Uncommon Tongues. Catherine Nicholson
to what had once seemed like linguistic infirmities. Primed by their sensitivity to “England’s classical nowhereness,”29 they prove keenly alert to the contradictory stances on familiarity and foreignness that structure classical accounts of eloquence, and the very moments at which they seem most urgently concerned with the particularities of their own Englishness are often the moments at which they come closest to the preoccupations of their Greek and Roman predecessors. The mutually inconsistent demands of classical rhetorical theory mirrored the mutually inconsistent demands exerted upon English writers by the classical tradition as a whole, that enticing yet alienating corpus of speeches, poems, and plays that both invited their efforts at emulation and impugned their status as barbarous outsiders. Relative to classical Greek and Latin, after all, English was already a peculiar language: haphazardly composed, indiscriminately mixed, awkwardly pronounced, and indelibly strange. Capitulation to the alien order of eloquence could thus seem curiously like doubling down on a native eccentricity.
As Jones documents in his magisterial study of the vernacular in English Renaissance culture, in a brief span of years beginning around 1575 the status of English was revised dramatically upward. Novel achievements in prose, verse, and drama earned for the vernacular the reputation of an “eloquent tongue,” and decades of skepticism give way to the assertive experiments of an age that, in Jones’s words, “believed wholeheartedly in the literary value of its language.”30 But this belief was not identical to—or even, perhaps, compatible with—faith in the vernacular’s power to organize and sustain the body politic, for making English eloquent was also a way of dislocating it from the imagined community of native speakers. As Jones observes, the first fruits of this new faith were often willfully off-putting: “No longer was the vernacular only a practical instrument, the efficacy of which depended upon simple clarity and humble plainness; it was, instead, a free medium of expression, in which brave new words and elaborate figures could puzzle or displease whom they would.”31 Jones does not dwell on this curiously negative formulation of poetic license, nor have subsequent scholars taken it up, but sixteenth-century critics were sensitive to its implications for the mother tongue. Although the authors of rhetorical and poetic handbooks promoted artful English as the expression of a well-fashioned England, others identified eloquence as a more disorienting and disruptive force.
Thus William Harrison writes in his Description and Historie of England, printed in 1577 as part of the first volume of Holinshed’s Chronicles, that the unprecedented investment of literary writers in their mother tongue seems to have made it both more excellent and less English than ever before. “Our tongue,” Harrison allows, “never came unto the type of perfection until the time of Queen Elizabeth, wherein … sundry learned and excellent writers have fully accomplished the ornature of the same,” but he cautions that “not a few other doo greatlie seeke to staine the same, by fond affectation of forren and strange words, presuming that to be the best English, which is most corrupted with externall termes of eloquence.”32 Harrison was not alone in identifying the pursuit of eloquence with the affectation of strangeness or externality. Samuel Daniel’s 1603 Defence of Ryme deplores the “affectation” of poets who show themselves “to be both unkinde and vnnaturall to our owne natiue languge, in disguising or forging strange or vnusuall words, as if it were to make our verse seeme another kind of speech out of the course of our vsuall practice,” while the preface to Robert Cawdrey’s 1604 dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, adapts a passage from Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique to its own homogenizing purposes, urging readers that unless they are prepared to “make a difference of English, and say, some is learned English, and othersome is rude English, or the one is Court talke, the other is Country-speech,” they “must of necessitie banish all affected Rhetorique, and vse altogether one manner of language.”33 Such admonishments remind us that, notwithstanding the myth of eloquence’s attractive power, the promotion of the vernacular as a literary tongue was not easily aligned with the promotion of a unified national identity. If laying claim to “the best English” meant disavowing the obligations of familiarity and mutual intelligibility, then the triumph of English begins to look like a more equivocal—even self-defeating—achievement.
The mingled pride and concern Harrison expresses is in some respects typical of his moment, a moment at which England appeared to its inhabitants as simultaneously provincial and cosmopolitan, isolated and expansive. Both perspectives can be grounded in historical fact. As David Wallace points out, only in 1558, with the loss of Calais, did England lose its foothold on the Continent and “become … an island.”34 At the same time, however, travel and trade brought the rest of Europe, and even Asia, closer: foreigners—and foreign books—swarmed London; the wool trade boomed; Englishmen crossed the channel in pursuit of wealth, learning, and pleasure; and the authors of texts such as Richard Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations of the English Nation (1589) took pride in representing England’s reach as unprecedentedly large. “Whoever heard of Englishmen at Goa before now?” Hakluyt asks. “What English ships did heretofore … range along the coast of Chile, Peru, and all the backside of Nova Hispania?”35
It is not surprising that the excitement and anxiety elicited by such changes inflect English authors’ perceptions of what Thomas Nashe half-jokingly calls “our homely Island tongue.”36 Nashe tells readers who object to his “huge words,” “I had as lieve have … no clothes rather than wear linsey wolsey”;37 the language that Thomas Wilson likens favorably to “our Countrie cloth”38 strikes him as too homespun altogether.39 So too George Chapman, who in the preface to his translation of Homer refuses to apologize for his “farre fetcht and, as it were, beyond sea manner of writing”: English would be better off, he insists, if its native authors did not restrict themselves to “nothing but what mixeth it selfe with ordinarie table talke.”40 For Richard Mulcaster, Spenser’s grammar-school master and a fierce advocate for the mother tongue, the mobility of England’s merchant class was a sign of the vernacular’s own potential for expansion and enrichment: “Will all kindes of trade, and all sorts of traffik, make a tung of account?” he asks. “If the spreading sea, and the spacious land could vse anie speche,” he declares, “theie would both shew you, where, and in how manie strange places, theie haue sene our peple, and also giue you to wit, that theie deall in as much, and as great varietie of matters, as anie other peple do, whether at home or abrode.”41
But the success of England’s efforts to extend its influence across the globe could intensify as well as assuage concerns about the value of English. Those far-flung merchants and travelers could hardly expect to use English in their dealings with foreigners.42 Puttenham worries in his Arte that the vernacular would suffer from such encounters, as the English of “Secretaries and Marchaunts and trauailours” was inevitably corrupted by the “straunge termes of other languages.”43
Debates about the vernacular’s literary potential thus intersected with, reflected, and informed more widespread debates about England’s place in the world—historically marginal, newly insular, increasingly mobile, and uncertainly bounded. Throughout the sixteenth century terms such as insularity and estrangement, homeliness and exoticism, proximity and distance served as analogies for a whole range of (often contradictory) attitudes toward English eloquence, and the immediate experiences of geographic expansion and isolation supplied vernacular writers with a rich fund of metaphors for their linguistic predicament. Like England in the sixteenth century, English seemed poised to embark on a potentially enriching, potentially ruinous venture beyond its native plot. Indeed the ambivalence with which many authors allude to England’s geographic circumstances—its long-standing marginality, its burgeoning global reach—turns out to be a useful guide for articulating their ambivalence about eloquence. If geographic insularity was both an asset and an impediment to England’s cultural, moral, and intellectual development, so too was confining oneself to the strict limits of common usage both an aid and an obstacle to rhetorical success. If travel, trade, and other foreign engagements were either the key to the nation’s growth and enrichment or the fastest route to degradation and decline, so too was the allure of strange terms either the vernacular’s greatest hope or its most persistent source of error.
Compounding this ambivalence was the fact that, as Paula Blank has