The deceit of language in Shakespeare's plays

Arianna CAPIROSSI M2 Cultures Littéraires Européennes Discipline : Littérature (M. le Prof. Laurent CURELLY) The deceit of language in Shakespeare’s plays Mastering words: not a matter of studies or social class In Shakespeare’s plays, each character uses a different kind of language. In particular, the characters use a language with different levels of meaning, which can be literal or figurative. The ability to build a speech with more levels of meaning does not depend on the studies or on the social class; it depends on their individual talent, which we can call “wit”. A witty person is a person who holds the secret of language and can dominate it and its multiple meanings. A simple mind cannot go beyond the first level of meaning of a speech; therefore, he is more likely to become a victim of the deceits of language and to be deceived by the form of the speech. The witty character: the jester A typical example of a witty character is the jester. A jester is an individual of humble origin who makes a profession out of his ability to play with the meanings of language. A jester exists in every court depicted by Shakespeare. He is the one who can make the court (and also the audience of the theatre) laugh, thanks to his mockeries, tricks and puns. Sometimes, thanks to his free speaking, he reveals some truths, but he is rarely taken seriously as he is commonly considered as a fool. For example, in Love’s Labour’s Lost we find the character of Costard, who is a clown. He helps to enrich the amount of sexual puns in the dialogues between men and women, making explicit the attraction existing between them (4.1.127): Indeed, ‘a must shoot nearer, or he’ll ne’er hit the clout. Here, “clout” is not only the center of the target, but is also the female sexual organ. He is talking about Boyet, who here plays the role not only of a “shooter”, but also of a “suitor” (besides, the two words have a similar pronunciation!), and the woman is his prey. Jests are the greatest pleasure for Costard (4.1.135-136): O’ my troth, most sweet jests, most incony vulgar wit, When it comes so smoothly off, so obscenely, as it were, so fit. 1 Arianna CAPIROSSI M2 Cultures Littéraires Européennes Discipline : Littérature (M. le Prof. Laurent CURELLY) The puns are not only sexual. Sexual puns are particularly used in comedies which stage love affairs, alluding to the double attraction, both mental and physical, existing between the lovers. Whereas, in a political tragedy like Julius Caesar, there is a different kind of pun, always playing on homophonic words and double meanings of expressions. Here, there is not a real jester, but a plebeian acting like a jester, and speaking to the tribunes (1.1.13-14): COBBLER A trade, sir, that I hope I may use with a safe conscience, which is indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles. The word “soles” has a pronunciation similar to “souls”: the cobbler is insinuating that the souls of the tribunes may need repair, as they verbally attacked him without any good reason. He cannot risk offending them explicitly, so he does it by puns. The pun continues in line 16: Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me; yet if you be out, sir, I can mend you. The expression “to be out” is used in the double meaning of “getting angry” and “to be out of the heels”, which literally brings us back to the cobbler’s shop. The surface of words 1 (eloquence and erudition do not always come together) Nevertheless, if also a cobbler can possess wit, what can a literate man do with words? We might expect the wonders and prodigies of poetry. On the contrary, we can see that the true effects can be boredom and difficult comprehension (Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.2.3): The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood, ripe as the pome water, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelum, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth. In summary, a self-praising discourse about how many synonyms of “sky” and “soil” he can enumerate. Holofernes, the pedant who makes this speech in the play, is just incapable of deepening the levels of meaning; all his words are scattered on the surface of things. He has the only skill of calling the same thing with different words, without conveying any interesting message. All his words are completely empty. On the contrary, the talent of the witty person lies in the ability to convey several meanings in the same expression or word, in order to make 2 Arianna CAPIROSSI M2 Cultures Littéraires Européennes Discipline : Littérature (M. le Prof. Laurent CURELLY) fun of other characters and to entertain the audience. Because of his failure in communication, Holofernes appears as a comic character, although he is completely unaware of it. Depicting the character of Holofernes, Shakespeare wants to ridicule the grammar and rhetoric school where he himself had to go when he was young. This character is probably a parody of the way of speaking of one of the learned scholars the bard was taught by at school. This is the typical style of people who lack competence in communication, and use a register which is inappropriate for each situation. For example, Holofernes goes on using Latin words while he is talking to Dull, a constable, who cannot understand anything; but in this way, the comic effect of the misunderstanding is ensured (4.2.12-18): HOLOFERNES Most barbarous intimation! yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather, unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion, to insert again my haud credo for a deer. DULL I said the deer was not a haud credo; twas a pricket. Dull mishears the Latin words “haud credo”, understanding “an old grey doe”, so the misunderstanding about the animals goes on… However, in this case, the play on words is a superficial play, based only on the form and not on the meaning. In particular, we can notice the exaggerated and annoying homoteleutons “-ation” and “-ed” and the stodgy alliteration “un”. Holofernes in his expression always manages to make a simple concept exhausting. The surface of words 2 (the danger of a dull crowd) Also in the tragedy Julius Caesar we find a scene where a group of people cannot go beyond the form of a word, as, for them, the name defines the essence of a person (they do not know that language is arbitrary!). It is the scene of the death of Cinna the poet (3.3.25-34): CINNA. Truly, my name is Cinna. FIRST CITIZEN. Tear him to pieces, he's a conspirator. CINNA. I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet. FOURTH CITIZEN. Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses. 3 Arianna CAPIROSSI M2 Cultures Littéraires Européennes Discipline : Littérature (M. le Prof. Laurent CURELLY) CINNA. I am not Cinna the conspirator. FOURTH CITIZEN. It is no matter, his name's Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going. Here Shakespeare wants to condemn the mindless violence of the crowd. They are satisfied with the sound of the words, and it does not matter if it may convey a misunderstanding. Hence, this is another example of lack of communication, which condemns Cinna to death. The crowd finds the evil also in the words, and, in this case, the name “Cinna” represents the evil to be eradicated: “Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going”. This is the cruel deceit of words. It can mislead simple people like the plebeians in Julius Caesar: their anger transform them into furious monsters. This deafness, opposed to the listening of the truth, represents symbolically the unconscious submission of the masses to power. Power takes shape in the gravity of the rhetorical discourses of politicians like Brutus or Antony. They do not understand, they are impressed only by the form, by the sound, finally by the appearance of words, by the gestures or by the attitude of the orator. It is interesting to consider that, for Shakespeare, a commoner can possess wit and the ability to manipulate words, but not a whole crowd of commoners. Wits are a precious talent which is part of the personality of an individual (who becomes an agent of truth), but cannot belong either to a monster with infinite heads like a crowd of people1, or to a pedant like Holofernes. The surface of words 3 (an attempt to mess up language) I would like to show a passage in which the rhetorical techniques are used voluntarily to inhibit communication. This is a use made by Costard, trying to avoid the accusation of having an affair with Jaquenetta (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.1.195-203): COSTARD The matter is to me, sir, as concerning Jaquenetta. The manner of it is, I was taken with the manner. BIRON In what manner? COSTARD In manner and form following, sir; all those three: I was seen with her in the manor-house, sitting with her upon the form, and taken following her into the park; which, put together, is in manner and form 1 Crowds were perceived as potentially dangerous in early modern England. 4 Arianna CAPIROSSI M2 Cultures Littéraires Européennes Discipline : Littérature (M. le Prof. Laurent CURELLY) following. Now, sir, for the manner,--it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman: for the form,-in some form. Costard plays with the paronomasia “matter-manner-manor” and with the traditional legal formula “In manner and form following” in order to bring confusion to the meanings of words. He pretends that the words of the cited formula have to be used literally inside his confession: so, “manner” becomes “manor”, “form” becomes “form” in the sense of “bench” and “following” is used in the sense of “following the girl”. Afterwards, Costard is confronted with the letter of accusation written by the braggart Don Antonio De Armado, whose style of speech is quite similar to Holofernes’s. Don Antonio describes his “crime” through long periphrases, and using many synonyms. For example, he indicates the woman in two ways: “A child of our grandmother Eve, a female” (1.1.246) and “for thy more sweet understanding, a woman” (1.1.247). This play on redundant synonyms is later taken up by Costard in order to escape punishment. The question is always: can you modify the essence of something by changing his name? (“What’s in a name?”, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.47). The answer is obviously no, but we have seen that this is not so evident for people who cannot see the truth (for example, the crowd in Julius Caesar). Therefore, Costard denies having been taken with a “wench”, the word used in the proclamation, because in reality he was taken with a “damsel”. Then, he corrects himself as she was not a “damsel”, but, actually, she was a “virgin”. After that, he is not sure anymore that she was a virgin… so, he prefers calling her “maid”. However, the confusion of synonyms does not deceive the King, who decides anyway to punish Costard. The scene ends with one more pun. As the punishment is “fasting a week with bran and water” (1.1.273-274), Costard declares: “I had rather pray a month with mutton and porridge” (1.1.275), which means, in a figurative meaning, “with a prostitute and a female”, because “mutton” is a slang term for “prostitute” and “porridge” sounds like “partridge”, a bird possibly referring to a female in general. In all these extracts, Shakespeare is examining the real source of poetic ability. In the Tudor era, during the studies of rhetoric, there was a real obsession with the quest for copia or copiousness, which was a constant search for new words, formulas, images in order to better 5 Arianna CAPIROSSI M2 Cultures Littéraires Européennes Discipline : Littérature (M. le Prof. Laurent CURELLY) explain a subject2. In reality, all this effort produced more often an amount of commonplaces that just tore up the effectiveness, the interest and the originality of communication. In conclusion: what is the secret of language? And who keeps this secret? Using only two key words, we can say that the secret of language is polysemy, and surely not synonymy; synonymy remains on the surface of things, while polysemy goes into the depths of meaning. A collector of words, like Holofernes, remains a simple mind, as he cannot master discourse but he keeps on buildings cages of incommunicability around him. A good orator can discern the different levels of meaning and is capable of choosing each time the level more suitable to each situation. Shakespeare wants to disclose that behind the rhetoric techniques must also reside an ability to play with words embodied by the wits of a jester or, on a different level, by an orator like Antony, capable of using images and gestures to touch the audience’s feelings. The effect should always be persuasion, fun or emotion, never boredom. While the pedant of the comedy is too busy to pick words and Latin citations, the politic orator of the tragedy chooses a semantic field in order to build up images. For example, the semantic field of the sacred sacrifice. In Antony’s speech, even the images speak (Julius Caesar, 3.2.214-220): I tell you that which you yourselves do know, Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths, And bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus, And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue In every wound of Caesar that should move The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny. At a time when euphuism became a trend, the bard warns us that not everyone possesses the talent to rule the word, and probably some people should not dare to try to play with words, unless they were born to be comic characters. Ironically, the one who sells himself short3 saying: “For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth / Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech / To stir men’s blood” (Julius Caesar, 3.2.211-213) is the only one who is really able to master rhetoric (Antony). On the contrary, the one who preaches the theory: “Imitari is nothing” 2 Criticism of artificiality is one of the fundaments of Shakespeare’s poetry. See also Erasmus’s theorising of copiousness in his De copia. 3 Although self-debasement serves his own purpose. 6 Arianna CAPIROSSI M2 Cultures Littéraires Européennes Discipline : Littérature (M. le Prof. Laurent CURELLY) (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2.112), who is Holofernes, cannot help but imitate verbatim and stereotypically the classical oratorical style4. Finally, what matters is not knowing many words, but knowing how to use them in the proper way. Only if you know how to do that, can you be considered a good communicator or a good interlocutor. And, finally, only if you are a real bard can you manage to shape a literary masterpiece out of a constellation of puns and poetic images. Bibliography William SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar (1599), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003. William SHAKESPEARE, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-1595), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 4 Invention as opposed to imitation. 7