Seth Lerer on Shakespeare

It should be clear to everyone by now that Seth Lerer has a minor obsession with the politics of the English language. So the relationship between class, gender, power and the language is a constant theme.

The chapter on Shakespeare wants to pay homage to the greatest writer of the period and talk a little about internal changes in the language and make a point about politics.

(The are the points about do and will becoming periphrastics; about the GVS being not quite complete and thus different vowel sounds; about odd spelling features; and about the great expansion of vocabulary that we sometimes refer to as the enrichment movement.)

He opens and closes the chapter, therefore, with the figure of Henry V, actually the first reference is to Henry IV, one and two, and thus Prince Hal rather than King Henry. Yet the points is made nonetheless. In the scene between the Prince and his ne’er-do-well sidekick Falstaff, he demonstrates the boldness of these large political characters and theatricality and slipperiness of language. Prince Hal playing the King banishes Falstaff which is true to the king, but also anticipates what will happen as Hal assumes the role of King.

The chapter closes with the scene of King Henry wooing the French speaking Katherine. The line is uttered that speech if full of tricks and traps, “tromperies,” but at this point the King is trying to be as clear as possible and thus live up to his reputation as finally a young king who was quite serious and good to his word, who was tutored in the slipperiness of language (he could “drink with every tinker in his language” [1 Henry IV: 2.4]).

The middle references are to Richard III, Macbeth, Kent from Lear, and Hamlet; they are all presented as characters who seem to expand with and because of language, but who may also be caught up and trapped, “trammeled,” by the troperies and trumperies of language. Hamlet is almost the paradigm case in this instance. Because of this great copiousness of the language in the theater, Shakespeare is able to coin so many terms, create, as Lerer says, “the English of the modern world,” and thus flourish in the rhetorical and linguistic play that Lerer documents with Shakespeare’s use of done, do, and will, you and thou; and semantic development of assassination, heart-ache, bourne, jump, be-all and end-all, consummation, bated breath, salad days, my mind’s eye, and on and on. Hamlet is the most articulate, philosophical, and academic of the characters that Lerer invokes, but likewise he is the most ineffectual, having his Henry V moment in the last scene of the play, taking care of business but meanwhile getting himself killed, clearing the way for Fortinbras, the Henry V stand-in, to enter the stage and clean up the mess.

In many of these chapters, Lerer attempts to weave together external history, internal history (or description), and a dash of literary criticism in most chapters. It makes for interesting reading, and we sometimes have to work to “piece out” what we need.