Language Lessons: Linguistic Colonialism, Linguistic Postcolonialism, and the Early Modern English Nation

While I was working on this paper, The Washington Post ran an article on the growth of cultural and linguistic hispanidad in the United States, a movement one of their sources characterized as a reconquista. ¹ The term recalls the Spanish reconquista that culminated in the overthrow of the last great Moorish stronghold of Granada in 1492, the same year that Spanish was first heard in the New World. It has often been remarked that Spain got in shape for its New World expansion by beating the Moors at home. What I would like to suggest in this paper is that a similar process was at work in early modern England. English linguistic nationalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely tied up with a postcolonial/colonializing dynamic, a dynamic in which the English came to think of themselves and their language both as having been colonized and as potentially colonizing others. In England, this dynamic was largely notional—a matter of stories the English told themselves about their past and future rather than of actual experience comparable to the Moorish occupation of Spain or the Spanish conquest of large stretches of the New World. But that notional quality makes the English example all the more significant. The pattern itself—a pattern both dependent on and productive of national consolidation—summoned forth stories to fit its demands, stories that were then turned into actions. And because Shakespeare remains the preeminent storyteller of early modern England, someone whose stories not only reached large and receptive audiences in his own time but have also continued to shape English national self-consciousness ever since, I will begin and end with him.

I

In the last few years of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare and his company staged two language lessons. These lessons belong to different plays. But taken together they provide a suggestive first intimation of the postcolonial/colonizing dynamic I wish to explore. The best known of the two occurs in Henry V, where the French princess Katherine, anticipating King Henry’s victory over her father’s armies, decides she had better learn English. The other takes place in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the only comedy Shakespeare set in England. Here the Welsh parson Hugh Evans has Will Page, one of the Windsor boys, recite his Latin accidence. Both lessons end in bawdy bilingual puns, and both plays are much more broadly concerned with language than these lessons would alone suggest—points to which I will return. But what initially seems most worth remarking is that while Shakespeare imagines English triumphant abroad, he also remembers the place that an ancient imperial language retains at home. The would-be conquerors were once among the conquered, and they still learn the long-departed conqueror’s language as a prerequisite for domestic status and influence.

This double sense of English—an expansionist ambition combined with recognition of linguistic subordination—was widespread in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Consider, for example, Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus, a poem published in 1599, the same year Henry V was staged. Musophilus leads to a hopeful vision of English as a major export commodity. “And who in time,” asks Daniel,

knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T’ enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with the accents that are ours? ²

Reading these lines four hundred years later in the United States, an English-speaking country that fills a large part of the then “unformed Occident,” we can hardly help regarding Daniel’s vision as wonderfully prophetic. After all, it points right to us.

But when Daniel wrote, little supported the prophecy. A full century and more after Columbus’s discovery, the English controlled nothing of the “unformed Occident,” much of which was being busily formed by the all-conquering Spanish. English colonies in Newfoundland and Virginia had failed miserably, and Guiana remained only a glittering dream. Nor were the English faring well...