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  • "Speak It in Welsh": Wales and the Welsh Language in Shakespeare
  • Lisa Hopkins (bio)
"Speak It in Welsh": Wales and the Welsh Language in Shakespeare. By Megan S. Lloyd. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Pp. xv + 209. $60.00 cloth.

Megan S. Lloyd's "Speak It in Welsh" looks at the depiction of Welsh characters and Welshness in Shakespeare and considers the issues these depictions may address. Inevitably, it focuses mainly on the Henriad (oddly, the first two chapters refer variously to Henry IV, Part I and to 1 Henry IV); as Lloyd herself observes, "Lady Mortimer is featured in chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7" (xiv). Attention is also paid to The Merry Wives of Windsor and Cymbeline; on the latter play, Lloyd is interesting on England rather than Wales as the place where meaning must be made, although it is odd not to mention the significance of the names Polydore and Innogen (indeed, she refers to the heroine simply as "Imogen" and does not mention the crux). She also looks at Welsh plays by some other dramatists, mainly Patient Grissil and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, but she misses The Welsh Embassador.

There is an attractive clarity of purpose here, but the representation of Welsh settings in Renaissance drama is no longer a neglected topic, and while she does acknowledge the scholarship of others, she does not really advance it. Her useful introduction lacks the sophistication of, for instance, Willy Maley's and Terence Hawkes's work on the subject. Lloyd announces as her aim the hope that "by examining the voices from this small, potentially insignificant country, we may learn what it means to be Welsh in Shakespeare's England" (xiv); Maley, Hawkes, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Philip Schwyzer, Huw Griffiths, Garrett Sullivan, and the others [End Page 216] who have written on this subject have much more ambitious projects and consider far more wide-reaching issues, in which Lloyd seems simply not to be interested. She does note in passing that "the eruption of such foreign language also contested the very creation of Great Britain" (13), but she never pursues this; similarly, she is potentially interesting on how the use of Welsh on stage might relate to the attempt to establish English as a suitable language for literature (40), but again she simply drops the topic. Finally, although she adduces the potentially useful frame-work of seeing Fluellen and Hugh Evans as assimilated Welshmen, her approach plunges her straight into the trap of treating them as if they were real people.

The book also suffers from not being well written. There are several instances of clotted or faulty syntax; there is an odd insistence on using an apostrophe in the plural form of names, such as "the Percy's" (53) and "many Llywelyn's" (72); there are slips, such as "mask" for "masque" (81, 83), "the Welsh fair no better" (114), "lays spellbound" for "lies" (63), and "Terrance" Hawkes for "Terence" (13). There are oddities such as "the Third earl of Worcester" (23) or "Taphydom" (xi), when the usual spelling is "Taffy." Lloyd appears to believe in the historical authenticity of the Welsh prince Madog, who we are told "traveled west and landed at Mobile Bay in 1169" (78), but who when last I looked was generally considered to be a personage from legend rather than history.

The section of the discussion I found most illuminating was her comments on Henry V's use of the words "break" and "broken" in his dealings with Katherine. Lloyd is informative on the bardic system, and there is also some useful new material about the law in Wales and about the learning of the language by the English and others, although there is a confusion of periods in the use of this evidence. However, while stronger than some other commentators on actual historical detail, she is both less penetrating and less persuasive in her use of it, being stronger on patriotism than on analysis. She is also driven to indulge in some fairly wild and rather pointless speculation about whether Glendower does or doesn't translate his daughter accurately, and if her analyses are sometimes ingenious, they...

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