Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare ed. by Michael Saenger (review)

As its title suggests, Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare, edited by Michael Saenger, focuses primarily on linguistics and international culture while offering insight into issues surrounding Shakespeare and performance. Because it is grounded in linguistics, some of aspects of this book are less accessible to readers in theater studies, most notably when authors refer to theories of translation or linguistic change. As this is an edited volume, some authors frame these approaches more clearly than others, and some incorporate more information from Shakespeare and performance studies than others as well. For example, Gary K. Waite’s chapter, “Where Did the Devil Go? Religious Polemic in the Dutch Reformation,” does not mention any of Shakespeare’s plays, though it does focus on Shakespeare’s period.

Saenger suggests in the introduction that the volume “presents cultural history at the beginning and performance studies at the end, with Shakespeare operating as a kind of rich and polysemous bridge” (19–20). This range means that there are things in this book to appeal to a variety of scholars, and uses may be found for these chapters in classes in theater history, performance, translation, linguistics, anthropology, European history, and more. Saenger ties the various chapters together elegantly in well-chosen sections. “Part One: The Meaning of Foreign Languages” discusses what certain kinds of language would have meant for Shakespeare’s audiences. The second (and largest) section, “Difference Within English,” considers the various ways in which Shakespeare used language within his plays, and begins to delve into the question of what that means for performances of Shakespeare today. This more modern theme is continued in the third section, “Shakespeare and Cultural Voice.”

“Part One: The Meaning of Foreign Languages” has a fairly narrow scope, looking first at Love’s Labour’s Lost in “Shakespeare, Navarre, and Continental History” by Elizabeth Pentland, then at Henry IV, Part I in “‘The Lady speaks in Welsh:’ Henry IV, Part I as Multilingual Drama” by Philip Schwyzer. Directors of either of these plays might benefit from these articles, and Schwyzer’s might be appropriate for classroom use because of its accessible language and performance-based approach. Beyond its specific focus on Welsh language and 1 Henry IV, it poses questions about who authored Shakespeare’s works, and the level of collaboration that was involved in their creation. It draws an intriguing picture of theater in Shakespeare’s time, and raises big questions. As Schwyzer observes: “The difficulty posed by the Welsh passages in performance has, I would argue, less to do with the fact that many of us do not understand them, and more with the challenge they pose to the notion that Shakespeare’s works are the natural birthright and property of English speakers” (57).

The middle section is the largest, and presents many interesting issues related to Shakespeare’s language, both when it was written, and as we encounter it today. “Part Two: Difference in English” starts out with two articles that describe Shakespeare’s ways of introducing new and foreign words to his diverse audiences. This is described in “Loving and Cherishing ‘True English’: Shakespeare’s Twinomials” by Scott Newstok and “Shakespeare’s Coining of Words” by Robert N. Watson. Both of these chapters give interesting information about Shakespeare’s language and reveal new things about English; they could even be accessible to undergraduates. Both, however, are fairly heavily laden with examples, which can make them difficult to get through for those not already familiar with Shakespeare’s canon. The final chapter in this section, “Introducing ‘Intrelin-guistics’: Shakespeare and Early/Modern English” by Paula Blank may be the most helpful one in the book when it comes to the intersection of linguistics and performance studies. Blank starts out with the question “are Shakespeare’s poems and plays written in English?” (138), then goes on to explore the differences between Shakespeare’s language and the language of today. Blank claims that the differences between these two Englishes are revealing in terms...