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>> Fifteen Reasons
for John Florio,
The Man Who Invented Shakespeare
>> Quindici Ragioni
per John Florio,
L’uomo che ha
inventato Shakespeare
>> Florio As Seen By Scholars : 1921-2007
>> Author matters
>> In pursuit of meaning
>> A world of words
>> Florio’s words, Shakespeare’s words
>> Chapter 7: (excerpt)
The Translation of Montaigne’s Essais
>> Chapter 8: (excerpt)
Language, Style,
And Euphuism
>> Chapter 17: (excerpt)
The Spirit and The Land
of Italy
>> L’Italia e Florio
>> John Florio
and His Entourage
>> The Testament
of John Florio
>> Florio’s works
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Florio - Shakespeare
Chapter 8: (excerpt)
Language, Style, And Euphuism
What do specialists in the history of the English language have to say about the Bard? A recent dictionary by N. F. Blake has this revelatory title: Shakespeare’s non-standard English. A dictionary of his informal language (2004). That Shakespeare’s English stands out against the background of the Elizabethan age as idiosyncratic, strange, and non-standard is a datum universally accepted by critics. As Simon Palfrey puts is, “In many ways his language remains strange and difficult no matter how familiar we become with it.”
What exactly does this mean? Let us dig deeper. Many specialists have recoiled at the way Shakespeare forms words. We have seen that the Florios had exactly the same linguistic passion and competence as the divine William; now let us try to see if what we have before us is an identical lexical creativity. In a 1970 contribution, Vivian Salmon points out that many have criticized Shakespeare’s lexical innovations as bizarre and excessive.183 The same assessment has been made by G.C. Taylor, Yates, Koszul and Matthiessen—of Florian coinages. Salmon quotes the opinion of a linguist that certain Shakespearian neologisms are “strange and shapeless, fashioned for argument rather than delight,” and states that it is necessary to carry out a systematic study to enable us finally to understand the function of Shakespeare’s neologisms, and so improve our understanding of his style. Forty years later, I have not been able to discover that this task has been accomplished, and what Salmon calls “the lack of any reasoned account of the principles directing Shakespeare’s lexical creativity” still persists.
Salmon’s essay informs us of another element that makes Shakespeare different and original with respect to the local English context: he was the first of the Elizabethans to use the suffix -ment with a certain regularity in order to forge substantives out of concepts previously expressed only through verbs. Unlike Shakespeare, the other Elizabethans preferred the native English form -ing, and neglected the array of suffixes available in the Romance languages: –ment, -ure and –ance (-ence). Why, linguists ask, did Shakespeare vary from the norm? Salmon attempts an answer: “The actual choice of suffix depended on aspectival and no doubt phonetic considerations, although what the latter were has not yet been explained.” So there we have it: for aesthetic reasons, of course, and for undetermined phonetic reasons! When he was engaged in translation, Florio experimented, tried out solutions, took chances, and in the lists compiled by G.C. Taylor, and in the introductions to Second Frutes, Montaigne’s Essais, and the dictionary A Worlde of Wordes (the last three reprinted in the appendices below), the many words ending in -ment, -ure and -ance (-ence), like credence, disnature, eminence, enticement, magnificence, prescience, tenure, etc. are highlighted in boldface. A systematic review of the two complete works using computer analysis remains to be carried out, but the results available at this stage indicate extensive use of such terms by Florio. What matters now is that, compared to his English contemporaries, Shakespeare behaves “oddly,” and he makes strange, exotic choices, just like the foreigner Florio. The sedentary country genius from Stratford (there is no sign that he did any travelling except for the London-Stratford commute) opts for foreign suffixes. Shakespeare, writes Salmon, “also tried annexment instead of the existing annexion...,” another departure from the usage of his English contemporaries. She explains this by stating:
When Shakespeare’s lexical creativity was directed towards genuinely poetic or dramatic ends, they were outside the requirements of normal Elizabethan speech. At the simplest level, his neologisms are invented for metrical reasons.
Price captures the essence of these priceless Shakespearian critics once again, remarking that they would sooner “suppose all sorts of things rather than conclude the obvious.” The obvious in this case being that Shakespeare came from elsewhere, that he had a different linguistic and cultural background, and that this led him to employ suffixes of Romance origin.
All these critics have been so struck by how different he was that, although they block themselves from thinking that he might have been foreign, they keep insisting on his radical, absolute originality (we have seen this in the simile of Shakespeare as the King Kong of English letters189). Ruth Nevo calls Shakespeare “a violator of language,” an expression which could perfectly well serve to characterize the experimentalism in translating Montaigne that Kozsul and Matthiessen noted in Florio. Anna Maria Cimitile has some interesting remarks on Shakespeare’s language, probing the ways in which the differentness of Shakespeare’s writing, his cultural and temporal difference, are perceived by us:
[T]he distance produces a certain “discontinuity” between the past and the present culture... [T]his discontinuity has often been perceived as “excess.”
One of the goals of her study is “to characterize their pastness in terms of their excess”. Milton had already alluded to this “excess” in L’Allegro: “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,/Warble his native wood-notes wild.” Cimitile develops this Miltonic suggestion that Shakespeare’s language is excessive:
Milton’s lines also suggest a certain excessive character in Shakespeare’s language, a transgressing of order and linearity, and make it a space where meanings are not distinct, but grow one upon the other uncontrolled, just as in a tangled wilderness.
For Stephen Orgel, we find in Shakespeare the same “self-conscious excess” characteristic of the Baroque in general. This uncontrollable, “Baroque” character, this unstoppable proliferation of meanings piled one upon another, is a trait also observed in Florio’s writing when translating Montaigne, and studied by Koszul, Matthiessen and Yates. What the critics regard as intolerable excess in Florio’s Montaigne, they tolerate in Shakespeare, however much they may see it as annoying, even opaque and incomprehensible. Cimitile poses the question whether this excess and opacity of language, understood as resistance against the transparent expression of precise meanings, are such only to Milton’s ear, or are proper, intrinsic qualities of Shakespeare’s poetry. Her conclusion is that these qualities are both inside and outside the plays, “a feature that characterizes them, the mark of their specific culture, but also the distance, cultural and temporal, between the Renaissance and the time of reading.”(...)
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John Florio
The Man Who Was Shakespeare
by Lamberto Tassinari
Giano Books
388 pages
$ 20.00 |
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