Playing Dumb: Diplomacy and Dramatized Multilingualism in Thomas Heywood’s If you know not me, you know nobody, part 2 - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus Année : 2021

Playing Dumb: Diplomacy and Dramatized Multilingualism in Thomas Heywood’s If you know not me, you know nobody, part 2

Résumé

Contrasting Thomas Heywood’s diplomatic scenes in If you know not me, you know no bodie or The Troubles of the Queene Elizabeth (1605), with Francis Thynne’s The Perfect Ambassadour (1578) and Jean Hotman’s The Ambassador (1603), this study considers, with Peter Burke, language culture “in terms of linguistic, cultural and social conflicts as well as of collective solidarities and identities”. It approaches languages in terms of communities as loci of construction and reconstruction of national and territorial identities. Observing Heywood’s Latin-based diplomatic multilingualism, this article examines the process of delocalizing one’s language into a linguistic other and its physical re-localizing on the stage. It probes how diplomatic multilingualism reflects the difficult construction of the English self at the turn of the seventeenth century in terms of absorptiveness and defiance. It analyses how it dramatises the English ambivalence regarding the concepts of community and commonwealth. The first section examines the use of foreign languages in early modern English diplomacy and posits that, after Thynne’s reflection on diplomatic multilingualism, Elizabeth’s Latin should be construed as an object of a proto soft power. Heywood’s transfer of Elizabeth’s diplomatic multilingualism on the stage partakes of a cultural strategy. Thus the article shows how Heywood paradoxically recreates diplomatic otherness as local language. Lastly, it assesses the concord provided by Elizabeth’s stage multilingualism as coercive and potentially inefficient if not handled with measure.

Dates et versions

hal-04353457 , version 1 (19-12-2023)

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Citer

Nathalie Rivere de Carles. Playing Dumb: Diplomacy and Dramatized Multilingualism in Thomas Heywood’s If you know not me, you know nobody, part 2. Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus, 2021, 10, pp.93-109. ⟨10.4000/asf.1149⟩. ⟨hal-04353457⟩
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