This chapter examines how resistance to the ideology of Englishness is expressed through Shakespeare’s vision of human community, especially with respect to ‘strangers’, in early comedies, the second tetralogy and the contribution to Sir Thomas More. Of key importance is the idea put forward through Shakespeare’s More that ‘the strangers’ case’ is at once common and contingent. This idea is shown to find expression in Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘stranger’ and in the phrase ‘straing rootes’ in his contribution to Sir Thomas More. The ‘straying’ into the condition of ‘a stranger’ is dramatised in the early comedies, and brought ‘home’ in the second tetralogy, which depicts the nation as a mix of mutual strangers. This resonates not only with premodern lived experience, but also with biblical figures of the stranger. Of particular importance is a biblical passage that represents the inclusive reach of the gift of redemption in terms of strangers made citizens in the house of God. Referencing this passage The Comedy of Errors engages with ‘the strangers’ case’, like, if less explicitly than the Shakespearean contribution to Sir Thomas More.

This chapter provides a history of ‘the King’s English’ as a context for an analysis of language, history and power in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the second tetralogy. The trope is used as a rhetorical and ideological tool in performatives. Associated with temperance and honesty, ‘the King’s English’ belongs to a set of defining values of true Englishness. The project to produce this linguistic norm coincides with a homologous project to produce a stable, monetary system of ‘good’ coin through exclusion of ‘bad’, ‘counterfeit’ or ‘clipped’ coin. These projects testify to a shift of the centre of economic and cultural gravity from the court to the merchant citizen class. Shakespeare’s one English comedy centred on English citizens which features his one use of ‘the King’s English’ is shown to engage critically with this ideology, and to set against it an idea of ‘our English’ as an inclusive mix, the ‘gallimaufry’ loved by the linguistically extravagant gentleman John Falstaff. The comedy draws out the implications of the banishment of Falstaff in the second tetralogy, which sets history against the project of cultural reformation ideology to produce (the) ‘true’ English.

This chapter introduces the central claim by grounding it in a range of contexts, beginning with the use of the word ‘Englishes’ by John Florio in 1598. The first section discusses the post-reformation struggle over the ‘property’ of ‘our English’ in the sense of defining character and ownership, a struggle conducted around practices in theatre and translation. The phrase ‘our English’ features only once in the Shakespearean canon, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where it is set against ‘the King’s English’. This opposition finds echo in staged confrontations, notably around Shakespearean instances of the word ‘reformation’. These anticipate future cultural history and critical responses to Shakespearean practice, beginning with Ben Jonson whose alignment with cultural reformation ideology is highlighted. The exclusionary character of this ideology is pointed out and Shakespearean resistance to it in plays of the 1590s introduced. Specifically, the welcoming of (linguistic and human) strangers urged by Shakespeare is discussed in relation to his status as ‘Englishman forren’, while his inclusive vision of ‘our English’ is considered in relation to the present as well as the past.

This chapter presents a history of the emergence and ideological uses made of the sartorial equivalent of the linguistic ‘gallimaufry’: the figure of the Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions. The normative centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is defined through exclusion of what it is not, and this is what the figure represents. Deriving from verbal descriptions linked to the first visual portraits of an Englishman, the figure acquires gender and class inflections and woven into a historical narrative charged with an implicit future project of a ‘true’ (protestant) commonwealth of ‘true’ (pious, ‘plain’ and temperate) Englishmen to be achieved through its exclusion. The centre of the ‘true’ Englishman is dissociated from the male elite at court, perceived as effeminate and of extravagant foreign habits. It is in this context that the four instances of the figure in the Shakespearean canon are discussed. While the first three are shown to resist the turn by which the ‘true’ Englishman becomes a function of normative cultural habits, the fourth, in All’s Well that Ends Well, is shown to be more ambivalent, an ambivalence that may be linked to the political watershed of 1603

This chapter explores Shakespeare’s ‘straing’ linguistic practices through which the drive to homogeneity of cultural reformation ideology is resisted. Illustrated by a family of figures these practices traverse proper and proprietorial boundaries, tending to the production of ‘our English’ as a mobile, expanding and inclusive ‘gallimaufry’. They also carry emancipatory as well as empowering implications, which are highlighted by two discourses with which they are associated. On the one hand, the discourse of ‘manage’ (horsemanship) is turned to advocate an emancipatory poetics of ‘straying’. On the other hand, verbal ‘straying’ is associated with the biblical genre of ‘the parable’, specifically the parables referenced in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The chapter closes with an analysis of this play, which aligns Shakespearean comedy as well as his ‘straying’ linguistic practices with ‘the parable’, and in particular with the liberating, inexhaustible debt-gift economy of the plot of redemption illustrated by the referenced parables. In relation to this economy the ‘charism’ of the figures of Holofernes and Falstaff and of the author that shadows them is considered in conclusion.

If there is a god who might challenge Cupid’s place as the presiding deity of Love’s Labour’s Lost it has to be Mercury. Obsessed with the use, and abuse of words, the play closes with the gnomic utterance, ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’ (5.2.914–15), which, as they appear in the Folio, may be taken proleptically to refer to the announcement of separation which follows: ‘You that way, we this way’ (line 915). The utterance has attracted a diversity of interpretations, predictably given its enigmatic and sentential character, but there is a more or less general consensus that Mercury and his harsh words represent some form of reality principle which breaks up the Arcadian fantasy world of (the) play, and which is embodied in the figure of Marcade, the messenger who brings the news of the death of the princess’s father. Not only does Marcade correspond to contemporary versions of the god’s name, as several critics have pointed out, but his function corresponds to Mercury’s functions as messenger and psychopomp. There is, however, a more prominent figure that the play invites spectators to associate with Mercury. Linked to Marcade by his dramatic function as well as by his office – he is sometimes grouped with Marcade in the ‘persons of the play’ – ‘honey- tongued’ (5.2.335) Boyet, the only major male figure at the princess’s court, is associated with ‘sweet tong’d’ Mercury both through more general features and, more importantly, through the specific features attributed to him in the two portraits by Berowne, especially the first (5.2.316–35).

Picked out in bold type here is a piece or ‘bit’ of word-play in Shakespeare’s erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis, which has not been noticed, or at least not recorded, and which has ramifications far and beyond its immediate context which I shall explore in what follows. Briefly, it consists in a verbal mimesis of the violence done by the horse to its ‘iron bit’, an image which thus acquires an emblematic metatextual significance as well as inter- and extra- textual significances. More precisely, the formation of ‘tween’ from between – a formation exemplary of poetic linguistic licence, as I shall indicate – is reactivated by a virtual homophone of the elided syllable or ‘bit’ before the verbal phrase ‘he crusheth. Releasing the polyvalency of the word bit this evokes at the same time its relation to the word bite, from which it is formed (again by elision), together with the relation of both to the body’s organs of articulation (‘tween his teeth’). Evoking these relations this bit of word-play makes them new, illustrating a poetics of recreative licence, a stepping out from narrative and syntactic linearity in a discursive equivalent to the intemperance of holiday, which, breaking with common or ordinary discourse, liberates and regenerates desire in a pleasurable re-creation of relations, especially of the word to the body.