Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Download or read book Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries written by Dirk Delabastita and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No literary tradition in early modern Europe was as obsessed with the interaction between the native tongue and its dialectal variants, or with ‘foreign’ languages and the phenomenon of ‘translation’, as English Renaissance drama. Originally published as a themed issue of English Text Construction 6:1 (2013), this carefully balanced collection of essays, now enhanced with a new Afterword, decisively demonstrates that Shakespeare and his colleagues were far more than just ‘English’ authors and that their very ‘Englishness’ can only be properly understood in a broader international and multilingual context. Showing a healthy disrespect for customary disciplinary borderlines, Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries brings together a wide range of scholarly traditions and vastly different types of expertise. While several papers venture into previously uncharted territory, others critically revisit some of the loci classici of early modern theatrical multilingualism such as Shakespeare’s Henry V.