Many-headed Multitude of Shakespeare’s Language
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The registers and voices that Shakespeare’s characters are engaged in and possessed of combine in a polyphony of the dramatic text (cf. Serpieri’s Polifonia shakespeariana, 2002). The languages characters use reflect the roles they play. These would be the realistic assumptions. However, characters are also metaphorical bearers of ulterior impulses and motifs, which in turn possess them and dictate their utterances. On the example of The Merry Wives of Windsor, judged against its various translations, the paper proposes to show a manipulative interpretation of the play. This is play of metamorphosis, where Falstaff goes through a number of disguises – be they self-induced or enforced – and where the comical figure of Miss Quickly has a courtly soliloquy on the mysticism of the Order of the Garter. These multiple voices are realistically inconsistent yet constitute the play’s texture (texture in both its common as well as its etymological sense of interwoven threads). |
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