‘Write Friar Lawrence’s letter to Romeo using as many discourse markers as possible to make it pragmatically salient. Will you be able to change the tragic events that follow Romeo’s exile?’).

Section 3, ‘(Im)polite Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew’, draws mainly on Reference Brown and LevinsonPenelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson’s (1978/87) and Jonathan Reference CulpeperCulpeper’s (1996, 2011a, 2011b, Reference Culpeper and Allan2018) taxonomies of (im)politeness, on the one hand, and Reference Allan and BurridgeKeith Allan and Kate Burridge’s (2006) analysis of forbidden words, on the other, to analyse theoretical aspects connected with taboo language and insults in Early Modern and contemporary English. Vulgar language is still considered a taboo in many education environments, yet it represents one of the most vivid and productive parts of any natural language. In Section 3, I argue that taboo language can be implemented safely in ESL courses to educate citizens who refine their awareness of the pragmatic force that offences and insults have in contemporary society, and how risky they are in certain situations. Among Shakespeare’s comedies, The Taming of the Shrew is certainly one of the most appropriate for a lesson plan (see Lesson Plan 3), about Shakespearean taboo language (Reference Del VillanoDel Villano, 2018: 137–72), as taboo expressions and insults pervade the play. Both written and oral outputs will be elicited. For example, both secondary school pupils and university students will work on written scripts or song lyrics for short TikTok videos or longer vlogs (Video blogs), respectively, interpreting some characters of The Shrew and trying to exploit the vividness of taboo language or avoiding vulgar expressions by paraphrasing them.

Speech Act Theory: A Brief Overview

Any introduction to English traditional speech act theory, that is, ‘a theory that a verbal utterance should be considered in terms of the intention of the speaker to bring about a particular result by making it and not solely as a statement with intrinsic meaning or reference’ (Oxford English Dictionary, hereafter OED), should start considering the pivotal and pioneering studies of the philosopher of language J. L. Austin and his disciple John R. Searle, who, around the 1950s and 1970s, laid the foundations for the discipline of pragmatic acts. I should begin by saying that Austin and Searle’s speech act theory is primarily interactional and thus implies the existence of a speaker (hereby called S) and a hearer (H) whose roles are interchangeable according to turn-taking rules (see Reference Sacks, Schegloff and JeffersonSacks et al., 1974, for a foundational study about turn-taking and conversation analysis). In this sense, the Shakespearean theatre, and theatrical texts in general, offer a rich field of research for the application of such theories, given their intrinsic dialogic nature: even monologues and soliloquies presuppose the existence of a hearer, that is, the audience. As Saltz asserted, the actors’ performance onstage ‘is committed to the real performance of illocutionary actsFootnote ¹⁰ [that] transforms whatever social reality the actors choose to portray into a living reality, at least for the duration of the performance’ (Reference Saltz and Krasner2000: 77).

The OED definition given at the beginning of this section introduces the notion of utterance, a notion which deserves attention in pragmatics. Generally speaking, an utterance is a group of words, communicating the S’s intentions, interrupted only by pauses, thus referring to the concrete oral use of a language, while a sentence is an abstract and ideal concept whose components are usually held together by grammar rules. In other words, ‘[w]hereas the term “sentence” refers to a formal, structural unit, the term “utterance” refers to a realisation of a speaker’s communicative intention: what a speaker says at a given point in time at a given location with a given intention’ (Reference Plag, Arndt-Lappe, Braun and SchrammPlag et al., 2015: 185). More specifically, in pragmatics, ‘sentences can … be realised as many different utterances’ (Reference Culpeper and HaughCulpeper and Haugh, 2014: 155), that is, the usage of language and the S’s intentions determine the passage from sentences to utterances.Footnote ¹¹ In this section, we will examine utterances, rather than sentences, but an issue arises when the text considered – Richard III in this case – is written on a page. Nevertheless, given the speech-purposed nature of dramatic texts (Reference JuckerJucker, 1995, Reference Jucker and Brown2006; Reference Culpeper and KytöCulpeper and Kytö, 2010: 17; Reference MontiniMontini, 2013: 131), I will treat them as representations of spoken language.

One fundamental principle theorised by Reference AustinAustin (1962: esp. lecture VIII, 92–107) is the distinction between the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force that a speech act possesses and that determines both the S’s intentions and the H’s understanding and/or implicatures:Footnote ¹²

• Locutionary force: The simple production of a speech act in its linguistic form with sense and reference (e.g., ‘Nice weather today, innit?’)

• Illocutionary force: The act/intention given by the S to the utterance (in the previous example, if the weather is not fine, the S may be ironic about his/her statement, thus communicating exactly the opposite of the locutionary act)

• Perlocutionary force: The effects produced on the H (with reference to the same example, the H may understand the S’s irony or, in case (s)he does not share the same situational context, may interpret the sense of the statement literally, as if the weather were really fine).

In this example, it is clear that the S needs to share some conditions with the H in order for his/her statement to obtain the desired effects, that is, in order to minimise the distance between illocution and perlocution. Reference AustinAustin (1962: 14) and Reference SearleSearle (1969: 66–67) devoted ample space to defining what they called felicity or felicitous conditions, that is, shared conditions between S and H that enable the success of the performative force of an utterance. These conditions, labelled by Reference YuleYule (1996: 50), can be summarised as follows:

• General condition: The H must understand the basic linguistic features of an utterance, that is, its phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic characteristics.

• Content condition: The semantic content of the utterance must be clearly rendered by the S.

• Preparatory condition: There are some basic prerequisites in order for the illocutionary force of utterance to be successfully performed. Each kind of speech act has its own preparatory conditions. For example, requests are usually imposed on those people whom we believe are able to fulfil them (e.g., one would not usually ask a three-year-old child to lift a heavy piece of furniture while moving house).

• Sincerity condition: The S must truly want to carry out the act.

• Essential condition: Both S and H should count on the actual possibility that the speech act can be put into practice. For instance, when the S invites the H out for coffee, the S must regard his/her act as a proper invitation and the H as well, not as a joke or something else.

Therefore, if all of these conditions (or even some of them) are present in a conversation, the H should be able to first understand the semantic meaning of an utterance, and then its pragmatic meaning, that is, what the S’s intentions are. This process of discovering the pragmatic meaning of an utterance is called inferencing.Footnote ¹³ Inferences are facilitated by different kinds of knowledge (Reference Plag, Arndt-Lappe, Braun and SchrammPlag et al., 2015: 197–200):

• Situational knowledge or knowledge of the situational context of an utterance (objects present, mimic, posture, etc.)

• Interpersonal knowledge: The level of reciprocal knowledge both S and H share (do they know each other? Are they friends?)

• World knowledge:Footnote ¹⁴ Knowledge of the things and spaces that surround both S and H in the world (if they talk about a piston rod, for example, do they both know what it is?)

• Co-textual knowledge: Knowledge of the co-text, that is, of the context of the surrounding text, what they have said before (this is the out-and-out linguistic knowledge they must both possess).

Austin distinguishes between two main kinds of speech acts: performative and constative. Performative speech acts are used by the S to undertake a certain action or to make it be undertaken by the H. Conversely, the S utters a constative speech act when (s)he simply makes a statement that can be either true or false. Performatives are sometimes introduced by performative verbs, that is, a verb that prepares the H for the content of the utterance by anticipating its illocutionary force. These kinds of performatives introduced by a performative verb are called explicit performatives (e.g., ‘Mum, I assure you I will clean my room tomorrow’), while implicit performatives are not introduced by any performative verb (e.g., ‘I will clean my room tomorrow, mum’).

After distinguishing between performatives and constatives, Austin draws a very careful, non-definitive, and ‘troublesome’ (Reference Austin1962: 151) taxonomy of speech acts, which he defines not as such, but as ‘[c]lasses of utterance, classified according to their illocutionary force’ (Reference Austin1962: 150). The five classes are as follows:

• Verdictives: Uttering a judgement (e.g., ‘estimate, reckoning, or appraisal’)

• Exercitives: Exercising power (e.g., ‘appointing, voting, ordering, urging, advising, warning’)

• Commissives: Obliging or declaring intentions (e.g., ‘declarations, or announcements of intentions, … promises, … espousals’)

• Behabitives: Expressing S’s attitudes or feelings (e.g., ‘apologizing, congratulating, commending, condoling, cursing, and challenging’)

• Expositives: Clarifying reasons, argument, or communication (e.g., ‘“I reply”, “I argue”, “I concede”, “I illustrate”, “I postulate”’) (Reference AustinAustin, 1962: 150–51).

Reference SearleSearle (1969) moved from Austin’s premises and developed a more detailed taxonomy of speech acts. To Searle’s taxonomy, I will add Geoffrey N. Leech’s category of rogatives (Reference Leech1983), as presented also by Reference Culpeper and HaughCulpeper and Michael Haugh (2014: 164):

• Assertives or representatives: The S asserts a state of affairs as (s)he sees it (affirming, describing, stating, etc.)

• Commissives: The S is committed to certain actions (offering, promising, threatening, etc.)

• Declarations: The S changes the state of affairs by declaring something (naming, baptising, pleading, sentencing, etc.)

• Directives: The H is directed by the S to perform certain actions (commanding, ordering, requesting, suggesting, etc.)

• Expressives: The S expresses his/her feelings (apologising, complimenting, congratulating, insulting,Footnote ¹⁵ thanking, etc.)

• Rogatives: The S questions the H about something (asking, querying, questioning, etc.).

Not all kinds of utterances may be inserted in Austin’s, Searle’s, or Leech’s taxonomy, but most of the ones they identified and classified will be considered in the following paragraphs when analysing speech acts in Richard III.

Speech Acts and Early Modern English: A Multidisciplinary Field of Research

Marcella Bertuccelli Papi’s ‘impertinent question … “is a diachronic speech act theory possible?”’, which gives the title to her breakthrough article about speech acts and their historical pragmatic investigation (Reference Bertuccelli Papi2000: 57), can be considered the official beginning of diachronic speech act theory as we know it today, although some foundations for the discipline had already been laid by Reference Schlieben-Lange, Weber and WeydtBrigitte Schlieben-Lange (1976, Reference Schlieben-Lange1983), Andreas H. Reference JuckerJucker (1995), and Leslie K. Reference ArnovikArnovik (1999). One of the main problems with the diachronic perspective regarding speech act theory is, according to Bertuccelli Papi, ‘consistent theoretical divergencies in synchronic speech act analysis’ (Reference Bertuccelli Papi2000: 57); hence, it is difficult to elaborate a solid theoretical framework ‘whose coordinates are context-specific, culture-specific, and time-specific’ (64). In other words, the ‘main divergencies’ (58)Footnote ¹⁶ concerning the analysis of speech acts in contemporary discourse are even more evident when trying to explore historical varieties of language with pragmatic frameworks elaborated for contemporary English. To borrow a very well-known metaphor used by Bertuccelli Papi, ‘[w]e may climb a mountain with various types of equipment, and starting from any of its slopes, but we need be aware that they may be slippery and treacherous in various ways. And the history of language is a very difficult mountain to climb’ (64).

In addition, echoing Arnovik’s statement that ‘[w]hen we widen our lens to view formal, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and cultural factors altogether a labyrinthine tangle confronts us’ (Reference Arnovik1999: 1), Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen affirm that ‘[w]hile we know a lot about the development of sounds and sound patterns, and the structure of words, phrases and sentences, we still know very little about how speakers use words and sentences to communicate’ (Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2008: 1). In this sense, I would argue, the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries offers a prime example of how people used words in context in the Early Modern English period, given the plays’ speech-purposed characteristics, yet considering the fictional nature of their language.

Despite the difficulties in adapting contemporary-oriented pragmatic frameworks of speech act theory to historical varieties of language, in the last two decades, pragmaticians have been studying the various historical contexts in which the English language has been employed, thus ‘giv[ing] instructive and comprehensive overviews of recent diachronic research on speech acts in the history of the English language’ (Reference Kohnen, Aijmer and RühlemannKohnen, 2015: 52). In order to justify and corroborate diachronic speech act frameworks, Reference Jucker and TaavitsainenJucker and Taavitsainen (2008: 3–4) appeal to the Uniformitarian principle,Footnote ¹⁷ which establishes connections and replicable patterns of language among different periods of time, spaces, and contexts. As William Labov notes, ‘the forces operating to produce linguistic change today are of the same kind and order of magnitude as those which operated five or ten thousand years ago’ (Reference Labov1972: 275). In this sense, Laurel J. Brinton, analysing occurrences of ‘I mean’ from Early Modern to contemporary English using corpus-based methods (hence working on big data), asserts that ‘pragmatic meaning works uniformly over periods and societies’ (Reference Brinton, Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen2007: 40). Adopting this perspective, Jucker and Taavistainen conclude that ‘even pragmatic phenomena like speech acts seem to repeat the basic patterns in slightly modified forms over the course of history’ and reassure their reader that ‘[p]eople and human behaviour cannot have changed so much in the course of years, decades, and centuries’Footnote ¹⁸ (Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2008: 4). Nevertheless, what is crucial to understand, I believe, is exactly what we mean by ‘slightly modified forms’ and how to identify them. Elizabeth C. Traugott and Richard B. Dasher (Reference Traugott and Dasher2002), for instance, suggest looking at semantic changes/shifts of single words (e.g., the verb ‘to curse’, as we will see in Richard III) to better carry out and understand inferences. Instead of concentrating on purely intralinguistic factors, Jucker and Taavitsainen insist on contextual factors: ‘[i]n speech act studies we look at social action through fragments: instances of an activity type. In this activity, the context gives us clues on how to understand and interpret the speech act. The frame of the action and the response are important (cf. cognitive approaches)’ (Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2008: 5). Their framework will be discussed in more detail in Section 3. Nevertheless, two considerations are worth being outlined here:

1. 1. Jucker and Taavitsainen take for granted that the taxonomy of speech acts elaborated by Searle is also valid for historical varieties of English. As we will see, the ‘slightly modified forms’ mainly concern not only semantic changes, as stated by Reference Traugott and DasherTraugott and Dasher (2002), but also morphosyntactic and lexical variations and their interfaces with pragmatics.

2. 2. The kinds of analyses presented thus far are mainly qualitative and can consider limited groups of words that underwent transformations in restricted groups of texts. Single case studies must be considered, each contributing to adding bricks to the wall of a broader perspective on diachronic speech act theory.

More recently, corpus-based approaches to pragmatics have tried to shed further light on diachronic speech act theory, thus broadening the perspectives offered by previous studies by referring to ‘huge amounts of data, quick access, replicability, and advances in corpus design’ (Reference Kohnen, Aijmer and RühlemannKohnen, 2015: 52). The intent of these studies (see, among others, Reference Kohnen, Aijmer and AltenbergKohnen, 2004, Reference Kohnen, Jucker and Taavitsainen2008; Reference Taavitsainen, Jucker and TuominenTaavitsainen et al., 2015) is mainly that of providing more general frameworks of historical speech act theory, based not on single or restricted groups of case studies, but on large historical corpora. Among these frameworks, it is worth mentioning Martin Weisser’s DART taxonomy/scheme (Dialogue Annotation and Research Tool, latest version n. 3.0; see Reference WeisserWeisser 2016, Reference Weisser2018, Reference Weisser2019, Reference Weisser2020), which expands Austin’s and Searle’s classifications to 160 speech acts, plus two additional categories, that is, unclassifiable and uninterpretable. Unfortunately, given its complexity and the criticism it has received (see, for instance, Reference Brosa RodríguezBrosa Rodríguez, 2021: 43; Reference VerdonikVerdonik, 2022), the DART taxonomy is not dealt with in this volume. Therefore, Searle’s revision of Austin’s classification will be adopted to analyse speech acts in Richard III, even considering the pedagogical (hence not exclusively research-oriented) aim of the lesson plans presented in the following sections. Nevertheless, as noted by Thomas Kohnen, whatever the methodology followed to study diachronic speech acts, scholars still adopt form-to-mapping approaches, looking for case studies and single/limited empirical data to return to general frameworks:

For example, looking at the most recurrent 3-grams (strings of three words) with the aid of corpus linguistics methods, Reference CulpeperCulpeper (2007: 64) noticed that the grammatical frame 1st person pronoun + performative verb + 2nd person pronoun is extremely widespread in Shakespeare’s plays. Expressions such as ‘I thank you, I warrant you, I assure you, I beseech you, I entreat you, [and above all] I pray you’ (Reference Culpeper and HaughCulpeper and Haugh, 2014: 159, Emphasis in the original) are found in abundance and can be considered explicit performatives, that is, speech acts presented by a performative verb that introduces the illocutionary force of the act itself. These and other acts will be analysed and contextualised within the plot of Richard III in the next subsection, with particular reference to the effects they have on the H.

Speech Acts in Richard III

Most of the studies devoted to the analysis of speech acts in Shakespeare’s Richard III focus on curses uttered by female characters – especially Anne and Margaret – and the effects they produce, or, at least, aim to produce (see, among others, Ghezzi Jr., 2024). When dealing with cursing women in early modern England, a few considerations must be advanced. First of all, as summarised by Stephen Reference OrgelOrgel (1996), chastity and silence were the most appreciated virtues in women on the Early Modern English stage, with female characters struggling to be heard but most often silenced by their male counterparts. For this reason, ‘cursing women were known to transgress the border of the feminine virtue of silence’ (Reference HamamraHamamra, 2019: 117). Resistance to silence was clearly manifested in language, that is, pragmatic force. Judith Reference ButlerButler (1999: 25) argues convincingly that resistance to silence helps the female characters’ identity be construed in the play, and Alexandra Malouf underlines that language – especially the language of curses – is actually ‘the[ir] primary source of power … in Richard III’ (2017: 65),Footnote ¹⁹ ‘a Reference Maloufsubstitute for political action’, as argued by Keith Reference ThomasThomas (1971: 509). The question here is to understand whether female characters in the play have actual power. On the other hand, male characters tend to be associated with action, although their use of language is usually the manifestation of their political and legal power, something that Richard definitely possesses in the play and that overcomes his physical deformity and limitations to act as a healthy king.

The second aspect to consider when focusing on curses is the ‘association with witchcraft’ (Reference MaloufMalouf, 2017: 66) of female characters who curse. Drawing from a corpus of ‘learned treatises containing narratives of witchcraft events, and … sets of courtroom witness dispositions’, Reference Culpeper and SeminoCulpeper and Elena Semino (2000: 2) observed that curse and wish were the two most common performative verbs associated with witchcraft between the late-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century, used ‘in the “modern” sense of simply expressing a desire that something negative happens to the target’ (7). Moreover, ‘[i]n the witchcraft context, … these two verbs were used to refer to a speech act which was believed to result inevitably in some misfortune falling on the target’ (7). I would argue that in Richard III both connotations are used by Shakespeare’s characters, with an evident preponderance of women. Examining the occurrences and collocations of the lemmas curse and wishFootnote ²⁰ – and their lexical forms – in Richard III helps confirm Culpeper and Semino’s findings. Tables 2 and 3 illustrate the absolute frequency of the lemmas sought for, the characters who utter them, and, in some cases, important information about their collocational patterning.Footnote ²¹

Some easy statistics are worth presenting before analysing the Tables 2 and 3. Curse has forty-four occurrences, twenty-seven of which (61 per cent) are in women’s speeches and seventeen (39 per cent) in men’s utterances. When looking at the collocational patterning, however, we discover that most of the hits of curse in male speeches actually refer to curses uttered by female characters (Anne and Margaret in particular) through possessives such as ‘thy’, ‘her’, ‘Margaret’s’, and so on. Similarly, wish has twelve occurrences, seven of them (58 per cent) in women’s speeches and five (42 per cent) in men’s utterances. It is important to note that in both cases, Richard is semantically ambiguous. In contrast to male characters like Hastings, Rivers, or Buckingham, who do not employ curse and wish in a manner intended to bring about negative consequences for a specific target, as societal norms dictated for men, Richard stands out. He utilises these linguistic elements with malicious intent, exemplified by his expression ‘I wish the bastards dead’ (4.2.19). This linguistic approach aligns with the idea of Richard embodying ‘various, often opposing, gendered positions’ (Reference MaloufMalouf, 2017: 66), underscoring the complexity of his character even in a linguistic context. If one concurs with Juliet Dusinberre’s assertion that ‘[i]n Shakespeare’s plays men are conscious of being effeminized if their only weapons are words’ (Reference Dusinberre1996: xxvii), then Richard emerges as deliberately ambiguous. He engages in combat with women using their own verbal weapons, a strategy influenced by both his deformity, which hinders him from ‘strutting before a wanton ambling nymph’ (1.1.17), and his inability to ‘prove himself a lover’ (1.1.28) in the conventional manner that other men employ. In this sense, although most critics affirm that ‘cursing in Richard III in inherently feminine’ (Reference HamamraHamamra, 2019: 118) and that Richard’s rhetorical abilities are so advanced that he manages ‘to silence women’s voices and to curtail the political threat they pose to his ruthless domination’ (123) by using their own weapons, I prefer to consider the scenes that stage the dialogues between Richard, Anne, and Margaret as a sort of witchcraft battle of curses where gender roles are blended and flattened. Margaret, widow of Richard’s cousin, the late King Henry VI, ‘is the vocal force of divine retribution against Richard’s blasphemous actions’ (123) and ‘a prophetess’ (1.3.301). Her curses are divine, since she continually invokes God’s intervention to punish Richard who ‘is unsuccessful in his attempt to turn her curse back upon her’ (Reference HamamraHamamra, 2019: 124). In the end, in fact, her curses prove to be prophetic: ‘the bloody dog is dead’ (5.5.2), proclaims Richmond at Bosworth after killing Richard and before being crowned King Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch.

Conversely, Anne’s curses are ineffective. Widow of Edward, the only son of King Henry VI, and now Queen of England after marrying Richard, she curses her husband as he is responsible for the deaths of her late father-in-law and husband. As noted by Paige M. Reynolds, her curses have nothing divine, but ‘maintain the memory of the dead’ (Reference Reynolds2008: 20). Unlike Margaret, whose curses are recognised as having been fulfilled in the end by all characters, Anne is annihilated by Richard’s ‘deceptive rhetorical power to combat the perlocutionary effects of [her] curses’ (Reference HamamraHamamra, 2019: 122), and when she has the chance to kill Richard with a sword that he himself hands her, she is incapable of overstepping ‘the confines of her female body’ (Reference CharnesCharnes, 1993: 46) by executing him with ‘a phallic weapon’ (Reference HamamraHamamra, 2019: 122).

However, one may ask, what kind of speech act is curses? As seen in the previous paragraph, from the standpoint of illocution, Austin lists curses under the category of behabitives, that is, expressing the S’s attitudes and feelings, together with other (re)actions: ‘apologizing, congratulating, commending, condoling, … and challenging’ (Reference Austin1962: 151). He then specifies that behabitives ‘include the … reaction to other people’s behaviour and fortunes, and of attitudes and expression of attitudes to someone’s past conduct or imminent conduct’ (159). Nevertheless, Culpeper and Semino point out that the use of curse and wish in witchcraft narratives (and, I might add, in Richard III as well) can be better ascribed to a category ‘that could … do justice to speech acts that cause (or are believed to cause) a change in the world’ (Reference Culpeper and Semino2000: 9). Therefore, they believe that Austin’s exercitives are a better category to accommodate curses. Exercitives are speech acts which indicate the exercise of power by the S – for example, ‘appointing, voting, ordering, urging, advising, warning’ (Reference AustinAustin, 1962: 150) – ‘the giving of a decision in favour or against a[n] … action …; [a] decision that something is to be so, as distinct from a judgment that it is so’ (154). Arguing that ‘exercitives appear to be a rather miscellaneous category, which does not fully capture the essence of speech act attributed to the witch’, Reference Culpeper and SeminoCulpeper and Semino (2000: 9) refer to Searle’s taxonomy and distinguish between early modern and contemporary curses, thus acknowledging a semantic and pragmatic change in the use of the language of curses. As summarised in Culpeper and Haugh, while ‘[t]oday cursing is more about expressing ill feelings, being bad-tempered and using taboo language [and] fits in the expressive group’, in Early Modern English ‘[c]urses were a type of declaration [since] witches’ words had the power to change the world (e.g., cause sickness and death)’ (Reference Culpeper, Hoover, Culpeper and O’Halloran2014: 167). Moreover, according to Searle’s taxonomy, declarations have the power to change the state of affairs by declaring something. In this sense, Margaret’s curses in Richard III have this power, while Anne’s are powerless.

Before focusing on the lesson plan, it is worth glancing at Ramie Targoff’s study (Reference Targoff2002) of amen as a speech act in Richard III. Considered a ‘devotional performative’ (63), amen is also an implicit performative for Austin, that is, a speech act ‘which affirm[s] a prior utterance’ (65). Bridget G. Upton maintains that in the Gospels amen is understood as ‘a form of closure [and] conforms to the category of declaratives …. Such an act requires … that the speaker has sufficient authority to utter it, and to bring about the desired perlocutionary effect, in this case, of declaring the narrative to be both finished and in some sense true’ (Reference Gilfillan Upton2006: 169–70). It is with this religious sense that amen is used in Richard III, the only Shakespeare play that ends with amen, here the last word uttered by the new crowned King Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty. For example, when at 2.2.107–08, Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, salutes her son with a blessing (‘God bless thee and put thy meekness in thy breast, / Love, charity, obedience, and true duty’), he answers ‘Amen’ (109) to ‘seal or confirm’ (Reference TargoffTargoff, 2002: 62) his mother’s utterance, adding in an aside that a mother should also wish her son a long life and reign – something the Duchess does not do. Similarly, when Richard is crowned in 3.7, the citizens answer ‘Amen’ (239) to Buckingham’s blessing ‘Long live King Richard, England’s worthy king’ (238). Nevertheless, as highlighted earlier, the most significant amens resound from the lips of Richmond upon his coronation as King Henry VII: ‘Great God of heaven, say Amen to all! … What traitor hears me, and says not amen? … peace lives again: / That she may long live here, God say amen!’ (5.5.8–41). This declarative speech act serves as a potent expression of approval and consent, carrying weight not only in religious contexts but also in the realm of political transactions, as emphasised by Reference TargoffTargoff (2002: 61). In this last scene, amen seals the pact between God and the new-born sacred dynasty Shakespeare’s queen (Elizabeth I) belonged to by declaring and affirming that Henry VII, Elizabeth’s grandfather, is the rightful king of England.

Lesson Plan 1

The lesson plan I have created for speech acts in Richard III has a dual aim: on the one hand, to make students (both at secondary school and university levels) reflect upon various kinds of speech acts in the play, hence not only curses and amen, and on the other hand, to focus on female characters and their complex and multifaceted use of speech acts, especially when feelings are expressed, that is, when expressives are employed. In fact, on the early modern stage, women are often associated with emotions, this being seen as a weak trait, as most scholars acknowledge (see, among others, Reference FindlayFindlay, 2010: 470; Reference NovyNovy, 2013: 77; Reference VaughtVaught, 2008: 98).

Noticing Activity (Input)

Secondary School

After reading the text, secondary school students will take part in a collective brainstorming activity on the blackboard or smart board (using online resources such as MindMup, Miro, or Canva; see Figure 4). Students will guess the three characters’ feelings when Stanley tells them that Anne is about to be Richard’s wife.

Figure 4 An example of a secondary school brainstorming activity realised with MindMup.

The teacher then summarises the results of the brainstorming activity and focuses on how feelings are expressed by the three women, thus explaining what speech acts are and how they are conveyed linguistically (slides or flashcards can be used as supports).

Awareness Activity (Scaffolding I)

Guided Practice (Scaffolding II)

University

University students, on the other hand, will write short sentences, paragraphs, or memos about the linguistic representation of female characters in early modern England, with a particular focus on the way they express feelings. Examples of short sentences or paragraphs can be as follows: ‘In the passage from Richard III, 4.1, it is evident that female characters express their feelings explicitly and with no half measure’, or ‘Stanley’s directive speech act underlines the patriarchal force of Richard’s order. Although he is the Earl of Derby, and thus should be inferior to the Queen consort, he orders her to go to Westminster because the King himself has decreed it’. All written tasks can be collected and shared via online tools such as Padlet or Linoit (see Figure 5).

Figure 5 Example of a guided practice task done with Linoit.

Autonomous Practice (Output)

What are Discourse Markers?

Most scholars agree that defining DMs is almost impossible, since they ‘are multifunctional linguistic expressions and […] do not form a recognized (closed) word class’ (Reference Degand, Cornillie and PietrandreaDegand et al., 2013: 5). In Diana M. Lewis’s terms, there is

Well aware of these theoretical and methodological issues, Reference Fedriani and SansòChiara Fedriani and Andrea Sansò (2017: 2) propose a distinction between pragmatic markers (hereafter PMs), DMs, and modal particles (hereafter MPs), partially based on Reference Ghezzi, Ghezzi and MolinelliChiara Ghezzi (2014):

Nevertheless, in the same volume, Reference Crible, Fedriani and SansòLudivine Crible (2017) affirms that the label ‘discourse markers’ should be preferred to ‘pragmatic markers’, the former indicating a broader class of elements governing and guiding conversation, a hypernymic category, an umbrella term which also includes PMs (Reference Hansen and FischerHansen, 2006: 28). For the purposes of this Element, I adopt Crible’s viewpoint and deal with a general, pragmatic-oriented connotation of DMs as items that ‘guide the hearer toward a particular interpretation of the connection between a sequence of utterances and at the same time rule out unintended interpretations’ (Reference FurkóFurkó, 2018: 158).

According to Reference Jucker, Ziv, Jucker and ZivJucker and Yael Ziv (1998: 3, adapted from Reference BrintonBrinton, 1996: 33–35), DMs have the following basic characteristics (qtd. in Reference LutzkyLutzky, 2012: 12):

• Phonological and lexical features:

  1. a. They are short and phonologically reduced.

  2. b. They form a separate tone group.

  3. c. They are marginal forms and hence difficult to place within a traditional word class.

• Syntactic features:

  1. d. They are restricted to sentence-initial position.

  2. e. They occur outside the syntactic structure, or they are only loosely attached to it.

  3. f. They are optional.

• Semantic feature:

  1. g. They have little or no propositional meaning.

• Functional feature:

  1. h. They are multifunctional, operating on several linguistic levels simultaneously.

• Sociolinguistic and stylistic features:

  1. i. They are a feature of oral rather than written discourse and are associated with informality.

  2. j. They appear with high frequency.

  3. k. They are stylistically stigmatised.

  4. l. They are gender-specific and more typical of women’s speech.

• Péter Reference FurkóFurkó (2014, Reference Furkó2018) clearly summarises the main characteristics of DMs, referring to previous studies. According to his framework, DMs are:

  1. 1. Truth-conditional (propositional) or non-truth-conditional (non-propositional), that is, does a DM express a content or not? This distinction has been replaced by Diane Blakemore’s relevance theory and her division between conceptual and procedural meaning of DMs (Reference Blakemore1987; Reference Blakemore2002, plus related criticism: see, e.g., Reference FraserFraser, 2006; Reference WilsonWilson, 2016). Typically, DMs are procedural words that do not encode any concept, but help the Hs in their inferential procedures to understand the meaning of the Ss’ utterances.

  2. 2. Syntactically and semantically optional, that is, if removed, the grammaticality and semantic meaning of the sentence they are inserted in are not altered (Reference SchourupSchourup, 1999: 231). As stated by Reference BrintonBrinton (1996: 1), DMs are ‘grammatically optional and semantically or functionally unmotivated’.

  3. 3. Context-dependent: This property is directly connected to the indexicality of DMs, that is, their capability of indicating (indexing) an object in the context in which it occurs.

  4. 4. Multifunctional: ‘DMs are also associated with a plethora of functions, including hedging and politeness functions. What is more, they can also be salient in conversational exchanges as openers, turn-taking devices, hesitation devices, backchannels, markers of topic shift and of receipt of information, and so on’ (Reference FurkóFurkó, 2018: 158).

  5. 5. Weakly associated with clauses: According to Reference Crible, Fedriani and SansòCrible (2017), DMs are not or only loosely part of the syntactic structure of a sentence.

  6. 6. Phonologically independent: DMs do not contribute to the general intonation of a sentence; yet they have their own ‘comma intonation’, that is, they are pronounced as if they were parenthetical or nonessential by pausing or changing the pitch before and/or after, according to their position within the sentence. Reference FurkóFurkó (2014) asserts that this characteristic partially depends on the fact that historically DMs underwent a process of grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation (see the next subsection), according to which some DMs originated from content, lexical words (i.e., words with a full, proper semantic meaning) and then became function words (i.e., words with almost no semantic meaning that merely perform a grammatical function).

  7. 7. Variable in scope: They can affect single words or entire sentences (e.g., in the string ‘You and I’, and connects two pronouns, while in the sentence ‘You like coffee and I prefer tea’, and links two clauses).

  8. 8. Highly frequent in speech: This forms the basis of the grammaticalisation of DMs, according to Reference FurkóFurkó (2014).

  9. 9. Mostly used in spoken interaction (see, for instance, Reference BeechingBeeching, 2016).

  10. 10. Stigmatised by prescriptivists (Reference Brown and YuleBrown and Yule, 1983: 17), that is, they are associated with markers of lower registers, something to be (over)used in speech, but to be avoided when writing.

Before offering some useful taxonomies to categorise DMs, it is worth understanding why such ‘insignificant words and innocuous particles’ (Reference Brinton and FisiakBrinton, 1990: 45) should be considered by linguists. According to Brinton, DMs have various discursive functions (Reference Brinton and Fisiak1990: 47–48):

• to initiate discourse

• to mark a boundary in discourse; that is, to indicate a shift or partial shift in topic

• to preface a response or a reaction

• to serve as a filler or delaying tactic

• to aid the speaker in holding the floor

• to effect an interaction or sharing between the speaker and the hearer

• to bracket the discourse either cataphorically or anaphorically

• to mark either foregrounded or backgrounded information.

Lutzky elaborates a similar, yet more complete, list of functions of DMs, distinguishing between structural and interactional functions, which is worth quoting here (see Table 6):

As stated in recent studies about DMs, Yael Maschler and Deborah Schiffrin’s definition and categorisation (Reference Maschler, Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton and Schiffrin2015) seems to be an excellent ‘up-to-date summarization’ (Reference Fedriani and SansòFedriani and Sansò, 2017: 1) of the issues surrounding DMs. According to Maschler and Schiffrin, there are three different perspectives on DMs ‘in terms of their basic starting point, their definition of discourse markers, and their method of analysis’ (Reference Maschler, Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton and Schiffrin2015: 190).

The first perspective derives from Schiffrin’s sociolinguistic analysis, conducted through both quantitative and qualitative methods (Reference Schiffrin1987), and underlines the close connection between markers and discourse, understood as ‘a process of social interaction’ (Reference Maschler, Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton and Schiffrin2015: 190). This analysis led to the definition of DMs as ‘non-obligatory utterance-initial items that function in relation to ongoing talk and text’ (Reference Maschler, Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton and Schiffrin2015: 191). As for grammar class, DMs belong to (1) conjunctions, (2) interjections, (3) adverbs, and (4) lexicalised phrases, such as ‘y’know, I mean’ (191, Emphasis in the original).

The second approach, by Reference Fraser, Jucker and ZivBruce Fraser (1998, 2009a, 2009b), is pragmatic and considers ‘how one type of pragmatic marker in a sentence may relate the message conveyed by that sentence to the message of a prior sentence’ (Reference Maschler, Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton and SchiffrinMaschler and Schiffrin, 2015: 192–93). In other words, Fraser’s broader framework analyses the relationship between two sentences – or discourse segment, according to Fraser’s definition (2009a: 296) – connected by a PM. Fraser’s framework distinguishes between four types of PMs (qtd. in Reference Maschler, Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton and SchiffrinMaschler and Schiffrin, 2015: 193):

1. 1. Basic PMs (signals of illocutionary force, e.g., please)

2. 2. Commentary PMs (encoding of another message that comments on the basic message, e.g., frankly)

3. 3. Parallel PMs (encoding of another message separate from the basic and/or commentary message, e.g., damn, vocatives)

4. 4. Discourse management markers ‘which signal a metacomment on the structure of the discourse’ (Reference FraserFraser, 2009b: 893).

DMs are included in the second category as commentary PMs, which is ‘a class of expressions, each of which signals how the speaker intends the basic message that follows to relate to the prior discourse’ (Reference Fraser, Jucker and ZivFraser, 1998: 387). Discourse markers are categorised into three functional classes (Reference FraserFraser, 2009a: 300–01):

1. 1. Contrastive (e.g., but)

2. 2. Elaborative (e.g., and)

3. 3. Inferential (e.g., so).

Lastly, Maschler’s interactionist approach (Reference Maschler1994 and following) focuses on the text and the function(s) of a DM within a given context. According to his framework (Reference Maschler, Jucker and Ziv1998; Reference Maschler, Schiffrin, Tannen, Hamilton and SchiffrinMaschler and Schiffrin, 2015: 194–98), DMs belong to ‘four realms of discourse’ (Reference Maschler, Jucker and ZivMaschler, 1998: 13):

1. 1. Textual–referential: deictics and conjunctions.

2. 2. Textual–structural: They mark order or hierarchy within the discourse (e.g., first of all). Both kinds of textual DMs connect ‘prior and upcoming discourse’ (Reference Maley, Carter, Walker and BrumfitMaschler and Schiffrin, 2015: 196).

3. 3. Interpersonal–interactional, which account for the relations between S and H (epistemic DMs, modal DMs).Footnote ²⁵

4. 4. Cognitive, which show the development of the S’s cognitive processes during conversation (e.g., Oh, I see, to express that new information is being processed).

DMs in Early Modern English

The first studies that focused on diachronic perspectives on DMs (see, e.g., Reference Stein, Eaton, Fischer, Koopman and van der LeekStein, 1985; Reference Brinton and FisiakBrinton, 1990) observed how difficult it was to cope with such a thorny category, which was ‘linguistically ephemeral’ (Reference Stein, Eaton, Fischer, Koopman and van der LeekStein, 1985: 300) and ‘transitory in nature’ (Reference Brinton and FisiakBrinton, 1990: 49). On the one hand, DMs are difficult to define; on the other hand, diachronic perspectives make things much more complicated. In this subsection, some questions concerning the diachronic development and study of DMs will be considered.

When adopting a historical perspective to deal with DMs, it is worth considering some processes that characterised this linguistic category. First of all, as highlighted by the frameworks presented in the previous paragraph (esp. Reference Brown and YuleBrown and Yule, 1983: 17; Reference BrintonBrinton, 1996: 33–35; Reference Jucker, Ziv, Jucker and ZivJucker and Ziv, 1998: 3), DMs are highly stigmatised since their presence in written texts is often associated with lower stylistic registers, as they are typical of oral language and spoken interaction. As noted by Reference Brinton and FisiakBrinton (1990: 46), they are ‘stylistically deplored’. This was particularly true in the history of the English language, when DMs ‘were regarded as mere fillers [and] they were often negatively evaluated when occurring in OE [Old English] and ME [Middle English] texts’ (Reference LutzkyLutzky, 2012: 25). While pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary have received much attention from English historical linguists, communication and spoken interaction has not. As noted by Reference Jucker, Watts and TrudgillJucker (2002: 210), ‘research into the history of English has tended to focus on pronunciation, the structure of words and the structure of sentences, but not on the communicative aspects of the language and on the interaction between speakers of the language’.

Nevertheless, as observed in the previous sections, theatrical texts represent a privileged field of study to be considered, given their speech-purposed nature, something that position them between written and oral language. According to Reference Brinton and FisiakBrinton (1990), a plethora of scholars have argued the oral nature of theatrical texts such as early modern plays: the written text was often a mere plot outline for actors who usually changed and adapted it before uttering their lines before the audience. In this sense, DMs cannot be considered stigmatised items, but markers of the speech-purposed nature of early modern plays, what Brinton calls ‘stylized discourse markers’ (Reference Brinton and Fisiak1990: 59), elements that signal ‘oral feature[s] … in written discourse’ (59).

Another paramount issue to consider in studying DMs from a historical point of view is the process that led some words to lose their semantic fullness and become DMs, that is, grammaticalisation, or, in most cases discussed here, pragmaticalisation. Reference Thompson, Mulac, Traugott and HeineSandra A. Thompson and Anthony Mulac (1991) state that some DMs derive from lexical items which acquired a mere grammatical value. For example, I mean and You know lost their primary semantic meaning – this process is known as semantic bleaching – to carry out a grammatical function, although Reference Aijmer, Swan and WestvikKarin Aijmer (1997) prefers calling this process pragmaticalisation or pragmatic strengthening, whereby ‘a lexicalised structure is recruited to serve a pragmatic function that involves the speaker’s attitude towards the hearer’ (Reference Jucker, Watts and TrudgillJucker, 2002: 216). To understand the difference between grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation, Aijmer uses the example of to be going to, where four lexical items combined together began to express the grammatical function of futurity. Conversely, such expressions as I mean or You know underwent a process of pragmatic strengthening, serving pragmatic instead of grammatical functions.

But how did scholars analyse DMs in the early modern period (in drama especially) and which DMs did they consider? Referring to the Helsinki Corpus, a repository of almost 450 texts from different genres, ranging from 730 to 1710 CE, Jucker analyses the distribution of the five most recurring DMs in the corpus – that is, o/oh, why, well, pray/prithee, marry – focusing on early modern plays, the written genre which contains the highest percentage of occurrences of DMs in the whole corpus – that is, 9.2 hits per 1,000 words – for the reasons discussed in the previous paragraphs. As Jucker explains,

The conclusions reached are articulated in three fundamental points:

Lutzky devotes an entire monograph to DMs in Early Modern English (Reference Lutzky2012), analysing both quantitatively and qualitatively the occurrences of marry, well, and why in four historical corpora – that is, the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English, and the Drama Corpus – and carries out a sociopragmatic analysis of the results obtained. Unlike Jucker, who focused on a restricted sample of genres, Lutzky analyses ‘a range of authentic and fictional text types, which either record spoken EModE (trial proceedings, witness depositions) or imitate it (drama comedy, prose fiction, didactic works), which were written to be spoken (sermon) or which may be regarded as speech-related due to their interactive and involved nature (letter, diary)’ (Reference Lutzky2012: 266). Lutzky’s conclusions are important and shed some light on the use of DMs by Early Modern English playwrights such as Shakespeare:

Therefore, what is important to underline for the purposes of this volume is that even in the early modern period, DMs were used more in speech-purposed or related text types, and that playwrights might have used them to characterise certain characters with a particular social status or gender, as the next subsections will show.

DMs in Romeo and Juliet

Studies about DMs in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are scant and often part of broader linguistic investigations of the play’s peculiar language.Footnote ²⁶ Reference CulpeperCulpeper (2009, Reference Culpeper, Hoover, Culpeper and O’Halloran2014), for instance, analyses words, parts of speech, and semantic categories in Romeo and Juliet using corpus linguistics, and among the different linguistic items he considers there are also DMs. By exploring the most recurrent keywords for each character, Culpeper concludes that DMs are ‘clearly established as a feature of the Nurse’s speech’ (Reference Culpeper2009: 45, Reference Culpeper, Hoover, Culpeper and O’Halloran2014: 48), thus confirming Lutzky’s hypothesis that DMs are typical not only of speech-purposed texts, but also of ‘characters of a particular social status or gender’ (Reference Lutzky2012: 270), in this case women of the lower classes. Culpeper lists the most recurring DMs uttered by the nurse. Such words as o (16 hits), ah (6), ay (5), nay (4), alas (3), no (2), amen (1), ho (1), yes (1), fie (1), and farewell (1) were not part of the keywords found by the software and it is worth noting this aspect now, because it provides important information about the uniqueness of the nurse’s linguistic choices, in addition to highlighting the limitations of the part of speech (PoS) tagging, which was exactly one of Culpeper’s aims – something that is not important to our study. Moreover, Culpeper’s findings shed important light on the lexical items used as DMs by Shakespeare, some of which we find obsolete nowadays and need to be modernised or carefully explained when introduced to students (especially secondary school students). Such words as alas or fie, for example, might be translated intralingually with the aid of the Cambridge Dictionary online, or recurring to modernised/simplified versions of Romeo and Juliet (e.g., the Cambridge School Shakespeare, edited by Reference SmithSmith, 2014). One may argue that obsolete, archaic DMs can be omitted when focusing on the linguistic aspects of Romeo and Juliet that are worth being taught in ESL classes, since they are not strictly necessary to an understanding of the semantic meaning of a sentence. Nevertheless, I agree with Reference Farahani and GhaneFarahani and Ghane (2022) that DMs ‘play a pivotal role in pragmatic competence of speakers … and will help them to make their speech more comprehensible and rich … as well as more sociable’ (49).

Drawing on Brinton’s categorisation and description of DMs in Early Modern English (Reference Brinton, Jucker and Taavitsainen2010: 290–92), Reference Busse, Busse, Suhr and TaavitsainenBusse and Busse (2012) elaborate a taxonomy of DMs in Shakespeare’s canon that is worth recording:

This taxonomy will be adopted in the following subsection to help secondary school and university students deal with the complex panorama of DMs in Romeo and Juliet.

Another model that will be adopted in the lesson plan about Romeo and Juliet is by David and Ben Reference CrystalCrystal (2002).Footnote ²⁷ Unlike Brinton’s framework, which is clearly based on syntactic patterns, Crystal and Crystal elaborated their own taxonomy based on the positioning of S and H and on the communicative intention of the sentence(s) uttered, which can be accessed online at the URL www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/LanguageCompanion/ThemesAndTopics.aspx?TopicId=11. The Crystals’ framework is furnished with examples from the Shakespearean canon and the modernised version of the early modern DMs. Categories and examples of DMs from Shakespeare’s plays are provided as follows:

• S draws H’s attention to a point: o’ conscience; I fear me; good deed; good now; know’t; la; la you; law; look you; I prithee; I protest; say; think it

• S reformulates or adds to a point: Nay, more; which is more

• S summarizes a point: This is for all; be it concluded; in few; once this; at a word; within a word

• S lets H know the utterance is about to end: There is an end; even so much; in fine; soft

• S lets H know the topic is changing: What though

• An alternative or contrast: Nay; but nay

• A stronger degree of affirmation or assurance than ‘yes’: E’en so; with all my heart; I warrant you; what else?

• A stronger degree of denial or rejection than ‘no’: Let go

• A confirmation check on what S has just said: Pray ye?; Say you?; Say’st me so?

• A prompt for S to continue: Good; make that good; have you at; trow

• An acknowledgement that S has made a point: Go to; you have said

• An acknowledgment of S’s attitude: Come; you may

• An expression of unwillingness to continue with S’s topic: That’s/’tis all one; I have said; go thy ways

• An expression of response uncertainty to S: O Lord, sir

• Elicit action, not further speech: Come your ways; have with you.

Lesson Plan 2

Noticing Activity (Input)

Awareness Activity (Scaffolding I)

Guided Practice (Scaffolding II)

Autonomous Practice (Output)

Secondary School

Secondary school students will work in groups of three in a cooperative learning environment. They will create a fake WhatsApp group whose components are the Nurse, Romeo, and Peter, with the aim of arranging Romeo and Juliet’s marriage. The use of DMs should, of course, be elicited. Free websites such as fakewhats.com or fakedetail.com can be used (see Figure 6).

Figure 6 An example of secondary school students’ output created using fakedetail.com.

Teaching S-T Words in the EFL Classroom: ‘Is [it] still a taboo?’Footnote ²⁹

Current literature in the field of English Language Teaching takes for granted that swearwords and taboo expressions (henceforth S-T words, as studies usually refer to them) are noteworthy socio-pragmatic phenomena that deserve attention by both teachers and students, without too much ado about ethical or moral implications traditionally associated with their role in educational environments (see, among others, Reference MercuryMercury, 1995; Reference HoranHoran, 2013; Reference Kaduce and MetzgerKaduce and Metzger, 2019; Reference WedlockWedlock, 2020). For example, in her study on teaching English insultsFootnote ³⁰ with the aid of audiovisual material, Reference Bruti, Bianchi and GesuatoSilvia Bruti (2016) simply considers S-T words as ‘conversational routines’, exactly as any other speech acts, ‘conversational features’ to be managed, since they are ‘an essential instrument to interact in a foreign language’ that ‘is very often marginalized in syllabi’ (153). Although this introduction to this final section of the Element may seem an unsolicited excuse, I would like to offer a brief overview of the importance and value of teaching S-T words in the EFL classroom.

First of all, I completely agree with Michael Adams’ assertion that ‘the more knowledgeable and therefore best educated on the subjects of “bad” words and language generally – will likely make the best decisions about their use’ (Reference Adams2002: 357). In the 1990s, scholars such as Vivian Reference De Klerkde Klerk (1991) and Robin-Eliece Reference MercuryMercury (1995) had already highlighted the sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic importance of teaching and learning S-T words. De Klerk considered taboo language a revealing instrument to understand ‘the social variables by which speakers are affected’ (Reference De Klerk1991: 164), while Mercury encouraged ESL teachers and learners ‘to consider [S-T words’] sociolinguistic importance’ (Reference Mercury1995: 28). A decade later, Jean-Marc Dewaele advocated the implementation of taboo language in the ESL classroom as a means for pragmatic development (Reference Dewaele, Hua, Seedhouse, Wei and Cook2007), while more recently Indika Reference Liyanage, Walker, Bartlett and GuoLiyanage et al. (2015) have examined teaching S-T words in terms of a language’s authenticity. In short, when used appropriately, S-T terms can be considered an index of authenticity in ESL teaching. This could lead to considerations about the authenticity of the Shakespearean text as one of the most representative and original examples of Early Modern English interactional language, although such a thorny debate is beyond the scope of this Element. (However, see, among others, Reference Busse, Busse, Bergs and BrintonBusse and Busse, 2017.)

Joshua Wedlock considers Adams’ approach a prevention-is-better-than-cure one and goes on to underline the lexico-pragmatic importance of teaching what he calls SOTL (Swearing, Offensive, and Taboo Language):

Teachers as well may offer interesting perspectives on the efficacy of teaching Shakespearean taboo words to their students. Sarah Swan, for instance, affirms that ‘insulting’ her students with the language of Shakespeare has humoristic effects in her English classrooms, allowing her to better capture the attention of her pupils (Reference SwanSwan, 2013). This is how she describes her approach: ‘The theorist would frame this approach in terms of bridging the gap between high and low culture, but actually my thoughts were more practical. I just wanted to try and get them to understand the text, feel less intimidated by the ‘poshness’ of Shakespeare’s language and Elizabethan sentence structure’.

The same approach had already been adopted by Reference Hill and ÖttchenCynthia J. Ottchen and Wayne F. Hill (1991, Reference Hill and Öttchen1996), who published didactic booklets from both a student- and teacher-centred perspective to inform their intended readers about the many ways Shakespeare’s characters insult each other. Students were invited to educate their wit (as the subtitle of their Reference Hill and Öttchen1991 publication has it), while the teacher-oriented approach of their Reference Hill and Öttchen1996 booklet aimed to create moments of comic relief and humour while teaching Shakespeare to both native and non-native students of English (exactly as in Swan’s experience).

Similarly, the British Council tutor and resource writer Genevieve White proposed focusing on quick-fire dialogues full of insults and ‘[m]ake sure … learners deliver their lines in as nasty a way as possible’ (Reference White2015). At least this approach would allow teachers to make their students feel closer to Shakespeare, make his literary output more attractive to them, and bridge the gap between high and low culture, as Swan has stated.

And lest one think that teaching Shakespeare’s S-T words should be reserved for adult learners only, there are scholars and instructors who actually disagree. Joe Winston and Miles Tandy (Reference Winston and Tandy2012), for example, advise teachers to begin implementing insults in early childhood, with children aged four to eleven, because ‘in Shakespeare’s work, the colourful and tense language of insult and aggression is not directed at anyone in the classroom but at people in a fiction’ (4). Addressing their book to primary school teachers, Reference Kucharczyk and KucharczykStefan Kucharczyk and Maureen Kucharczyk (2022) agree with Winston and Tandy, asserting that insults ‘are delicious to use and will become a staple of your drama lessons. They are also very useful for adding authenticity and spice to descriptive writing’ (39). Here, once again, the question of authenticity arises when dealing with offensive language in Shakespeare.

The pro-SOTL teaching approach described here will be adopted in this last section of the Element, in the belief that ESL students must be aware of the pragmatic contexts of use of S-T words in order to avoid offending their interlocutors in certain contexts.

(Im)politeness Strategies in The Taming of the ShrewFootnote ³¹

There is no doubt that, among Shakespeare’s comedies, The Taming of the Shrew is one of the most interesting to analyse in terms of S-T words or SOTL (Reference Dupuis and TiffanyDupuis and Tiffany, 2013). According to pragmaticians, taboo language belongs to the theory of impoliteness,Footnote ³² but even before late-twentieth-century linguistic studies about S-T words and impoliteness, insults and offences were considered threats to an addressee’s self-image (or face)Footnote ³³ by sociologists such as Ervin Goffman, who paved the way to face-based pragmatic models of (im)politeness and was the first to deal with SOTL by distinguishing between intentional and incidental, or unintentional, insults and offences (Reference Goffman1967: 14). Referring to Goffman, pragmaticians ‘seized upon intention as a means of identifying ‘genuine’ impoliteness’ (Reference CulpeperCulpeper, 2021: 6), as Derek Bousfield’s definition of impoliteness clearly states: ‘Impoliteness constitutes the communication of intentionally gratuitous and conflictive verbal face-threatening acts which are purposefully delivered’ (Reference Bousfield2008: 72).

In 1980, Lance Lachenicht was the first linguist to try to analyse interactions where the S intentionally wants to hurt the H’s facework (i.e., the communicative strategies employed to maintain face or social prestige) by building a theoretical framework of impoliteness based on Brown and Levinson’s well-known model of politeness. Lachenicht distinguishes four superstrategies of what he calls aggravating language: (1) indirect (off-record) aggravating language (i.e., ambiguous and ironic insults), (2) direct (bald on-record) aggravating language, (3) positive aggravating language (the H does not have the S’s approval), and (4) negative aggravating language (the H receives an order by the S). Lachenicht’s model, ‘which presented problems with both the theory and methodology’ (Reference Bousfield and CulpeperBousfield and Culpeper, 2008: 161), was readjusted in 1990 by Paddy Austin, who proposed a six-phase H-based framework of impoliteness, and then by Culpeper in 1996. Culpeper’s modelFootnote ³⁴ and its ensuing developments/integrations (esp. 2011a, 2011b, Reference Culpeper, Capone and Mey2016, Reference Culpeper, Hardaker, Culpeper, Haugh and Kadar2017, Reference Culpeper and Allan2018, Reference Culpeper2021) are the most widespread and authoritative today in the field of face-based impoliteness, even from a diachronic perspective, which is the one adopted in this Element. As a matter of fact, as Jucker and Taavitsainen note, ‘[i]nherently [(im)]polite speech acts can be more sensitive to changes of fashion and cultural variation (cf. the contrary meanings of gestures in different cultures), but, at the same time, this principle must hold at some level’ (Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2008: 4).

Culpeper includes S-T words in what he calls positive impoliteness output strategies, ‘the use of strategies designed to damage the addressee’s positive face wants’ (Reference Culpeper1996: 356), where positive face means ‘the positive consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants’ (Reference Brown and LevinsonBrown and Levinson, 1978/87: 61), or, in other words, ‘the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others’ (62). When an S wants to damage the H’s self-image, positive impoliteness occurs and taboo words – ‘swear, or use abusive or profane language’ (Reference CulpeperCulpeper, 1996: 358) – are one of the possible strategies to employ.

In their sociocultural framework of taboo words, Reference Allan and BurridgeAllan and Burridge (2006) propose a slightly different model of S-T words, which however can be connected and integrated with Culpeper’s taxonomy of impoliteness, since they ‘examine politeness and impoliteness as they interact with orthophemism (straight talking), euphemism (sweet talking) and dysphemism (speaking offensively)’ (1). It is clear that, in the case of this section of the Element, dysphemism is the category we must consider, as ‘bald on-record’ aggravating language (Reference LachenichtLachenicht, 1980: 619) is now the object of research. Allan and Burridge’s definition and examples of dysphemism are particularly useful here, since they are a good introduction to the world of SOTL in The Taming of the Shrew for readers, teachers, and learners:

Of course, what is considered an insult today may not have been considered offensive in Shakespeare’s day. Moreover, ‘What people considered insulting is a matter of culture to a large extent’ (Reference Jucker and TaavitsainenJucker and Taavitsainen, 2008: 6). For this reason, Jucker and Taavitsainen elaborated a framework of the ‘pragmatic space of insults’ (Reference Jucker and Taavitsainen2000: 74)Footnote ³⁵ which could also take into account the diachronic variation of SOTL. See Table 2, or Table 9, which presents a graphically simplified version of the same:

As Jucker and Taavitsainen explain,

This framework, together with Culpeper’s definition of taboo language as one of the possible output strategies of positive impoliteness, and Allan and Burridge’s notion of dysphemism comprise the methodological starting point for the lesson plan on insults in The Taming of the Shrew. Table 10 summarises the three taxonomies presented in this subsection, with the most relevant aspects for this Element in bold:

The most complete and detailed study of impoliteness in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is undoubtedly Del Villano’s Using the Devil with Courtesy: Shakespeare and the Language of (Im)politeness (Reference Del Villano2018), whose last chapter (137–71) is devoted to the gendering of (im)politeness in this Shakespearean comedy. Del Villano divides her study into five sections, focusing on the (im)polite dynamics among the play’s characters. A summary of (only) the taboo language used in each section is given in Table 11.

Other examples (adapted from Reference MaturiMaturi, 2021: 50–51) of S-T words, insults, and offences in The Shrew are as follows:

• PETRUCHIO: Senseless villain (1.2.34)

• HORTENSIO: Twangling Jack (2.1.154)

• PETRUCHIO: you logger-headed … foolish knave … You peasant swain! You whoreson malt-horse drudge! … rascal knaves … you rogues, you villains … a whoreson, beetle-headed, flap-eared knave! … dogs … rascal … villain (4.1.96–134)

• HORTENSIO: Cullion (4.2.20)

• Other insults repeated more than once by various characters in the play, very common in the early modern period, are (in alphabetical order) ass, fool, knave, rascal, rogue, and villain.

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin has recently analysed insults in The Taming of the Shrew and their ‘complex dialectics of tongue-taming’ (Reference Vienne-Guerrin2022: 18). Like many other scholars before her (see, among others, Underdown, 1985; Reference BooseBoose, 1991; Ingram, 1994; Reference BardsleyBardsley, 2006; Reference CressyCressy, 2010), Vienne-Guerrin considers that the very first insult in the comedy is in its title:

The very title of this comedy thus anticipates the impolite behaviour towards someone whose tongue is too bald and direct – and hence needs to be tamed. As we all know, this is precisely the case of Katherine, ‘who goes through a non-naturalistic transformation that leads her to abandon her initial scold-like behaviour and become the perfect example of an obedient wife as a consequence of violent taming by her husband Petruccio’ (Reference Del VillanoDel Villano, 2018: 138). Although critics discuss the fact that ‘Shakespeare’s time was a transitional period for a term [shrew] that was not yet exclusively reserved for women’, Early Modern English was ‘a period in which the term was increasingly used in the feminine’ (Reference Vienne-GuerrinVienne-Guerrin, 2022: 162). This leads to the consideration that The Taming of the Shrew is a privileged field for the investigation of gender relations – and power imbalance, above all – also from a pragmalinguistic point of view. As a matter of fact, after ‘[h]aving subjected Katherina to every sort of abuse by starving her and denying her clothing, Petruccio’s endgame strategy focuses on the linguistic power of a husband over his wife’ (Reference Del VillanoDel Villano, 2018: 166). As explained by Vienne-Guerrin,

In other words, SOTL in The Taming of the Shrew depends on ‘pragmatic significance, i.e., their scope, extent and purpose’, and putting them in the meaningful context of the Shakespearean text also ‘serve(s) to explore the gender [as well as social] dynamics at its heart’ (Reference Del VillanoDel Villano, 2018: 171). The following lesson plan, however, assumes the gender-related considerations dealt with in this subsection and focuses on other dynamics, whereby S-T words underline the power imbalance among the characters, that is, the relationship between a master, Petruchio, and his servants.

Lesson Plan 3

Noticing Activity (Input)

Secondary School

Both secondary school and university students will familiarise themselves with the text (4.1.91–138) and, more generally, with the plot and main themes of The Taming of the Shrew. Speaking and writing skills will be elicited during this first phase. The teacher may help younger students by introducing the play, emphasising the main linguistic and content-related characteristics of the scene considered. The Cambridge School Shakespeare book series can be a useful resource at this stage (Reference BradyBrady, 2014). In particular, Petruchio’s aggressive language deserves attention (a good explanation is provided at www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuBb-0p5u2c). After that, a short clip of the scene is shown; for example, 4.1 from Lucy Bailey’s 2012 RSC production is recommended, since the latest productions (Fentiman’s 2014 and Audibert’s 2019) present a provocative gender-swapped world that may be too distant from the aims of this lesson plan. A brief brainstorming activity follows (with the support of the blackboard or online interactive boards such as Webwhiteboard by Miro): students are invited to guess the power relationship among the characters onstage in order to understand the Ss’ and Hs’ reactions to SOTL. An example of a brainstorming activity is given in Figure 7.

Figure 7 An example of a brainstorming activity realised with webwhiteboard.com by Miro.

S-T words are highlighted in the text and inserted in the brainstorming.

Awareness Activity (Scaffolding I)

Secondary School

Secondary school pupils will be assigned a written or computer-based drag-and-drop exercise where two or more adjectives (or adjectival nouns/phrases) and nouns, which compose creative insults in Early Modern English (see Figure 8), are given in random order. In this way, the syntactic and lexical creativity (Reference Jucker and TaavitsainenJucker and Taavitsainen, 2000: 74) of Shakespearean insults in The Shrew is explored. Possible modern versions or L1 translations are provided with the help of a dictionary or through websites such as the Shakespearean insults generator (www.librarieshawaii.org/learn/brain-games/bardly-barbs/) or the Shakespeare insult kit (www.scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/articles/migrated-files-in-body/shakespeare_insult_kit.pdf), which draws on Rex Gibson’s list of Shakespearean insults (Reference Gibson1998: 197–99).

Figure 8 An example of a reordering drag-and-drop exercise realised with classtools.net.

(www.classtools.net/dragdrop/)

Guided Practice (Scaffolding II)

Autonomous Practice (Output)

A Preliminary Experiment with Shakespeare as CBLT in the ESL Classroom

‘A book about Shakespeare which reduces his great literary masterpieces to mere tools for teaching a foreign language? Scandalous!’ (Reference Dobson, Lau and TsoDobson, 2017: vii). Michael Dobson’s provocative incipit to his preface in Lau and Tso’s Teaching Shakespeare to ESL Students ironically comments on the tone of this Element as well. I hope that the previous sections have demonstrated that teaching English as a FL via Shakespeare’s plays is definitely not a ‘scandalous’ reduction of his literary output. On the contrary, in my view, it is one of the most productive ways of exploiting the linguistic potentials intrinsically offered by works that have contributed so much to shaping the English language as we know and use it today. Paraphrasing Jan Kott’sFootnote ³⁷ most famous book, it is also a way to make ‘Shakespeare our contemporary’ (1964).

Furthermore, the prevalence of literature addressing the teaching of English with Shakespeare in non-Anglophone countries, as evidenced by works such as Reference Lau and TsoLau and Tso (2017) and others including Reference Flachmann, Salomone and DavisMichael Flachmann (1997), Todd Reference HeydenHeyden (2002), Reference Eisenmann and LütgeChristiane Lütge and Maria Eisenmann (2014), Reference TsoTso (2016), and Kohei Reference Underdown, Fletcher and StevensonUchimaru (2020), underscores the enduring significance of Shakespeare as a ubiquitous figure in ESL syllabi. This trend not only emphasises his pervasive presence but also fuels the ongoing discourse regarding adaptations, reworking, simplifications, modernisations, and other pedagogical approaches associated with Shakespeare’s works. What is ‘scandalous’, some critics may argue, is the over-simplification of Shakespeare’s language, especially when teaching primary school pupils or novice adult learners.

Of course, extreme attempts to modernise Shakespeare’s Early Modern English are absolutely respectable and extremely useful for their intended readers (e.g., foreigners who approach Shakespeare for the first time, very young learners, among others). However, given the purpose of this Element, these intralinguistic translations of Shakespeare plays were not particularly useful. As a matter of fact, this Element has tried to demonstrate that once spelling modernisation has been carried out, the main morphosyntactic and lexical difficulties with a 500-year-old language can be overcome using specialised dictionariesFootnote ³⁸ or glossed editions of the texts, given the huge amount of material available on Shakespeare. This triggers a pedagogical virtuous circle whereby the more material that is produced for ESL instructors and learners about Shakespeare in the English language classroom, the more his plays are known and exploited in educational environments worldwide, the more Shakespeare-centred pedagogical experiences and experiments produce outcomes which in turn become teaching materials.

As for the specific level of linguistic analysis, this Element has aimed to go beyond considerations of spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. Its purpose is to use Shakespeare’s plays (in particular Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew) to teach English pragmatics – with a specific focus on speech act theory, DMs, and (im)politeness strategies – a ‘somewhat neglected or marginalized’ (Reference IvanovaIvanova, 2018: 27) field of language pedagogies, although ‘[r]esearch of the past three decades has shown almost unanimously that the teaching of pragmatic skills to language learners is not only feasible … and desirable …, but also more effective than mere exposure to the target language’ (Reference GlaserGlaser, 2013: 151). Nevertheless, linguistic interfaces are carefully considered and treated, so that when dealing with pragmatics, interfaces with morphosyntax and lexis are dealt with. In this Element, Shakespeare’s plays are used both as linguistic means and literary content in what has been defined as CBLT or CBI. Literature as content offers a number of topics and themes to be combined with metalinguistic reflection (LLE) with the final goal of creating useful ready-made lesson plans to be implemented in both secondary school and university ESL courses. In fact, the model proposed to deliver both ESL secondary school classes and university lectures using Shakespeare’s plays is Reference LysterLyster’s (2018) four-phased proactive approach – that is, (1) noticing activity phase; (2) awareness activity phase; (3) guided practice phase; and (4) autonomous practice phase – which he created for the specific purposes of CBLT. By transforming the traditional tripartite model of lesson plans (input, scaffolding, output), Lyster’s approach allows teachers and lecturers to focus more on the linguistic training of learners, since the scaffolding phase – which in CBLT is the core of the teaching of specific/specialised language of a non-linguistic discipline – is split in two, in order to give instructors and students more space and time to acquire linguistic structures.

In Section 1, curses from Richard III offer much food for thought for a lesson plan about speech acts in Shakespeare’s plays and their implementation as pragmatic devices in the ESL classroom, with particular attention to female characters and men–women power imbalance. Using act 4, scene 1 as input – a dialogue between Lady Anne (widow of the late Edward, Prince of Wales, and now wife-to-be of Richard), Queen Elizabeth (wife to late Edward IV), and the Duchess of York (his mother and mother of Richard) – both secondary school and university students are encouraged to work on their speaking skills. Younger students enact a role play whose protagonists were Anne, Elizabeth, and the Duchess, trying to use as many kinds of speech acts as possible. Elizabeth and the Duchess are TV talk show presenters and interview the future queen Anne, who has just heard the news of her imminent coronation. University students prepare PowerPoint or Prezi presentations on the pragmalinguistic representation of female feelings and emotions in Richard III, highlighting the pivotal role of expressive performative speech acts, to be presented and discussed with their peers in a seminar-like format.

Section 2, which focuses on Romeo and Juliet, examines a dialogue between the Nurse, Peter, and Romeo from 2.4 about arrangements for Romeo and Juliet’s secret marriage. Exploiting the communicative potential of DMs in the scene, both secondary school and university students are invited to work on their writing skills. On the one hand, secondary school students are required to create WhatsApp groups with the Nurse, Peter, and Romeo as members and must arrange the marriage Friar Lawrence has accepted to celebrate. Of course, given the focus on DMs, their use is elicited during the output phase. On the other hand, university students are asked to write (in)formal letters to characters in the play, inviting them to the ceremony. In this case, DMs are to be used to set the tone and register of the letters.

Lastly, in Section 3, The Taming of the Shrew, 4.1 is selected as the privileged field to investigate (im)politeness strategies such as insults, offences, and taboo language, with the firm belief that aggressive language should be taught in the ESL classroom, at least to ensure students avoid it in certain communicative contexts. A combination of speaking and writing skills is elicited. Secondary school students launch a TikTok challenge, recording short double videos with bleeped insults, on the one hand, and their attenuated, polite versions on the other. In the university lecture, however, an early modern courtroom can be set up, with Katherina, Grumio, and all the servants accusing Petruchio of hurling insults at his subordinates. A student playing the judge must decide on the gravity of the facts and condemn or absolve Petruchio.

This Element offers merely a preliminary exploration of the many ways Shakespeare’s plays can be used in the ESL classroom to teach English pragmatics. Firstly, the corpus of texts considered could easily be expanded and the entire Shakespearean corpus investigated, even to find recurring pragmatic patterns and features. Secondly, other pragmatic and pragmalinguistic areas could be taken into account, such as deictics, implicatures, and presuppositions, to mention only a few. A larger-scale theoretical project, which is beyond the scope of this Element, would certainly benefit from the tools offered by corpus pragmatics (see Reference Aijmer and RühlemannAijmer and Rühlemann, 2015; Reference Taavitsainen, Jucker and TuominenTaavitsainen et al., 2015; Reference WeisserWeisser, 2018, Reference Weisser2020), a transdisciplinary field of study which combines pragmatics and corpus linguistics, thus giving scholars the possibility of managing large amounts of data (in this case texts and words), and which has recently received critical attention in Shakespeare studies (see, among others, Reference MulliniMullini, 2016; Reference Culpeper, Oliver, Jonsson and LarssonCulpeper and Oliver, 2020; Reference OliverOliver, 2022).

All things considered, this Element has merely scratched the surface of a very rich and vastly unexplored field of research, which warrants scholarly attention not only to understand the linguistic (especially pragmatic) mechanisms of Early Modern English and, above all, Shakespeare’s language but also to improve and expand research into Shakespeare and the pedagogy of the English language in the ESL classroom. Almost 500 years later, Shakespeare’s plays still have a great deal to tell us, also from a linguistic viewpoint.