Multilingualism, Language Trouble, and Linguistic Infelicity in Early Modern English Writing, 1550-1642

Abstract

Early modern intercultural exchange is characterized by the need to find a common language. Depictions of that exchange for an English audience tend to translate that improvised, ad hoc work in ways that downplay the uncertainty and promote the image of the triumphant English traveler or translator. Evidence of these extemporaneous exchanges nonetheless remains visible in early modern writing. In “Multilingualism, Language Trouble, and Linguistic Infelicity in Early Modern English Writing, 1550-1642,” I argue that these linguistic workarounds are linked to writers’ imaginings of their role in international exchange and the formation of an English proto-national identity. This dissertation looks at how “language trouble,” my term for how the possibility of perfect communication goes awry, is depicted in a variety of genres. Chapter 1, “Language as Travail: Language Trouble in Depictions of Early Modern Emissaries,” focuses on emissaries (unofficial ambassadors who cast themselves as advocates for England’s political interests abroad) and the ways their accounts erase the possibility of failure in multilingual communication. By comparing letters, published first-person accounts, and staged depictions of historical events, I examine how the complications of documented situations were packaged for an English public’s consumption. I argue that fictional accounts (such as If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody and The Travels of the Three English Brothers) present a fantasy of perfect communication in which English Protestant interests triumph; published narratives and private communication, instead, work to diminish the possibility of miscommunication. Chapter 2, “Language as Workaround: Multilingualism in Travel Narratives,” examines prose narratives of “merchant venturers”: traders, captains, sailors, and others who participated in transnational mercantile economies. This chapter takes up one genre of text written by many different types of authors to illustrate the variety of potential failures in linguistic workarounds, both those experienced and those avoided, with which early modern venturers were preoccupied. No one narrative emerges as the genre’s standard, indicating how situational and contingent these workarounds were. Chapter 3, “Language as Labor: Learning, Language Manuals, and Multilingual Discourse,” turns to multilingual dictionaries and language manuals to more fully address questions of imperfection and sufficiency that previous chapters raise. Early modern dictionary compositors were distinctly aware of the impossibility of creating the perfect dictionary, and developed discourses emphasizing sufficiency to assuage the readers that their product would provide a good enough framework for the level of learning at which it was advertised. Finally, Chapter 4, “Language as Performance: The Pleasures of Failure and the Role of Understanders on the English Stage,” looks at the ways in which linguistic infelicity depicted on the early modern stage indicates social or national boundary-crossing. Plays such as Jonson’s Volpone, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost, and Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside show how the humor to which that linguistic infelicity regularly gave rise demonstrates the limits of social mobility. By examining linguistic infelicity by genre as well as by subject, I argue that there is no one framework by which to examine early modern language trouble: multilingual communication is heterogenous, messy, and resistant to easy categorization.