"Ick verstaw you niet": performing foreign tongues on the early modern English stage.

    Gentlemen, this play of Hieronimo in sundrie Languages, was thought
    Good to be set downe in English more largely, for the easier
    understanding to euery publicque Reader.
    --The Spanish tragedie ... (1592)

IN his Defense of Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney praises English, "our mother tongue," for its vitality in poetry and "in other arts." (1) He goes on to celebrate its malleability, "capable of any excellent exercising of it," and recasts charges of the language's impurity and its lack of formal grammar as virtues, concluding that it surpasses Latin in expressing "the conceits of the mind" and should in fact rank "equally with any other tongue in the world" (119). Sidney may have been trying to imagine his English into prominence; he was not alone in praising the language. As Carla Mazzio recalls, Richard Mulcaster had valorized English's ability to domesticate foreign terms to allow them to be made useful, and as Steven Mullaney notes, Richard Carew had reimagined the apparent shortcomings of English as a mark of its great potential. (2) And yet there were others who worried precisely about the debasing that could accompany this vernacular flexibility and capacity to encompass the barbarous. Spenser's participation in Sidney's project evinces just this anxious defensiveness in lamenting that they did not yet have "the kingdome" or mastery over "oure owne Language." (3) Nevertheless, Sidney persisted, defending his language's voracious ability to "tak[e] the best of both the other" and enrich itself (119). English playwrights might have agreed.

Despite the recognition that, for good or ill, the porous English language was likely to absorb exotic terms and grow larger and stronger, the English themselves were notoriously monolingual. (4) Portia's deriding of her English suitor Falconbridge, who "hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian ... alas who can converse with a dumb show?" embodies this stereotype. (5) The delicious irony of an (perhaps "the") English dramatist creating an Italian character in an Italian setting speaking an English to be understood by an English audience as Italian as she mocks the English for their lack of linguistic facility points to the issue here. For audiences who refused (or were imagined as unable) to genuinely learn a foreign language, could English dramatists in 1600 find a way to present another tongue without turning their stage into an incomprehensible Babel? That playwrights would try to represent linguistic difference--sometimes accurately, sometimes suggestively--demonstrates both the playwrights' and their audiences' appetite for foreignness. London was one of the most important trade centers in Europe; its immigrant population, while comparatively small, did create the likelihood that real Dutch, French, or Spanish might be heard (if not understood) in the public arena: markets, fairs, public houses, theaters. The foreign tongues that non-English characters speak on these stages had to be somewhat comprehensible to English audiences if a play's action was meant to be understood by the paying customers, and the fact that playgoers could make even rudimentary sense of dramatized foreigners would testify to England's significance as a cosmopolitan trade center. And while the English are traditionally derided for their lack of skill with other languages, these strange dialects were a mark of England's prominence in the mercantile arena of early modern Europe. Rehearsing exotic tongues, even if they were not entirely understood, signaled the emergence of England and cosmopolitan London on the metaphorical stage of European events. (6)

Despite anxieties about Englishmen's ability to learn foreign languages, and the fact that an audience of the middling sort was even less likely to have reached the sophistication of a linguist like Sidney, popular playwrights in Elizabethan London persisted in commodifying other languages and bringing them before a broad audience, often for the effect of "jest[ing] at strangers because they speak no English so well as we do" that Sidney had lamented (116). Putting aside the ambivalent xenophobia and nationalist aspects of such rehearsals--the recognizing and cataloging of the strangeness of their Continental neighbors' language and customs--the practical question of the staging of foreign tongues remains. If a character spoke "stage" Welsh, or Dutch, or Latin, how might this exotic language be accommodated to a popular audience, most of whom would not speak the language being staged? Did the playwrights expect audiences to accept a series of incomprehensible sounds that may or may not have been a genuine language as "foreign" or were there ways such languages could be staged that would still signify to this notoriously monolingual audience? Attending to staging clues in several early modern plays, we may discern how playwrights could bring commodified foreign tongues onstage for their audiences' consumption. Several well-known instances of linguistic confusion illustrate three strategies for marking linguistic difference; a survey of the staging of Dutch figures shows how these strategies might have worked in practice.

Responding to the Challenge of Foreign Languages

The linguistic melange of the late Elizabethan stage might take as its most emblematic moment the playlet in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. With the plot of the tragedy of Soliman and Perseda in hand, the vengeful Hieronimo persuades Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Bel-imperia to join with him in "act[ing] his part / In unknown languages": Latin, Greek, Italian, and French (4.1.173-74). (7) The anonymous note (the epigraph for this essay) that interrupts the printed text of The Spanish Tragedy to explain that the printer has translated the play-within from sundry languages into English raises the difficult question of whether the actors actually performed in four exotic languages--two of them scholarly--in addition to English, and if they did so, how they staged the playlet for a public audience, most of whom would not have known Italian or French, let alone Latin or Greek. The note asserts a polyglot performance and a concession to a less linguistically able readership. It makes no mention of how "euery publicque spectator"--if they were not polymaths--might have responded to such a play-within-the-play. Placing too much emphasis on the note's veracity, however, obscures evidence elsewhere in the text that a multilingual performance of the play would have been unnecessary and unlikely.

In one scenario, the actors in the playlet actually speak their parts in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. (8) In such a situation, Kyd does not leave his audience completely in the dark. While casting the playlet, Hieronimo provides Kyd's audience with the basic argument of the plot as he explains the story to the actors, Balthazar and Lorenzo, in extensive detail: "The chronicles of Spain / Record this written of a knight of Rhodes ..." (4.1.108ff.). Hieronimo's royal audience in 4.4, characters who clearly do not understand the words spoken by their children, have the argument before them, and comment briefly on the action during the performance, reinforcing the audience's understanding of the plot. The Spanish King hands the argument to the Portuguese Viceroy at the play's outset, making him "the book-keeper" and informing him that it contains "the argument of that they show" (4.4.9-10). As the action proceeds, the royal spectators help each other understand what they are watching. Following Balthazar's first speech (perhaps in Latin) the King helpfully tells his Portuguese counterpart, "See, Viceroy, that is Balthazar, your son, / That represents the emperour Soliman" (4.4.19-20) and later when Lorenzo enters as Erasto, the King inquires, "Here comes Lorenzo; look upon the plot / And tell me, brother, what part plays he?" (4.4.33-34). As the murders and suicide of the playlet proceed, the action, if not the words, of Soliman and Perseda can be understood by both the royal audience within The Spanish Tragedy and the paying audience in the Rose's yard. It can be understood in much the same way as the previous use of dumb show in the play. (9) So, in the first possibility for this linguistically confused playlet, an audience might productively be alienated by hearing a confused assembly of four foreign languages, (10) but the playlet is so brief and the plot so simple, with its argument presented twice--once before and once during the interior performance in lieu of translation--and complemented by action, as in the play's earlier dumb shows, that Kyd's English audience could have comprehended it.

In the more likely possibility, maugre the printed prefatory note, Lorenzo, Balthazar, and the rest of the playlet's actors perform their parts in English, and Kyd uses theatrical conventions to establish which characters can understand what others speak onstage, without requiring a learned audience beyond the stage's edge. After all, The Spanish Tragedy is set in Spain, yet Kyd's English audience at the Rose miraculously understands each word spoken by the Iberian characters in the first three and a half acts of the play. Why couldn't Soliman and Perseda also be performed in English, with Kyd's audience understanding every bit of it, while Hieronimo's onstage royal audience, with their signs of lacking comprehension, (11) are imagined to be hearing Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, miraculously translated (like their Spanish and Portuguese) into an English only the paying audience can understand? The tragedy, then, offers two possibilities: either that something approaching genuinely foreign languages appeared onstage, or that English could be understood as "foreign" through establishing the conventions of linguistic difference in the staging itself. Although Sheldon Zitner concludes that "we cannot decide these questions of theater history" (89), the careful reading of plays like The Spanish Tragedy can at least lead us to two of the strategies available to Elizabethan playwrights who wanted to exhibit exotic cultures and strange tongues on their stage.

The second solution to the dramatic presentation of languages--of asserting that English stood in for a foreign tongue--works when the printer claims to have translated foreign speech into English. What happens when the printed play contains genuinely foreign matter, as in Shakespeare's Henry V (1599)? Take, for instance, the "language lesson" between Katherine and Alice. (12) Printed texts of Henry V suggest that some French was spoken in performance; the printer captures something approaching phonetic French. In Q1 the princess asks her attendant to teach her how to name the parts of the body in English, beginning "Coman sae palla vou 1a main en francoy" (C3r). (13) Despite this interesting confusion--why ask how to name "le main" in "francoy" instead of in "Anglois" as happens in F1 (14)--the more important issue from a staging perspective is the fact that Shakespeare brings something resembling real French to his new stage at the Globe. Did his audience speak French? Did they turn to others in the audience to ask, "What was that?" And if not, how would they have understood this scene (while so many of our students are left in confusion by the printed text)? The answer, it seems, is that for the benefit of the majority of Shakespeare's audience, who knew no French, the performance of the scene itself leads the audience to comprehension. If a princess holds forth her hand for all the audience to see and asks, "Coman sae palla vou la main en francoy," and her respondent, adding an "accented" English word at the end of a French sentence, replies "La main madam de han" (C3v), and then follows the rest of the language lesson by wiggling her fingers, bending her elbow, or pointing to her chin (with as much royal dignity as possible in this comic scene), it is reasonable to assume that the language lesson works not only for a French princess but also for a notoriously thick English audience. The "coarse physicality" of this scene, as Helen Ostovich observes, certainly resonates with thematic aspects of nationalist conquest in the play. (15) But this "coarse physicality" may also be literalized in the body standing on the stage and gesturing to hands, limbs, and neck. (16) The staging of a genuinely foreign language, at least when accompanied by corporeal gestures, is perhaps not impenetrable. (17)

Shakespeare offers other strategies for performing foreign tongues throughout the Henriad. The scene that immediately follows Katherine's language lesson, for instance, also involves French characters, but they use a limited quantity of genuine French. The scene's complex mixture of coarse and abstract subjects cannot be presented in French accompanied by gestures in a way that an English audience would readily understand. The Constable's frustration and surprise, "whence haue they this mettall? / Is not their clymate raw, foggy and colde. / On whom, as in disdaine, the Sunne lookes pale?" (C4r), would not make sense, even with gestures, if presented in French. Instead, the only genuine French in this scene is contained in the handful of angry oaths the French peers utter. If these few phrases surpass the English audience's literal understanding, their brevity and inflection would allow them to convey the sense of French frustration, and would thus serve their purpose. Following hard upon the extended scene of French in the language lesson, the scene might have the aura of French in performance without requiring real French. When Shakespeare makes more extensive use of French in later scenes, he does so in the context of bilingual characters who can translate for other English speakers, both those onstage and those in the Globe's audience. This technique had been adequate earlier in the Henriad, when the monolingual Mortimer married the Welsh daughter of Glen-dower and had to admit to his coconspirators, "My wife can speak no English, I no Welsh," but could fortunately understand some of her "looks" and could rely on his father-in-law to gloss her more complex speeches. (18) In Henry V, such scenes present the opportunity for further comedy, as when Pistol mistakes the language of his French prisoner and requires the boy to translate for him. With an effective translator in the scene, Shakespeare can give Le Fer several substantial speeches in French and allow the boy's faithful translations for Pistol--"He saies ..."--to translate for the audience as well. After one such sustained speech, the boy's translation builds to the climax "He will giue you 500 crownes," with the scene culminating in Pistol's comic "My fury shall abate" (E3v). Q1 also includes the satisfying measure of Katherine's progress in English as she translates Henry's broken French, phrase by phrase in the play's final scene, in lines typically lacking in modern editions based on F1.

Between the extremes of a foreign language that is merely imagined as foreign while performed in English on the one hand, and genuine foreign speech on the other, a third strategy for staging a foreign tongue remains. English can be made to suggest the foreign through "patois"--English spiced with sounds or small portions of a foreign language--offering the third, more common possibility for marking language or speakers as foreign while not entirely obscuring the meaning. In Henry V, we find a nice counterpoint to the linguistic Babel of the Spanish Tragedy in the much-remarked scene of the British captains, Gower, Fluellen, Jamy, and MacMorris. Here the Fl scene--in which the printed speech prefixes signal the national identities of the characters (Welsh, Scot, Irish) rather than their names (19)--gives aural signals of cultural difference between them. Thus the overbearing Welsh captain, Fluellen, speaks with ps for bs, and Ch- for J- ("by Chesu," he swears) while his Scots counterpart, Jamy, uses vowels that phonetically mark his difference ("vary gud, gud ... gud Captens bath") and his Irish fellow slurs the ends of words, perhaps suggesting a stereotyped drunkenness ("so Chrish save me," he swears and reminds them that the "Town is beseech'd"). Such signals of dialect may serve merely to differentiate characters, to give a sense of individuality perhaps, though of course there is some humor made of linguistic difference in a later scene over Fluellen's discourse on "Alexander the pig." For the most part, however, it is this final strategy or convention--creating characters who speak an adulterated English, marked by aural markers of difference and an occasional, contextualized foreign word--that marks foreigners on the stage in 1600.

Dutchmen Onstage, English Facility

Because the Dutch signify multivalently on the English stage--the English had a vexed relationship with their Dutch coreligionists and trade rivals--they provide a useful case study for observing how these strategies for staging linguistic foreignness might work. Each of the strategies discussed so far makes an appearance in plays staged in the decade around the turn of the century, though the simple strategy of marking difference through slight changes in consonants in regular English constructions predominates. For instance, William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1598) portrays three foreign and three English suitors wooing three half-English ladies. Though their Portuguese father would have them marry the wealthy foreign merchants who pursue them, the willful women mock and deride these aliens, especially for their lack of linguistic facility: "If needes you marry with an English Lasse, / Woe her in English or sheele call you Asse." (20) The Dutch merchant, Vandalle, comes in for the worst treatment of the three foreign suitors, just as the Dutch language comes in for extended abuse in the play. Told that he will recognize a man's ability to speak Dutch if he can say something like "Haunce butterkin slowpin," Pisaro's servant replies that he too "can speake perfect Dutch" if he can "have my mouth full of Meate first, and then you shall heare me grumble it foorth full mouth, as Haunce Butterkin slowpin frokin" (183, 186-88). The language of the Dutchman is derided for its associations with gluttony and appetite. This instance of "speaking" is purposely marked as linguistic nonsense; it is the "sound" of Dutch grunting that is required here. (21)

English facility is the means of influencing these English maidens, and Vandalle laments his immanent failure--"if dat ick can neite dese Englese spreake vel" (1153)--in language that marks his linguistic difference, if not his incomprehensibility. The markers of linguistic difference--mostly the substitution of consonants such as d for th and the use of foreign words such as "neite" or "spreake" with close English cognates ("not" or "speak")--are blunt and obvious, but would have little effect of veiling the meaning behind these characters' words. When the pressure is on and Vandalle fails to sustain coherent English, reverting to a mixture of English and Dutch--"de loue tol v be so groot, dat het bring me out of my bed voor you" (1717-18)--he reveals his identity to the daughters through linguistic difference; they declare "we know the Asse by his eares; it is the Dutchman" (1719-20). Vandalle's stage Dutch, even at the moment when it is supposed to be most different, registers as a recognizable English. Haughton stages a London populated by scheming, linguistically unskilled foreigners whose anti-English plans are foiled. Nevertheless, his staging of foreignness in the Dutch Vandalle and his companions requires very little from the audience; they must merely mark the patois or the accent and associate it with the mercantile Dutchman.

Something approaching genuine Dutch makes its way to the Fortune in Thomas Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's (1611), but competing onstage translators accommodate this foreign tongue to comic effect. (22) Sir Oliver Twilight comes to suspect that Philip, his son, and Savorwit, his servant, have duped him when a Dutch merchant arrives with news that Sir Oliver's wife, whom Philip has convinced him is dead, is languishing in the Low Countries lamenting his neglect. Moreover, the merchant reports, Grace is not Oliver's long-lost daughter, but is instead a tavern wench. Having reported this in plain English, the Dutch merchant leaves his son, who can "speak no English, [but] all Dutch," while he attends to business in London. (23) Determined to learn the truth of these allegations, Sir Oliver confronts his unreliable servant, who feigns offense at the accusations. Claiming to speak Dutch, Savorwit interrogates the merchant's son in a series of nonsensical exchanges. Since Sir Oliver cannot speak Dutch, Savorwit "translates" the exchanges to his advantage. Savorwit's "Dutch" is gibberish: "Hoyste kaloiste, kalooskin ee vou, dar sune, alla gaskin" (1.3.143). The boy's responses reflect his confusion, though the audience may not have understood them: "Ick wet neat watt hey zacht; Ick unverston ewe neat" [I know not what thou sayest; I do not understand you] (1.3.144). Since Oliver lacks comprehension as well, Savorwit is free to translate as he sees fit. He claims that the boy has informed him that the merchant is a lunatic who "talks like a madman" (1.3.147). Savorwit proceeds to fabricate "translations" that might clear him and Philip of suspicion. The skeptical Oliver, though, cannot believe that one brief phrase, "Nimd aweigh de cack," can mean "his father came from making merry with certain of his countrymen and he's a little steep'd in English beer," as Savorwit claims, when "I heard him speak but three words" (1.3.178, 181-83, 185-86). Though Savorwit tries to persuade his master that "Dutch is a very wide language. You shall have ten English words for one," he does not press his luck and makes a hasty retreat (1.3.187-88). The Dutch merchant's return allows Sir Oliver to learn the truth of what the Dutch boy has said, as he repeats the questions he posed with Savorwit's "help" and learns the trick his servant has been playing. As in the scene of Pistol and the Boy's exchange with Le Fer, the use of an onstage translator adds to the scene's comic effect, but the competing translations of a genuine speaker of the language and one whom the audience knows is improvising to save his skin add a further layer of linguistic play to Middleton's staging of Dutch.

John Marston wrote The Dutch Courtesan (1605) for the children's company at the Blackfriars. The Dutch figure of Marston's title, the inaptly named Franceschina, muddles an Italianate name and manners with a sometimes unintelligible garble of Germanic expressions. (24) Despite this accomplished courtesan's social refinements, she speaks an unpleasing, guttural language, an English with harder consonants inserted to mark her foreign-ness. In her first appearance on the Blackfriars stage, for example, Frances-china speaks recognizable English, marred by harsher consonants, and mixed with one foreign term: "O mine arderliuer love, vat sall me do to requit dis your mush affection." (25) Though the coterie English audience might not know the Dutch word "arderliver," they might be able to guess from context that it means, "dearest" and modifies "love"; even if they missed this, their comprehension of the line is not seriously compromised. The rest of her lines here are similarly recognizable; spoken with some sort of an accent and occasionally inverted syntax, they would not likely confuse the audience. So, lines such as "A mine art, Sir you bin very velcome" (B2r; 86) and her ardent "Vill not you stay in mine bosome to night love?" (B2v; 109) would not give the English audience too much pause. In fact, her parting lines in this scene might seem to drop all pretense of foreignness: "Rest to mine deare loue, rest, and no long absence" (B3r; 125). The initial signals of "Dutchness" are fairly transparent in Marston's comedy. The fact that Franceschina has no scenes in which she speaks more than a few Dutch words also helps.

In fact, in the crucial scene in which Franceschina ensnares Malheureux to help her injure Freevill, who has just cast her off, and Beatrice his more acceptable, English beloved, the artifice of the courtesan's foreign language drops almost completely away. Responding to Malheureux's inappropriate effort to take up the cast-off woman in her grief, Franceschina coyly asks, "doe you take mee to be a beast, a creature that for sense onely will entertaine loue, and not, onely for loue, loue? O brutish abhomination!" (C4r; 2.2.130). Nothing in the printed version of this speech marks it as foreign--no foreign words are imported, and not even simple changes of consonants or vowels creep in to mark Franceschina's "Dutch" accent. On the one hand, this might signal that Malheureux knows exactly what he is getting himself into. On the other, it might also be a concession to the audience, to ensure that they know precisely what Franceschina asks Freevill to do. Yet another possibility is that the linguistic signs of foreign speech are so slight that the playwright or the printer neglected to mark these occasional signals. Once the courtesan's plot begins, the casual mix of unaccented English and lightly marked patois again returns as Franceschina exits declaring "Now does my harte swell high, for my reuenge / Has birth and form, first friend sall kill his friend, / He dat suruiues, ile hang; besides de / Chast Beatrice ile vexe" (D1r; 2.2.205-8). As "Dutch" markers return to her speech--the return of hard s for sh and d for th--the audience does not lose any sense of comprehension but might instead merely mark the foreign feel of this wicked woman.

At the supposed height of her success, Franceschina gloats in the most guttural of her stage Dutch. Though consonants shift and syntax twists, however, the sense is not hard to follow:

    Metre Frevile liue: ha, ha, liue at mestre Shatewes:
    Mush at metre Shatews, Frevile is dead, Malhereux, sail hang,
    And swete diuel, dat Beatrice would but run mad, dat
    she would but run mad, den me would dance and sing.
    (G4r; 5.1.79-82)

And her final words are a similarly not impenetrable mixing of English with "Dutch" sounds: "Ick vil not speake, torture, torture your fill, / For me am worse then hangd, me ha lost my will" (H2r; 5.3.77-78). Marston's "stage" Dutch requires little sophistication to present or perform, and little effort for an audience to comprehend, and in this it is typical of the practices required for staging Dutch or other foreign languages in 1600.

While the stage Dutch in Marston's comedy is typically clumsy and blunt, a more complex staging of Dutch, combining several of these strategies, appeared at about the same time. Several scenes in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall (c. 1600) take place in the Low Countries, where Lodowick and his family seek refuge under the roof of the lascivious, unscrupulous, and bilingual Yacob van Smelt. A range of linguistic markers pepper Yacob's stage Dutch. Speaking to the whole company, Yacob's Dutch mixes English, accented English words, cognates, and internal translations. (26) Taking stock of the group asking for lodging with him, Yacob observes, "Well, here bene van you vier (four as you seg in English): twea mannikins, twea tannikins; twea mans, twea womans." (27) With Yacob speaking to Lodowick, Bunch, Oriana, and Diana, the audience could probably translate "vier," "twea," "mannikins," and "tannikins" as "four," "two," "men," and "girls," even if Yacob had not reinforced his meaning by explicitly translating his phrases into English, "as you zeg." This complex strategy allows for comic staging as the botcher Barnaby Bunch consistently takes offense at Yacob's words. Having learned that Bunch is a tailor willing to practice his trade to pay for his keep, Yacob tells him, "Ick heb a cleyne skuttell, a little stall, by mine huys dore. Sall dat hebben for a skoppe" (4.70-72). Bunch's suspicious, "'Hebben, habben,' quoth 'a? What shall I 'hebben'?" might have left them at an impasse were it not for Lodowick, who understands Dutch. His explanation placates Bunch who sets to work. More importantly, Lodowick's facility with Dutch permits Yacob to use a foreign language in more complex ways. A combination of props, gestures, interior glosses, and Lodowick's responses to and translations of Yacob's propositions allows the melodrama of Lodowick's poverty and Yacob's designs on the beautiful Oriana to proceed. Confronting Lodowick with "a long board chalked" (7. s.d.) with Lodowick's charges, Yacob demands that he "Betall, betall ... / Betall, shellam, betall. I mought gelt / heb. Comt, pay" (7.4, 10-11; my emphasis). Lodowick's response, "have patience awhile. / I will endeavor to come out of debt" (7.12-13) and Yacob's mixture of Dutch and English, "Ick can niet forbear, niet suffer, / niet spare" (7.19-20) make Lodowick's situation plain as he must leave his wife and daughter as "eane gage, eane pawn" (7.72). Between Yacob's mixed stage Dutch, Bunch's misunderstandings that require explanation from Lodowick, and Lodowick's own translations of and responses to Yacob's scheme, The Weakest Goeth to the Wall is capable of creating surprisingly complex emotional tension in a foreign tongue. It is not surprising that the play is often associated with Thomas Dekker, who frequently uses Dutch in his acknowledged body of work.

Dekker's Dutchmen

Thomas Dekker's collaboration with John Webster on Northward Ho (1607) at about the same time as Marston's Dutch Courtesan similarly relies on English patois, this time sprinkled with a little more genuine Dutch, in the incidents involving Hans van Belch, the Dutch merchant and suitor to Doll. Hans's Dutch is mostly English dressed up with harder consonants, as in his entrance line in 2.1: "Dar is vor you, and vor you," he says, counting out coins to Leverpoole and Chartly. (26) When he does switch to genuine Dutch, counting the coins, "een, twea, drie, vier and viue skilling," the strategy is similar to that employed in the Henry V language lesson. Holding up coins and counting them out into his companions' hands, introduces the English audience to some simple Dutch terms. As more "real" Dutch slips into Hans's dialogue, the audience finds assistance in Doll herself, who claims to be "an apt scholler" able to translate the broken sentences of her Dutch suitor.

When the gullible Dutch lover worries about Doll's pander, Jack Hornet, Doll persuades Hans that Jack is actually her father. Anxious to impress him and "call you mine vader ta for Ick loue dis schonen vro your dochterkin" (i.e., call you my father for I love this beautiful woman your daughter), Hans brags about his ships:

  Ick heb de skip swim now vpon the vater: if you endouty, goe vp in de
  little Skip dat goe so, and bee puld vp to Wapping, Ick sal beare you
  on my backe, and hang you about min neck into min groet Skip.

  [I have the ship now swimming upon the water: if you're in doubt, go
  up in the little Ship that goes so, and be pulled up to Wapping. I
  shall bear you on my back, and hang you [you may hang?] about my neck
  into my great Ship.]
  (2.1.84-87)

Though Hornet professes to misunderstand, "He Sayes Doll, he would haue thee to Wapping and hang thee," Doll sets him and the audience straight with an indirect paraphrase of the merchant's words: "Nay Father I vnderstand him, but maister Hans, I would not be seene hanging about any mans neck, to be counted his Iewell, for any gold" (2.1.88-92). In this brief incident, as with other foreign tongues in the play, linguistic confusion is not left to stand, but, in a technique hearkening back to Kyd's treatment of the polyglot, it is quickly Englished for the audience--under the guise of clarifying it for onstage auditors--so as to leave no room for confusion.

Such concern for absolute clarity stands in marked difference from Dekker's earlier play, The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), in which more sophisticated use is made of Dutch, with a concomitant trust in the audience's ability either to comprehend it or to suspend their frustration. In the comedy, Lacy disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker in order to remain in London in pursuit of his beloved Rose. His first entrance in Dutch disguise activates the stereotypes of Dutch drunkards as he literally sings a "Dutch Song":

    Der was een bore van Gelderland
    Frolick sie byen;
    He was als dronck he could nyet stand,
    Upsee al sie byen;
    Tap eens de canneken,
    Drincke schone mannekin. (29)

The Dutch here is not so important; rather, the audience's sense that it is a drinking song, reinforced perhaps with gestures and certainly with words they might recognize such as "dronck" "Tap" or "Drinck," would serve to characterize this new character of the Dutch shoemaker. (30) In the play, Dekker most often relies on simple audible signals, such as harder consonants, to signal the foreign language being spoken. Hans introduces himself as a "skomawker" (shoemaker), for instance (4.77). But whereas other playwrights make somewhat simplistic use of a "stage accent" to indicate their speakers of a foreign tongue, such as Dutch, Dekker's characters' accents in The Shoemaker's Holiday represent a more sophisticated appreciation for the genuine foreign language. The introduction of the sound sk here, for instance, more closely represents the difficult sound of native Dutch's sch while the subtle use of aw may be an effort to reproduce the long a of Dutch's aa. The English audience would not necessarily be unable to understand the playwright's more sophisticated appreciation of Dutch--after all, it wouldn't be too difficult to determine that this word "skomawker" means "shoemaker" in a play about shoemakers and in a scene in which the character enumerates the various tools of his trade--and its use does suggest how even more complex use of a foreign language can be staged.

Lacy-as-Hans does occasionally speak accurate Dutch in this play. For instance, he places helping verbs in the second position of sentences, reserving main verbs until the end of sentences. Thus, when he happily agrees to accompany Sybil to service Rose's cobbling needs (and thus to meet his beloved clandestinely), he declares, "Yaw, yaw; ik sal mit you gane" (Yes, yes; I shall with you go) (14.63). Similarly, the Dutch skipper, even when he is most drunk, not only separates helping verbs and main verbs, but uses the characteristic syllable ge to indicate the past tense of main verbs. When Eyre asks Hans whether he has "made him drink" the skipper interjects, "Yaw, yaw, ik heb veale gedrunck" (Yes, yes, I have drunk well) (7.139). Both of these instances of grammatically correct Dutch are not so complex as to cause confusion in the English audience, though Firk does enjoy mocking his Dutch comrade in his absence, joking with Margery and Hodge, "Yaw heb veale gedrunck, quotha! They may well be called butter-boxes when they drink fat veal, and thick beer too!" (7.142-43). While this English character may not understand the grammatically correct Dutch he overhears (or may claim to misunderstand it in order to make a stereotyped joke of it), the foreign language here resembles English closely enough that many auditors of the play could understand it or at least piece the meaning together, especially with Firk's mangled assistance.

When Hans/Lacy does speak Dutch that has no English cognate, Dekker proceeds to provide a partial gloss for his English audience, again under the guise of accommodating English characters in the play. Thus, for instance, when Sybil comes to find Lacy disguised as Hans to request his help for Rose--a clandestine meeting of the lovers in the offing--he uses some terms that sound nothing like their English counterparts. Sybil asks for Hans at the shop and Firk calls him forth--"Hark, butter-box, now you must yelp out some spreaken"--larding his speech with a little foreign matter of his own (13.52). Hans/Lacy politely asks the customer, Sybil, "Vat begey you," but before an audience can be thrown off by this uniquely Dutch phrase ("What do you desire?"), he follows the question immediately with an Englished version of it: "Vat begey you, vat vod you?" (13.53). His English interlocutor knows precisely what he has asked--"What would you?"--and responds with a request for him to accompany her to help Rose. He again immediately juxtaposes his "Dutch" reply, "Vare ben your edle fro?" lest the use of another foreign phrase cause any confusion, with a more "English" gloss: "Vare ben your edle fro? Vare ban your mistress?" (13.56). Thus Dekker includes snippets of genuine Dutch in his comedy, but makes concessions to accommodate his English audience, most of whom (though not all) might have no understanding of this foreign tongue.

Other plays of the period make similar use of these staging techniques to signal the foreignness of speech. Between English made to seem foreign (through conventions or slight alterations) and genuinely foreign speech (made comprehensible through its simplicity in combination with gestures or through the use of interpreters for other characters onstage, and by extension for the audience) stands the third and most common staging technique: a combination of sounds and contextualized phrases that would "sound" foreign without taxing an audience's ability to make sense of dialogue. Such techniques allow Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights to do as Mullaney suggests--to "collect and exhibit ... other cultures ... and the pleasures of the strange" (63) as part of the process of extending, reformulating, and coming to understand the evolving new national culture. These staging strategies allow playwrights to gently mock their supposedly dull English audience, though there is generally a sense of fun about linguistic play, so that, finally, when someone like Hans can turn the linguistic confusion around and reply to Firk's interrogation with "ik verstaw you niet" (I understand you not) (4.89) the layers of linguistic play--an English actor, playing an English aristocrat, disguised as a Dutch cobbler, claiming not to understand the perfectly lucid English of an English actor playing an English journeyman before an English audience--suggest how lively the staging of language on the stage in 1600 could be.

Notes

This essay draws on work I began at the Staunton, Virginia Blackfriars, and the London Globe during an NEH Summer Seminar conducted by Ralph Cohen and Patrick Spottiswoode, "Shakespeare's Theatres: Inside and Out," and first presented in William Kerwin and Ewan Fernie's seminar at SAA, 2003. I thank Paul Menzer and an anonymous reader at the journal for encouraging comments on previous drafts of this essay. The epigraph at the beginning of this essay is from Thomas Kyd, The Spanish tragedie ... (London, 1592), K3r. I quote here from the first printing. Further references will be to act and scene numbers in the New Mermaids edition, Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne (London: A & C Black, 1989).

1. Sir Philip Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 74.

2. Carla Mazzio, "Staging the Vernacular: Language and Nation in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy," SEL 38 (1998): 208; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 79. On the status of English, see also Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62.

3. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., vol. 9 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), 16. Although Richard Helgerson recalls that Spenser is more concerned here with the tension between different poetic genealogies, his treatment of Spenser's relationship to his own language is significant. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.

4. Stephen Greenblatt focuses on the importance of appropriating and domesticating exotic terms in both Hal's ability to record the alien voices of the Elizabethan underclass (Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 49) and in the exploration of the New World, where the English blithely (or cynically) assumed that their language would be understood by the indigenes, or represented an indigenous yearning to learn English (Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World [(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 105).

5. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 1.2.58, 61.

6. Steven Mullaney suggests "Learning strange tongues, or collecting strange things, rehearsing the words and ways of marginal or alien cultures, upholding idleness for a while--these are the activities of a culture in the process of extending its boundaries and reformulating itself" (82). See also P. K. Ayers's comments about city comedies' presentation of foreign tongues in the context of a "new urban Iron Age." "'Fellows of Infinite Tongue': Henry V and the King's English," SEL 34 (1994): 269.

7. Carla Mazzio offers a brilliant reading of The Spanish Tragedy "in light of contemporary debates about the heterogenous and intertwined fabrics of language, culture, and nation," but neglects the question of how Hieronimo's playlet would have been performed (213).

8. In Sheldon P. Zitner's reading of The Spanish Tragedy, the alienating confusion created by performance in sundry languages heightens the drama. Arguing that Kyd "sought strong emotion without much cost of imagining affective language," Zitner concludes that the polyglot performance would reach emotions incapable of linguistic expression, that language is subordinate to drama, and implicitly that a translated printing of the text does Kyd a disservice. "The Spanish Tragedy and the Language of Performance," Elizabethan Theatre 11 (1990): 90.

9. J. R. Mulryne, who has edited The Spanish Tragedy, believes that the playlet was performed in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. In this case, he argues, the emblematic elements of the play must "stand out even more vividly in a kind of dumb show." "Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy," in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems, 93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Assuming that such foreign speech would leave an English audience in the dark, Mulryne argues that Kyd made the most of this linguistic confusion for other nationalist purposes in the play. Similarly, Michael Hattaway suggests that Kyd attempted an experiment to determine whether he could create a play that would, "to the unlettered at least, communicate by its mere sound." Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 110.

10. See S. F. Johnson, "The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited," in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosely, 25 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962).

11. On the significance of the royal audience's minimal comprehension here, see Kevin Dunn's important consideration of word and action in the tragedy, "'Action, Passion, Motion': The Gestural Politics of Counsel in The Spanish Tragedy," Renaissance Drama 31(2002): 49.

12. In the discussion of Henry V that follows, my interest is in Shakespeare's staging of linguistic difference--the way he embeds the performance of the foreign into his play--rather than the important nationalist implications of that difference. Much excellent work on the nationalist and xenophobic aspect of these scenes has been written since Mullaney's treatment of such rehearsals in the Henriad (79-87) and Greenblatt's interest in Hal's recording and domesticating of other tongues (Negotiations, 58-59), but the best and most recent is Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 152-60.

13. I cite the text from Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto: A Facsimile Edition of Copies Primarily from the Henry E. Huntington Library, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

14. Just as Andrew Murphy points to the bibliographic blind spot in treatments of Henry V that do not account for their use of heavily edited editions of the play, "an unproblematized reliance on modern editions of Henry V," so critics who do not examine their assumptions about how a play like The Spanish Tragedy presents foreign tongues take a good deal for granted. "'Tish ill done': Henry the Fift and the Politics of Editing," in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, and Culture, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 218 (London: St. Martin's 1997). P. K. Ayers occasionally notes the significance of different readings gleaned from the Quarto and the Folio, though his concern is not with the staging of language difference so much as with Hal's characteristic speech practices and his royal claim to lack sophisticated rhetoric (262). For Folio Henry V, I cite William Shakespeare, Henry V: The Life of Henry the Fift, ed. Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare Folios (London: Nick Hern, 2001).

15. Helen Ostovich, "'Teach you our princess English?': Equivocal Translation of the French in Henry V," in Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance and Submission in History, ed. Richard C. Trexler, 153 (Binghampton, NY: MRTS, 1994). These thematic, nationalist issues in the play have been treated at great length elsewhere; my concern here is in exploring the performance strategies of bringing a foreign language before an English audience in the popular theater. On the transformation of the stage's interest in female sexuality in plays at the turn of the century, see Mary Bly, "Imagining Consummation: Women's Erotic Language in Comedies of Dekker and Shakespeare," in Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy, ed. Gail Finney, 47 (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994).

16. Huston Diehl is more interested in the moral and tragic implications of gesture, but argues effectively that an Elizabethan audience could be expected to "read" gesture and other visual rhetoric with great care: "the physical action in a Tudor morality is, for its audience, often charged with iconographic significance ... [and] on the Elizabethan commercial stage, we find that this visual rhetoric does not radically or profoundly change." "Inversion, Parody, and Irony: The Visual Rhetoric of Renaissance English Tragedy," SEL 22 (1982): 200. One excellent discussion of the power of gesture in the Elizabethan theater can be found in Paul Menzer, "That Old Saw: Early Modern Acting and the Infinite Regress," Shakespeare Bulletin 22 (2004): 34.

17. Although Frances Teague is interested in a different aspect of stage practice, what she calls "stage synecdoche," in her treatment of the stage's literalization of the trope of taking a bride's hand in marriage, her attention to hands and their importance to stage practice offers an interesting analogue to Katherine's practice here. "'What about our hands?': A Presentational Image Cluster," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 16 (2003): 219.

18. King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden Third Series (London: Thomson, 2002), 3.1.189, 196.

19. On this issue, see Murphy's discussion of Jamy's appearance in the text (221).

20. William Haughton, Englishmen for My Money, Malone Society Reprints, ed. W. W. Greg (London: Malone Society, 1912), lines 1125-26. Further references will be to line numbers in this edition.

21. Ton Hoenselaars suggests that derision of foreign tongues in the drama may derive "from a hidden frustration among Englishmen regarding the poor status of their own language" and anxiety about mass immigration into England. "In the Shadow of St. Paul's: Linguistic Confusion in English Renaissance Drama," in English Literature and the Other Languages, ed. Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning, DQR Studies in Literature 24 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 33. While I would agree that some may have felt that English as a language was under assault, I am more interested in Haughton's effort to present, or represent, the Dutch language on an English stage. On acting styles of the period as more typical than specific, which might suggest the effort to give the appearance of something foreign rather than to genuinely present the foreign, see Hattaway (73).

22. For the dating and staging of the play, see John Jowett, "Middleton's No Wit at the Fortune," Renaissance Drama 22 (1991): 191.

23. No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, ed. Lowell E. Johnson, Regents Renaissance Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 1.3.101. A. J. Hoenselaars points to the rarity of Middleton's positive depiction of the Dutch merchant. Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558-1642 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), 138. Jonathan Gil Harris suggests that the playwright included this scene of stage Dutch to give a "global accent" to the play's mercantile conventions. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 184.

24. Jean Howard calls her speech a sign of her "monstrous hybridity." Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 157. Hamilton comments briefly on Franceschina's "irregular mixture of accents," though her interest in the play focuses more on the witty approach to English of the English characters in the play. "Language as Theme in The Dutch Courtesan," Renaissance Drama 5 (1972): 85. Editors run into great troubles in deciphering Franceschina's language: "perfume my seetes" (4.3.26) has been interpreted as "feetes" or "sweetes," but rarely as "sheetes" as the context would seem to demand. Perhaps the language isn't as transparent as I believe it is.

25. John Marston, The Dutch Courtezan ... (London, 1605), B2r. Line numbers will be to John Marston, "The Dutch Courtezan," in Four Jacobean City Comedies, ed. Gamini Salgado (New York: Penguin, 1975), 1.2.82-83.

26. Although he does not mention the language barriers in the play, Jeremy Lopez does notice other staging techniques, including dumbshows, that increase the play's accessibility. Theatrical Conventions and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 80.

27. A Critical Edition of the Anonymous Elizabethan Play The Weakest Goeth to the Wall, ed. Jill L. Levenson (New York: Garland, 1980), 4.4-6. This edition uses scene and line numbers only. Levenson discusses the likely collaboration of Dekker and others in this play (18).

28. Thomas Dekker and John Webster, "Northward Ho," in The Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Further references are to this edition. Bowers does not even "translate" Hans's mixture of English and Dutch, perhaps assuming that it would be transparent to the modern reader as well.

29. Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr, New Mermaids (New York: Norton, 1990), scene 4, lines 39-44. References will be to scenes and lines in this text.

30. In a mid-Tudor interlude, Welth and Health, the Dutch figure, Hance, enters "with a dutche songe," though the song is not specified. The Interlude of Wealth and Health, ed. W. W. Greg (London: Malone Society, 1907), s.d. 397. Lacy's evocation of the drunken Hans may thus activate not only a stereotype but an emblem, in the sense of Huston Diehl's analysis of "visual rhetoric" on the Elizabethan stage (201).