Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Abbreviations and conventions
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 ‘When the world woxe old, it woxe warre olde’: History, etymology and national identity, 1066–1337
- 2 ‘To destroy and ruin the whole English nation and language’: The chronicles of the Hundred Years War
- 3 ‘God gyue you quadenramp!’ Mimetic language in the war poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
- 4 ‘The brightnesse of braue and glorious words’: Language and war in the sixteenth century
- 5 ‘Talk not of France, sith thou hast lost it all’: The Hundred Years War on the stage in the 1590s
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
5 - ‘Talk not of France, sith thou hast lost it all’: The Hundred Years War on the stage in the 1590s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Abbreviations and conventions
- Timeline
- Introduction
- 1 ‘When the world woxe old, it woxe warre olde’: History, etymology and national identity, 1066–1337
- 2 ‘To destroy and ruin the whole English nation and language’: The chronicles of the Hundred Years War
- 3 ‘God gyue you quadenramp!’ Mimetic language in the war poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
- 4 ‘The brightnesse of braue and glorious words’: Language and war in the sixteenth century
- 5 ‘Talk not of France, sith thou hast lost it all’: The Hundred Years War on the stage in the 1590s
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
Therefore, you clown, abandon – which is in the vulgar leave – the society – which in the boorish is company – of this female – which in the common is woman; which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown, thou perishest; or to thy better understanding, diest; or (to wit) I will kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado, or in steel; I will bandy with thee in fiction, I will o'rrun thee with [policy]; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways: therefore tremble and depart.
Touchstone's verbal battery of William in As You Like It rests upon pugnacious hierarchies of synonymia. His tirade is both threat and execution: a lexical copiousness that overruns his addressee, whose ‘better understanding’ is bamboozled by his accelerating rhetoric. In the multiplied image of ‘poison … bastinado … steel’, the real weapons are the words that signify them. The threat is that Touchstone will translate William to death, not that he will actually harm him. ‘Poison’ and ‘bastinado’ are not needed when words enact their effect. Instead of representing realities through language, Touchstone's inverted dramaturgy transposes realities into words. ‘I will bandy with thee in fiction’ is not just equivalent to ‘I will kill thee’: it replaces it. Signifier and signified are elided: language becomes the site of violence, as the real violence fades into metaphor, a shadowy guarantor of the verbal signifier.
Touchstone's rhetoric was not an abstracted exercise in synonymity: it was a practical instance of how the linguistic registers of English functioned hierarchically and combatively. The process of linguistic mimesis had been an object of scrutiny for chroniclers, poets and language theorists, for whom it had been a more straightforward idea of a verbal imitation, performance or embodiment of an event; but it was especially, indeed endemically, so for dramatists, visible in their terminology of shadow and substance to describe the actor and the original.
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- Information
- The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337-1600 , pp. 206 - 250Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016