Does Shakespeare differentiate his characters in terms of speech or do his characters all speak alike? Alexander Pope, Margaret Cavendish, Muriel Bradbrook, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Leo Tolstoy, and Leon Levitchi tackled this issue in different ages. The conclusion we can draw from their views is that Shakespeare's characters are distinct from each other, and yet, they often seem to mimic the language or the manner of speaking of other characters. Many characters act as if they were innate actors or as if they were born under the sign of homo ludens. Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, the Countess of Salisbury in Edward III, Achilles, Patroclus, and Thersites, as well as Ulysses and Agamemnon in Troilus and Cressida turn out to be great imitators (mimickers). They are ready to impersonate other characters, to play 'pageants', and to devise plays of their own within the larger frame of the plots they are involved in. By studying Act Three, Scene One (ll. 146-84) and Act Three, Scene Three (ll. 235-90) of Troilus and Cressida, the undergraduates may realise that Shakespeare makes his characters play the games of linguistic mimicry in a surprisingly self-conscious manner. Harold Bloom claims that Shakespeare 'surpasses all others in evincing a psychology of mutability' because he 'originates the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-hearing'. The undergraduates are invited to notice that Shakespeare's characters are first of all great overhearers and only secondly self-overhearers. Reading the aforementioned passages, we might conclude that Shakespeare's plays foreshadow the linguistic theories developed by Otto Jespersen in the first half of the twentieth century: So action - custom - imitation, on the one side: the individual - a smaller circle - a larger circle, on the other side. The alpha and omega of the life of language is all there. The influence of imitation in human society can hardly be overestimated. We speak of 'human apes' and put into the words all the scorn we have for our nearest animal cousins. But what if the animal-psychologists are right who deny to apes the faculty of real imitation, in any case the faculty of learning anything by imitation and maintain that imitation is a prerogative of Man! It is assuredly not always a bad thing that men imitate one another. Imitation is not merely picking up silly fashions and echoing idiotic phrases: a good example may be as infectious as a bad one. Without imitation, there can be no civilised life, at any rate no linguistic life. If a child did not try to the best of its ability to talk like grown-up people or like children rather older than it, it would be permanently shut out fro 434e420e m the common life of the spirit and really remain outside the human society. But even the grown man or woman imitates his neighbours' speech, consciously or unconsciously (Mankind, Nation, and Individual).
What is the 'rhetoric' of linguistic mimicry made up of? What linguistic bricks does Shakespeare use in constructing mimicking speeches and mimicking characters? Here is a brief survey of the main figures of speech used by the dramatist, with examples from several plays. The undergraduates could easily work out lists with other examples from the same plays or from plays not quoted below. I shall begin with the several types of linguistic repetitions. Here is an example of word for word repetition - the resumption of both form and content:
BIRON: Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
ROSALINE: Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
BIRON: I know you did.
ROSALINE: How needless was it, then, to ask the question.
(Love's Labour's Lost, II. 1. 114-7)
The irony and the punch line of the woman engaged in a battle of wits (and sexes) are self-evident even when taken out of context. The repetition of form with the change of content is apparent in the following exchange from Twelfth Night (I. 3. 46-53):
SIR TOBY: Accost, Sir Andrew, accost (.).
SIR ANDREW: Good Mistress Accost.
MARIA: My name is Mary, sir.
SIR ANDREW: Good Mistress Mary Accost.
To better understand the mechanism of this type of repetition, here is a twenty-first century joke that uses the same 'misreading' of a previous statement due to phonetic homonyms and altered punctuation:
An English professor wrote the words 'A woman without her man is nothing' on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly. All of the males in the class wrote: 'A woman, without her man, is nothing.' All the females in the class wrote: 'A woman: without her, man is nothing.' Punctuation is everything. The third type of repetition is based on the resumption of content and change of form; it is based on synonymy and analogy, as in the following example:
COSTARD: Which is the greatest lady, the highest?
PRINCESS: The thickest and the tallest.
COSTARD: The thickest and the tallest! It is so; truth is truth.
(Love's Labour's Lost, IV. 1. 47-51)
The fourth type of repetition consists of the resumption of the same syntactic pattern, as in the following quotes from both comedies and history plays:
FORD: Want no money, Sir John, you shall want none.
FALSTAFF: Want no Mistress Ford, Master Brook, you shall want none.
(The Merry Wives of Windsor, II. 2. 268-71)
PLANTAGENET: Hath not thy thorn a canker, Somerset?
SOMERSET: Hath not thy horn a thorn, Plantagenet?
(1 Henry VI, II. 4. 68-9)
A fifth type of repetition I advance in my course is that of resumed prosodic patterns. In this case it is the rhythm, the length of the lines and the rhyming pattern that become the object of imitation. See, for instance, Rosalind's reading of Orlando's love poems ('From the east to western Ind / No jewel is like Rosalind. / Her worth being mounted on the wind / Through all the world bears Rosalind', in As You Like It, III. 2. 92-6), which is ironically parodied by Touchstone as 'If a hart do lack a hind, / Let him seek out Rosalind, / If a cat will after kind, / So be sure will Rosalind etc (III. 101-5). Stichomythia, the exchange of brief, one-line cues may be considered a subtype of the fifth type of repetition. The characters are turned into machine guns firing rapid rounds of verbal bullets, as in The Comedy of Errors (IV. 4. 73-8):
ANTIPHOLUS: Were not my were lock'd and you shut out.
ANTIPHOLUS: And did not she herself revile me there?
DROMIO: Sans fable, she herself revil'd you there.
ANTIPHOLUS: Did not her kitchen maid rail, taunt and scorn me?
DROMIO: Certes, she did; the kitchen-vestal scorn'd you.
We can use various criteria to produce taxonomies of linguistic repetitions. For example, we may consider the proximity to, or the distance at, which one character or another resumes certain words/phrases. The repetition in immediate vicinity is the figure termed anadiplosis.in this case, the last word/phrase of a cue becomes the first word/phrase of the next cue, uttered by a different character. The anaphora illustrates the case of a character's first word resumed by another character in his/her next cue in exactly the same initial position. The epiphora, or epistrophe, resumes the last word of a cue in the final position of the next cue. Shakespeare's plays abound in examples of anadiplosis, anaphora, and epistrophe, so I shall not illustrate them with quotations, asking my students instead to look up their own examples in the English or in the bilingual editions of Shakespeare's plays. The 'echo' words, which are more difficult to detect and often pass unnoticed, are sometimes ostentatiously used, as in King John (III.1. 129-290), where Bastard repeatedly and irreverently tells the Duke of Austria 'to hang a calf's skin on [his] recreant limbs'. Mimicry used as scornful mock is termed mycterismus.
Another taxonomical criterion I have applied to linguistic repetitions is that of quantity. We can distinguish three types of repetitions: synthetic (a long cue is resumed as brief comment, often an ironic and humorous punch line), equivalent (a cue regardless of its length or brevity is mimicked in a cue of a similar length/brevity), and analytical repetitions (in the latter case the mimicking agent enlarges and elaborates on a shorter cue).
Shakespeare's characters do not simply parrot one another. They stick to their own views and convictions. That is why they often engage in verbal clashes, and this explains the high frequency of antonyms used in combination with linguistic repetition. King John provides us with an excellent illustration of the function of antonyms in the mimicking speeches of Constance (III. 1. 75-114), the mother whose son is the victim of political machinations instead of succeeding to the throne of England.
The combination of repetitions and antonyms often result in unexpected puns or word-plays. In Shakespeare's plays there are no social barriers or impositions as regards the use of puns. They are freely used by characters belonging to all sorts of social groups or classes. The fools, the servants that outwit their masters, and the couples of lovers, with their never-ending battles of wits, are, probably, the most creative users of puns. Molly Mahood counted more than 200 puns in Love's Labour's Lost and about 100 puns in All's Well That Ends Well. She calculated that the average use of puns with Shakespeare is of 78 puns per play. Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing almost always retorts with a pun whenever she feels that someone is intent on dominating or manipulating her. She always has the last word in an argument, as in the following brief excerpt:
BEATRICE: I am stuffed, cousin, I cannot smell.
MARGARET: A maid, and stuffed.
MARGARET: Doth not my wit become me rarely?
BEATRICE: It is not seen enough; you should wear it in your cap.
(III. 4. 57-64)
Next, here are some figures of speech selected from Sister Miriam Joseph's famous study Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language. They are sophisticated types of repetitions and do contribute a lot to the mimicking habits of Shakespeare's characters. Amphibology is, according to Miriam Joseph, 'ambiguity of grammatical structure, often occasioned by mispunctuation'. (It is what I actually have termed repetition of form with change of content. Here is yet another example of such a repetition).
CASSIO: Dost thou hear, my friend?
CLOWN: No, I hear not your honest friend. I hear you.
(Othello, III. 1. 22-3)
Cacozelia, or affected diction, is often the target of mock-mimicry in Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet parodies Osric's affected diction (Hamlet, V. 2). Malapropism is the misuse of words. It may emerge from bad imitation of someone's use of rare or precious words, as in Love's Labour's Lost.
HOLOFERNES: Th' allusion holds in exchange.
DULL: 'Tis true indeed; the collusion holds in exchange.
Chiasmus is a figure that combines repetition and inversion. It is one of Sir John Falstaff's favourite devices of refuting other people's statements:
CHIEF JUSTICE: You have misled the young prince.
FALSTAFF: The young prince has misled me.
(2 Henry IV, I. 2. 163-4)
CHIEF JUSTICE: Well, God send the Prince a better companion!
FALSTAFF: God send the companion a better prince!
(idem, 223-5)
Other figures of repetition are paronomasia (the words repeated are nearly but not precisely alike in sound) and asteismus (a figure of reply in which the answerer catches a certain word and throws it back to the first speaker with an unexpected twist). Both Katharina and Petruchio resort to it, in their battles of wits, throughout The Taming of the Shrew.
The phrase linguistic mimicry does not refer to the imitation of an individual's speech acts alone. The object of imitation may also be an idiom, i.e. a language, dialect, or style of speaking peculiar to a people. It may be the language spoken by a group, a social class, a coterie, all the members of an ethnic group. It may what we conventionally call the high style (sermo sublimis) of the aristocracy and the educated versus the low style (sermo humilis) of the vulgar commoners. Many of Shakespeare's characters sometimes do not speak their own everydeay idioms but borrow the idiom of a different group. For example, in All's Well That Ends Well, the French noblemen participating in the war between Florence and Sienna 'mimic' a non-existing language, consisting of phrases such as 'Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo' and 'Boskos thromuldo, boskos' (IV. 1. 71-2), 'Oschorbidulchos volivorco' (IV. 1. 88). Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Dekker similarly had a comic character, Lacy, speak an invented 'Dutch' of his own. Later, Moliere's Cleonte would speak 'Turkish' in the comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. In Edward III, the Countess of Salisbury imitates the Scottish accent of her enemies, King David and Douglas (I.2.). Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston co-wrote Eastward Ho in 1605, in which they satirised the upstart Scottish knights that had literally invaded London after King James Stuart's accession in 1603.
Upper class characters can mimic lower class people in what I have termed downward mimicry and vice versa (the other way round is upward mimicry). In As You Like It, Rosalinds tricks Orlando into believing she is a poor boy by speaking to him 'like a saucy lackey' (III. 2. 314). And yet, Orlando is clever enough to notice the finesse concealed behind the feigned simplicity of Rosalind's speech: '. your accent is something finer than you could purchase in such a remote dwelling' (III. 2. 329-30). Hamlet wittily impersonates a madman, and Edgar in King Lear reinvents himself as Poor Tom, a beggar. Moreover, in Act Four, Scene Six, Edgar impersonates, in turn, a poor beggar, a passer-by that speaks like a gentleman, a 'bold peasant', and then his propria persona. In The Taming of the Shrew, Tranio, a servant, act and speaks disguised as his master, Lucentio. Tranio is so good at mimicking sermo sublimis, that in a wooing contest he makes one of his rivals exclaim, 'What, this gentleman will out-talk us all!' (I. 2. 224). The servants in Shakespeare's plays can easily appropriate the language of their masters in a carnivalesque world of suspended rules, of suspended social hierarchies. The Countess of Rousillon takes over her clown's role, while the latter (Lavache) boldly impersonates a stupid courtier, exposing the unfounded pretensions of the aristocracy (All's Well That Ends Well, II. 2. 42-51). Upward and downward mimicry get mixed in the famous scenes in which Prince Hal and Falstaff impersonate, in turn, King Henry IV in 1 Henry IV. Touchstone's wooing of Audrey in As You Like It is, probably, the most famous instance in which a character simultaneously practises both upward and downward mimicry. Bruce R. Smith has justly labelled Touchstone as 'a nimble mover up and down the social ladder'. Talking to a country wench, the clown adopts the style of the rustics, but sometimes he mingles the low style of his interlocutor with the high style fashionable in court. He says, 'I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths' (III. 3. 7-9). The use of high terms, cultural allusions, and words of Romance origin triggers Audrey's baffled response: 'I do not know what "poetical" is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?' (18-9). Touchstone can easily overcome the slight problem he is confronted with by explaining the meaning of 'poetical' in plain words. In the same scene, he can adjust his speech to the sermo humilis of a shepherd (Corin) and speak naturally about trivial things like 'the very uncleanly flux of cat', 'tar', 'the copulation of cattle', 'grease', 'the sweat of a man' etc. Self-consciousness underlies Touchstone's extraordinary linguistic flexibility. He translates his own incomprehensible high style into explicit terms, so that he may intimidate William, his rival:
Therefore, you clown, abandon - which is in the vulgar, leave - the society - which in the boorish is company - of this female - which in the common is a woman; which together is abandon the society of this female, or clown, thou persihest; or, to thy better understanding diest; or, to wit, I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage. (V. 1. 52-60)
Common-code mimicry defines the mimicking acts that occur among people who belong to the same group, whether a social class, or a vocational guild. It often takes the form of the deliberate use of cliches, commonplaces, and linguistic conventions. Courtly affectation, artificial manners, and exaggerated politeness become boring during Hector's parting with the Greek commanders after his visit to the Greek camp (Troilus and Cressida, V. 1. 69-84). The more than idiomatic 'good night' occurs eight times, each time accompanied by epithets expressing civility ('sweet', 'great', 'fair'). That Shakespeare deliberately created this dull dialogue is proved by Achilles' exasperated retort, cutting a long story short: 'Good night and welcome, both at once to those / That go or tarry' (76-7). The affectation and mannerism of the characters are obvious in the following exchange from The Two Gentlemen of Verona:
SILVIA: Too low a mistress for so too mean a servant
To have a look at such a worthy mistress.
(II. 4. 102-4)
The burghers, the rising bourgeoisie, use a different kind of code, in which the language is simpler, with short greetings. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff adjusts himself to the occasion and uses the etiquette of townsmen.
FORD: Bless you, sir!
FALSTAFF: And you, sir!
(II. 2. 151-2)
In the historical plays, common code mimicry is an important feature of feudal ceremonies, with rules and rituals that everybody is expected to observe. In a famous trial-by-combat scene in Richard II (I.3), Bolingbroke and Mowbrey must recite in long cues their identity and the purpose of their duel, in a ceremony conducted by the Lord Marshal. Needless to say, the king and the rest of the audience know too well who the contenders are and what the cause of their dispute is. So, everything is just a spectacle staged by the monarch, a good opportunity to display the splendour and the strength of authority.
Another type of mimicked idiom to be discussed is the professional jargon. In The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio disguises himself as a master of philosophy to win Bianca's love. Hortensio, the equally imaginative rival-suitor impersonates a master of music. Both contenders speak in the professional jargon of their fake occupations. In a famous scene of Twelfth Night (IV.2) Feste, the Fool, impersonates a priest called to exorcise the 'possessed' Malvolio, who is kept locked in a cellar. And the very Duke of Vienna in Measure for Measure impersonates a monk throughout the plot. Mimicking professional jargons may result in malapropisms. Bottom, Quince, Snout, and the other mechanicals make us laugh when they try hard to imitate the professional actors. Dogberry, the feeble-minded constable in Much Ado about Nothing, likewise shows his lack of skills as a speaker of his mother tongue whenever he tries to use impressive legal terms.
Various other functional styles fall prey to the mimicking appetite of Shakespeare's characters. In As You Like It, Touchstone imitates the style of the doggerel of the popular ballads, while Parson Evans, Mistress Quickly, and Pistol imitate the style of the English popular ballads of superstition in The Merry Wives of Windsor (V. 2). And Falstaff, in 2 Henry IV can even boast that he does self-consciously imitate the rhetoric of the ancient Romans. He says, 'I will imitate the Romans in their brevity' (II. 2. 134-5). And that is what he actually does in the opening sentence: 'I commend me to thee, I commend thee, and I leave thee' (136-7). Falstaff concludes his letter with a parody of Cicero's three styles of oratory, tenue, medium and grande: 'Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe' (142-6).
If we consider the mimicking acts of Shakespeare's characters from the viewpoint of performance criticism, we can distinguish three more types of linguistic mimicry: in absentia, in pseudo-praesentia, and in presentia. Mimicry in absentia (mimicking someone who is not on the stage) relies on the dramatic convention of the monologue or soliloquy. It betrays a special psychic condition of the mimicking agent. Julia, the betrayed mistress in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, mutters to herself (IV. 4. 95-7) the words of her traitorous lover, Proteus (IV. 4. 68-75), after his exit (the latter employs her as a page without knowing who she really is). After falling in love at first sight with Cesario, the page impersonated by Viola in Twelfth Night, Olivia literally resumes their earlier exchange of cues (I. 5. 296-8) in I. 5. 308-10. And we have already seen that Patroclus mimics Nestor and Agamemnon, Thersites plays Ajax, and Falstaff and Prince Hal impersonate Henry IV in the absence of the targeted character(s).
Mimicry in pseudo-praesentia occurs when both the mimicker and the mimicked are on stage, but the latter is not aware of being mimicked by someone else. This situation is made possible by another theatrical convention, namely, the aside. This convention enables a character to be on stage without participating in the unfolding dialogue, to utter cues that are heard by the audience alone, not by
the other characters on stage. The asides were assigned by the Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega mostly to el gracioso (the comic servant). With Shakespeare, all characters, regardless of class, sex, and age are allowed to make comments in asides. The asides may show the mimicker's contempt for the mimicked person (Julia mimicking Thurio in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, V.2 15-8 and 22-4), or, conversely, the mimicker's admiration (Sir Andrew collects les mots justes from viola disguised as Cesario in Twelfth Night, III. 1. 97-102). The use of the aside may also betray psychological stress and anxiety, a disturbed state of mind (see again Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, V. 4).
As for mimicry in praesentia, the term designates the situation in which both the mimicker and the mimicked are on stage, and the mimcking is performed I a loud voice, in a face-to-face conversation. I shall refer to only two scenes to illustrate this type of mimicry. In Love's Labour's Lost, the King of Navarre and his three courtiers, Biron, Longaville, and Dumain fall in love with the Princess of France and her three attending ladies, respectively. Earlier in the play, they have forsworn any worldly pleasures for a period of three years, in the name of academic study. The four men have written love-letters to their sweethearts but none of them wants the others to know that he has been the first to break the vow of austerity. Biron comes to the stage with a love poem he has written in his hand; he hears the King coming, so he hides away. The king enters with a paper and reads out the love poem he has written for the princess. Then, he hears Longaville coming, so he hides himself. Longaville closely resumes the King's behaviour, and goes into hiding when Dumain appears. Then, Longaville comes forth to chide Dumain and to mock-mimic the style of his poem. The King does the same to Longaville, and then Biron steps forth to 'whip' the King's hypocrisy. At last, when no one expects anything else to happen, Jaquenetta the countrywench and Costard the clown come up with Biron's lost love-letter and expose Biron as a hypocrite. The comic scene that abounds in mimicking speeches is crucial in the plot. The four male characters give up individualism and acknowledge their love.
In Much Ado about Nothing bushes and hedges are again essential props in using linguistic mimicry as a comic device. Beatrice and Benedick love each other but they always quarel and neither of them would openly admit his/her love. Hence, their friends will do their best to bring them together through a 'play-within-a play' designed to flatter their ego. Claudio and Don Pedro will speak about Beatrice's love for Benedick when they know that the latter is in the garden, overhearing their dialogue constructed of mutually mimicking cues. Ursula and Hero similarly contrive a dialogue about Benedick's qualities and his love for Beatrice when they, too, know that Beatrice is eavesdropping on them. The two couples of 'actors' (Don Pedro-Claudio and Ursula-Hero) constantly mimic each other's cues in order to persuade the hidden eavesdropper of the truth of their statements. The two tricks are essential for the evolution of the plot, bringing forth changes in the relationships between the targeted characters: the man-hater and the woman-hater finally acknowledge their mutual love.
Linguistic mimicry in Shakespeare's plays can also be discussed from the viewpoint of modality, 'the speaker's / writer's attitude towards the propositional information of his utterance' (Stubbs). According to Kapstein (1956), we can distinguish the following types of modality:
. intellective modality, defined as reasoning, expressing certainty, hesitation, doubt,, confidence, necessity, possibility, probability, etc.;
. emotive modality, defined as emotions, expressing love, hatred, disgust, abhorrence, sympathy, antipathy, appreciation, etc.;
. volitive modality, defined as expressions of will such as order, request, invitation, advice, desire, etc.
Persuasive mimicry implies the presence of volitive modality. Linguistic contamination, or unconscious mimicry, corresponds to emotive modality. Quoting other people's utterances is a self-conscious, mnemonic act, based on intellective modality. The three types of mimicking acts do not necessarily exclude one another: sometimes they may rather occur simultaneously, complementing one another.
Here are two examples of persuasive mimicry. The first presents a servant who is good at persuading his master to be more generous than he usually is:
PROTEUS: Beshrew me, but you have a quick wit.
SPEED: And yet it cannot overtake your slow purse.
PROTEUS: Come, come, open the matter in brief: what said she?
SPEED: Open your purse, that the money and the matter may be both at once delivered. (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, I. 1. 119-23)
Speed's emphasis on money demanded in exchange for information anticipates the twentieth century informants asking for an extra sawbuck in Raymond Chandler's detective stories, a cliché taken over by thousands of Hollywood movies. The second example features Feste, the Fool with great persuasive resources:
OLIVIA: Take the fool away.
FESTE: Do not you hear, fellows? Take away the lady.
FESTE: I know his soul is in hell, madonna.
OLIVIA: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
FESTE: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen. (Twelfth Night, I. 5. 42-4 and 74-8)
Linguistic contamination has both a psychological and a social dimension. It may represent a safety valve for female heroines in search of an emotional rescue. See Cressida's long cue in Troilus and Cressida (III. 2. 191-203), which closely resumes the intricate syntactic pattern of Troilus' love vow (III. 2. 178-191). A similar case (a woman closely mimicking a man's words in a scene of seduction) occurs in All's Well That Ends Well when Bertram and Diana bargain for the Rousillons' precious family jewel in exchange for the maid's chastity:
BERTRAM: It is an honour 'longing to our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors
Which were the greatest obloquy in the world
In me to lose.
DIANA: Mine honour's such a ring,
My chastity's the jewel of our house
Bequeathed down from many ancestors
Which were the greatest obloquy in th' world
In me to lose. (IV. 2. 42-9)
Diana's resumption of Bertram's bombastic speech on family traditions raises a couple of questions regarding literary interpretation and stage performance. Diana's tour de force turns the persuader into the persuaded. But we shall never know whether playing a role according to the script devised by Helena (Bertram's wife), the bargaining Diana gets contaminated as result of her momentary fear; or, whether she is a subtle and exquisite actress who can easily parrot the arrogant seducer.
It would be unfair to state that female characters alone get contaminated by the speeches they are addressed. Men also under go this psycholinguistic process. When Duke senior meets Orlando in the woods, he gets contaminated by the young man's rhetoric:
ORLANDO: If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever you have sat at good men's feasts,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
If ever form your eyelids wiped a tear
Or know what 'tis to pity and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be:
In the which hope I blush and hide my sword.
DUKE SENIOR: True is it that we have seen better days,
And have with holy bell been knolled to church
And sat at good men's feasts and wiped our eyes
Of drops that sacred pity hath engendered:
And therefore sit you down in gentleness.
(As You Like It, II. 7. 113-24)
Orlando, homeless and hungry, meets the Duke, who has undergone the tragic experience of being usurped by his own brother. Under the circumstances, the Duke knows all too well the meaning of Orlando's plea. In the wilderness, men regain their fragile humanity - this is the ultimate message Shakespeare conveys through this instance of men's verbal contamination.
Another famous case of male linguistic contamination is Othello's. The Moor's moral decline coincides with a process of latent linguistic contamination in which he gradually comes to echo dirty words and thoughts. The turning point of the plot in Othello is, according to Mikhail Morozov, the moment when Othello's lofty speech is supplanted by Iago's dirty vocabulary: the Moor's contamination is irreversible. Morozov notices that Othello's downward mimicry has a counterpart in Iago's upward mimicry. When Iago calls a good name 'the immediate jewel' of the soul (III. 3. 156), he is obviously imitating the Moor's style. And Fintan O'Toole argues that the two characters melt into each other in terms of diction. Iago's 'I would change humanity with a baboon' (I. 3. 315) is closely echoed by the Moor later as 'Exchange me for a goat' (III. 3. 184). S.L. Bethell's classic study into the diabolic images in Othello shows that, of the sixty-four diabolic images in the play, Iago has only eighteen to Othello's twenty-six. Bethell shows how the theme of hell originates with Iago and 'is passed to Othello later as Iago succeeds in dominating his mind'. Here are Bethell's statistics supporting his view. In Act One Iago has eight diabolic images and Othello none; in Act Two he has six and Othello one. The change comes in Act Three, when Iago drops to three and Othello rises to nine. In Act Four Iago has only one, while Othello has ten, and in Act Five Iago has none and Othello six. Bethell's diagnosis overlaps Morozov's: Othello's fate has been sealed by the end of Act Three. In the last two acts, Othello continuously thinks of Desdemona as a devil or damned soul. As Bethell notes, this is the measure of his spiritual blindness, his enslavement by Iago'.
I shall move on to another type of mimicry, which combines intellective and emotive modality: ironic mimicry. It may take the form of a long dialogue with a punch line, as in the following duet of two lovers from The Merchant of Venice (V. 1. 1-24)
LORENZO: The moon shines bright: in such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls
And sigh'd his soul towards the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.
JESSICA: In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew
And saw the lion's shadow ere himself
And ran dismay'd away.
LORENZO: In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.
JESSICA: In such a night
Medea gather'd the enchanted herbs
That did renew old Aeson.
LORENZO: In such a night
Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew
And with an unthrift love did run from Venice
As far as Belmont.
JESSICA: In such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,
Stealing her soul with many vows of faith
And ne'er a true one.
LORENZO: In such a night
Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrew,
Slander her love, and he forgave it her.
JESSICA: I would out-night you, did nobody come,
But, hark, I hear the footing of a man.
The lovers' happiness is somewhat overshadowed by the mythological references they exchange. Troilus, Thisbe, Dido, and Medea stand for tragic figures symbolising betrayed love, violent death, unhappy accidents and suicide. They may be read as unwitting premonitions or ominous reminders of love's frailty. In Shakespeare's time (and this keeps happening even today), society could hardly sanction the love of two people belonging to different ethnic and religious groups. What does Fortune have in store for Jessica and Lorenzo in the long run? The question still lingers after the end of the play. But for the time being the well-provided couple indulges in actin under the sign of carpe diem. Jessica's bathos, or anticlimax, brings to an abrupt end the mock-poetic atmosphere of the scene. The dream-like interlude is over, the two of them are ready to cope with the immediate urgencies of life. The punch line, as usual with Shakespeare, belongs to a woman who outwits her lover.
In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Speed, the servant is allowed to ironically mock-mimic his master Valentine. But in his late play Cymbeline Shakespeare has the two attending lords mimic Cloten, the jackass of the royal family, only in muffled, camouflaged asides, as in the following excerpt:
FIRST LORD: Did you hear of a stranger that's come to court to-night?
CLOTEN: A stranger and I know not on't?
SECOND LORD (aside): he's a strange fellow himself, and knows it not.
Echo-mimicry is the most pungent form of dramatic irony. In Much Ado about Nothing Don Pedro and Claudio quote Benedick's early anti-marriage vow, 'if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull's horns and set them on my forehead' (V. 1. 183-6):
DON PEDRO: But when shall we set the savage bull's horns on the sensible Benedick's head?
CLAUDIO: Yea, and the text underneath, 'Here dwells Benedick, the married man'?
(V.1. 183-6)
Claudio translates Don Pedro's echo-mimicry into an explicit statement. The two of them know too well that Benedick's marriage has become imminent in the wake of the two farces they have staged earlier.
Like parodistic mimicry, quoting someone else's words, phrases, utterances is an intellectual process. We should be surprised to learn how many Shakespearean characters quote, resume or recount (either in direct or indirect speech) someone else's words and thoughts. In Troilus and Cressida, Patroclus quotes Nestor, Ulysses quotes Patroclus and Achilles, and Priam quotes Nestor, too. In Richard II the point of departure for King Richard's assassination is the ominous quotation of Bolingbroke's words by Exton:
EXTON: Didst thou not mark the king, what words he spake?
'Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?'
Was it not so?
SERVANT: These were his very words.
EXTON: 'Have I no friend?' quoth he - he spake it twice
And urged it twice together, didst he not?
(V. 1. 1-5)
Intellective modality does not occur only in quotes between inverted commas. The following excerpt from King John (I. 1. 39-40) is a clear illustration of intellective modality at work:
KING JOHN: Our strong possession and our right for us.
QUEEN ELINOR: Your strong possession much more than your right.
When Queen Elinor assesses the legitimacy of her son's claims to the throne of England, she is neither emotive nor persuasive, but assertive and conclusive. It takes Shakespeare a single line to portray the strong personality of one of the most fascinating heroines of the Middle Ages. Daughter of the powerful Duke of Aquitaine, wife to King Louis VII of France and later to Henry II Plantagenet of England, Elinor mothered two more kings, Richard the Lionheart and Landless John, in a world in which the power of arms was decisive in settling political disputes about succession and possession.
I shall now introduce a new notion applied to linguistic mimicry discussed in terms of modality: self-mimicry. Linguistic mimicry is a phenomenon that occurs as part of a larger process of linguistic communication. To speak about self-mimicry, we must first get accustomed with the notion of self-communication theorised by Yuri Lotman: 'Besides the well-known pattern of addresser and addressee, there is a kind of self-communication, a process wherein the afore-mentioned two participants are brought together, becoming a single agent.' Language is not only a means of communication. It also underlies 'the self-communication of mnemonic type including messages to oneself, which refer to things already known'. So, the addresser and the addressee are one and the same person. In self-mimicry, the
addresser, addressee and reference overlap. In plain words, self-mimicry means that 'I speak to myself about myself'. Self-mimicry is the main source of dramatic irony in scenes in which characters in disguise in such a way that their message is at the same time addressed to themselves, or it is about themselves, describing their situation (plight) known by themselves alone. Self-mimicry underlies the transient identity crisis undergone by disguised characters. The message of a self-mimicker requires a double reading/decoding: on the one hand it is denotative, referential, transitive, cognitive, and true; on the other hand, it is connotative, emotive, reflexive, counterfeit, and false.
A couple of examples will clarify this seemingly difficult notion. Rosalind alone knows that she is not Ganymede, a boy, when she rejects Phebe's love, begging her: 'I pray you, do not fall in love with me, / For I am falser than vows made in wine' (As You Like It, III. 5. 72-3). Rosalind knows that she is she, not a he, and that she is playing a role, tricking the other characters on stage. Julia, disguised as a page in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (IV. 4. 153-63) likewise speaks not only to Silvia but also to herself during the dialogue in which she has to face the woman who has stolen her faithless lover's heart:
SILVIA: Is she not passing fair?
JULIA: She has been fairer, madam, than she is:
When she did think my master loved her well,
She, in my judgment, was as fair as you;
But since she did neglect her looking-glass
And threw her sun-expelling mask away,
The air hath starved the roses in her cheeks
And pinched the lily-tincture of her face,
That now she is become as black as I.
SILVIA: How tall was she?
JULIA: About my stature.
Grief and humour collide in Julia's confession. 'She' is in fact 'I', her previous self prior to Proteus' betrayal and the reinvention of her person as a page. Back to Rosalind, with her, like with Viola in Twelfth Night, we are no longer in the realm of commedia dell' arte when the heroine comes to deny her temporary identity in disturbing, ambiguous, and memorable cues:
OLIVER: You lack a man's heart.
ROSALIND: I do so, I confess it.
(As You Like It, IV. 3. 163-4)
OLIVIA: Are you a comedian?
VIOLA: No, my profound heart; and yet (.) I swear I am not that I play.
VIOLA: Then think you right. I am not what I am.
(Twelfth Night, I. 5. 195-8 and III. 1. 153)
The most moving instance of self-mimicry in all of Shakespeare's plays is Viola's sentimental CV presented to Orsino in Twelfth Night (II. 4):
Say that some lady, as perhaps there is,
Hath for your love as great a pang of heart
As you have for Olivia. (92-4)
My father had a daughter loved a man -
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship. (110-12)
[.] She never told her love
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. (113-18)
Up to now I have repeatedly used terms like addresser, addressee, code, message, encoding and decoding. The central topic of this course is linguistic mimicry. Speaking about the language of Shakespeare's characters, we inevitably have to deal with Saussurean speech or parole. As such, I shall approach our topic from the viewpoint of linguistics, and I shall describe it in linguistic terms. To begin with, linguistic mimicry can be discussed in terms of economy versus redundancy. Depending on the figures of speech used by the mimicker, redundancy is nil in the case of homonyms but it increases when the mimicker uses synonyms. With the use of antonyms and puns, the level of redundancy decreases again. As for economy, it depends on the synthetic or analytic feature of repetitions/mimicry. If we consider the functions of language as defined by Roman Jakobson in Linguistics and Poetics, we shall note that both economy and redundancy are irrelevant when the imitator employs the phatic function of language.
The use of the phatic function of language is obvious in Verge's constant echoing of Dogberry's firm, resolute assertions. Says Dogberry: 'Marry, sir, this is it' (Much Ado about Nothing, III. 5. 6). Verges automatically parrots him: 'Yes, in truth it is, sir' (7). A bit later Dogberry tells Leonato, 'I am glad to hear it' (30). Verge instantly adds, 'And so am I' (31).
Parolles, the miles gloriosus and knave from All's Well That Ends Well, is doubtless the human embodiment of redundancy. As his very name suggests, Parolles' identity is mainly a construct made up of empty words. Whenever he appears on stage, the audience knows that a lot of meaningless verbiage is to follow. And yet, there is a scene in the play (II. 3. 1-45) in which the ingratiating Parolles manages to keep a tight reign on his verbosity and restricts himself to parroting every single cue uttered by the old courtier Lafeu. Paradoxically, Parolles' speech is economically. redundant: they resume in very few words the ideas of his wise, learned interlocutor. Here is a list of Parlloes' untypical replies, which differ so much from his earlier appetite for debate and disputation: 'So I say ' (11), 'So I say' (13), 'Right: so I say' (15), 'Why, there 'tis: so I say too' (17),'Right [.]' (19), 'Just, you say well; so would I have said' (21), 'It is, indeed.' (24), 'That's I; I would have said the very same' (29-30), 'Ay, so I say' (38), and 'I would have said it; you say well' (45). Parolles' cues cannot be discussed in terms of lexical, syntactic, or stylistic mimicry, but in terms of economy and redundancy. The parroting Parolles tries hard to interfere in the dialogue between Lafeu and Bertram. Parolles' phatic interruptions should be interpreted as desperate attempts to have himself treated on equal terms by the two aristocrats, who obviously ignore, unless openly reject, his participation in their discussion.
Another linguistic criterion that is relevant for the description of mimicking acts in the process of linguistic communication is the number of agents participating in the dialogue and the relationships established among them. The simplest relationship is the one way mimicry, expressed through the formula A->B. This means that B consciously or unwittingly mimics A's speech. Ironic and parodistic mimicry, persuasive mimicry, and linguistic contamination best illustrate this kind of relationship.
But linguistic mimicry can also be a reciprocal action, in which case we can apply the formula A->B, B->A. This is the type of mimicry preferred by Shakespeare, especially in his famous scenes opposing men and women in their battles of wits. The whole plot of The Taming of the Shrew revolves around the verbal clashes between Petruchio and Katharina. Shakespeare later revived the two of them in Much Ado about Nothing, in the guise of Benedick and Beatrice, much to the delight of the Elizabethan audience. Here is a brief excerpt illustrating mutual mimicry:
BENEDICK: Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.
BEATRICE: A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.
BENEDICK: I would my horse had the speed of your tongue [.].
BEATRICE: You always end with a jade's trick. (I. 1. 105-8)
Mimicry in Shakespeare's plays is not confined to the two aforementioned models (one-way and mutual ones). Sometimes more complicated communication patterns emerge from the rules of ceremonial rituals, as in the trial-by-combat in Richard II. Here, the Lord Marshall acts as a go-between, as the King does not address himself to his vassals. What we have is an A->B->C sequence, as in the lines below:
KING RICHARD: Marshal, demand of yonder champion
The cause of his arrival here in arms:
Ask him his name and orderly proceed
To swear him in the justice of his cause.
LORD MARSHAL: In God's name and the king's, say who thou art
And why thou comest thus knightly clad in arms,
Against what man thou comest, and what thy quarrel:
Speak truly, on thy knighthood and thy oath;
And so defend thee heaven and thy valour!
(I. 3. 7-13 et seq.)
Shakespeare's chronicle plays abound in scenes in which messengers and ambassadors are the bearers of an off-stage monarch's words. They resume the words of the absent addresser in what might be expressed as (A)->B->C, which reverts to C->B->(A) when the respective herald, ambassador or messenger is sent back to his employer. King John, Edward III, and Henry V have memorable encounters between English and/or French kings and/or ambassadors. But the ritualistic use of the A->B->C type of mimicry engendered by the presence of an intermediary also occurs in comedies (Love's Labour's Lost, V. 2), problem plays (Troilus and Cressida, III. 3) and romances (Pericles, II. 3). In all of these plays kings and princesses speak obliquely via an intermediary, avoiding direct verbal collision with their interlocutors.
As You Like It has a unique scene in which mimicry becomes contagious and several characters get instantly infected with it. 'Chain reaction' is the term that best describes the response elicited by Silvius' declaration of love for Phebe:
SILVIUS: [Love] is to be all made of sighs and tears; and so am I for Phebe.
PHEBE: And I for Ganymede.
ORLANDO: And I for Rosalind.
ROSALIND: And I for no woman.
SILVIUS: It is to be all made of faith and service; and so am I for Phebe.
PHEBE: And I for Ganymede.
ORLANDO: And I for Rosalind.
ROSALIND: And I for no woman. (V. 2. 90-9)
The first two rounds of 'mass mimicry' are soon followed by a third round:
SILVIUS: And so am I for Phebe.
PHEBE: And so am I for Ganymede.
ORLANDO: And so am I for Rosalind.
ROSALIND: And so am I for no woman.
PHEBE: If this be so, why blame you me to love you?
SILVIUS: If this be so, why blame you me to love you?
ORLANDO: If this be so, why blame you me to love you?
ROSALIND: Who do you speak to, 'Why blame you me to love you?'
(V. 2. 105-13)
In the three rounds of spontaneous mass mimicry it is Silvius who introduces the message to be resumed by the other characters. The situation might be expressed as A->B->C->D->(E), in which A is Silvius, B is Phebe, C is Orlando, D is Rosalind passing as Ganymede, and E is both the audience and a split, self-communicating and self-mimicking Rosalind, who is talking to herself. At the middle of round three there is a turning point when Phebe takes over the role of the contaminating agent. Each question is specifically addressed to just one of the characters on stage. Phebe's question targets Rosalind, Silvius' targets Phebe, and Orlando, rather uncannily, speaks to an absent Rosalind, or, maybe, to a surrogate of hers, a boy named Ganymede. This slip of tongue may fuel the perverse imagination of gender critics, but I shall take it as yet another case of linguistic contamination.
I shall conclude this course presentation with an ontological approach to mimicry. Within their fictional world, Shakespeare's characters imitate both 'real' and 'imaginary' people. In the 'reality' of their world, the 'real' characters imitate 'what is or is not', as Ulysses puts it in Troilus and Cressida. In the opening of 1 Henry IV, Prince Hal warns the audience that he 'will imitate the sun / Who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world' (I. 2. 220-2). That is, his apprenticeship in the London underground is just a strategic move aimed at concealing his real value. Grown a wise king, the same character will instigate the English troops to 'imitate the action of a tiger' during the siege of Harfleur (Henry V, III. 1. 6). Viola in Twelfth Night self-consciously refashions herself taking her lost brother as a model: '. he went / Still in this fashion, colour, ornament, / For him I imitate (III. 4. 416-8)'. Imitation is not always a virtue. It may be a sign of servile attitude. Mark Antony criticises Lepidus as a barren-spirited fellow always ready to imitate other people's fashions (Julius Caesar, IV. 1. 36-9). York in Richard II likewise complains about 'our apish nation' addicted to the 'base imitation' of Italian fashions (II. 1. 21-3).
All these imitators and imitated non-objects or actions are 'real' in their fictional world, but in All's Well That Ends Well Parolles is threatened to death by would-be 'enemies' that speak a fictional, existent language. We come across a situation of 'fiction within fiction'. Shakespeare's characters become themselves dramatists that, quoting Theseus' famous lines, 'give to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name' (A Midsummer Night's Dream, V. 1. 16-7). The 'things unknown' referred to by Theseus are the potential things theorised by Aristotle, those possible things opposed to actual ones, or those that do not exist in fact but are capable of being or becoming (Metaphysics, IX. 3). Rosalind, Viola, and Julia mimic the language or speech of potential beings that belong to existing social categories (pages, shepherds). Unlike Plato, who upheld the idea that poets were irrational vessels, Aristotle considered them skilled craftsmen. In Metaphysics (IX. 5), Aristotle referred to the 'existent capabilities acquired through learning' and listed 'artistic skills' among these capabilities. Whenever self-consciously employed, linguistic mimicry is the result of learning, of the experience acquired in everyday life. Man's identity depends on language. Man is what he speaks and how he speaks. Man is eager to learn, to evolve. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is ready to write down the words used by Viola and to start practising their usage (Twelfth Night, III. 1). Justice Shallow is likewise ready to enrich his vocabulary and learn through imitation whenever he has an opportunity:
BARDOLPH: Sir, pardon: a soldier is better accommodated than with a wife.
SHALLOW: It is well said, in faith, sir, and it is well said indeed. 'Better accommodated!' It is good, yea, indeed is it; good phrases are surely, and ever, very commendable. 'Accommodated' - it comes of 'accommodo'; very good, a good phrase.
(2 Henry IV, III. 2. 72-9)
Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Justice Shallow probably reflect the very habit of Elizabethan playwrights of learning from one another, of borrowing and storing the impressive phrases they heard in the public theatres. Writing plays was not just a matter of natural born talent, but also a matter of Aristotelian skills and craftsmanship, which relied very much on the 'commonplace book method' of the age. And the characters of Shakespeare's plays, with their unusual (which has turned out to be, actually, a usual human feature) inclination for imitation, turn out to be a mixed species of homo sapiens and homo ludens.
Evaluation
The students will have to read the plays All's Well That Ends Well and Cymbeline, and write a personal commentary on two or three excerpts in which they have detected instances of linguistic mimicry. The passages must be other than those discussed in my study 'Methinks You're Better Spoken'. For less inspired students, I have in store a written test consisting of two or three excerpts from Shakespeare's plays, which they will have to comment upon. I do not completelz rule out the possibility of a multiple choice test in case such a test will be considered obligatory by the Senate of the University.
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