Lingue e Linguaggi Lingue Linguaggi 13 (2015), 211-225 ISSN 2239-0367, e-ISSN 2239-0359 DOI 10.1285/i22390359v13p211 http://siba-ese.unisalento.it, © 2015 Università del Salento BABEL ON THE BATTLEFIELD Englishing the French in Shakespeare’s Henry V DAVID LUCKING UNIVERSITY OF SALENTO Abstract. This paper examines Shakespeare’s Henry V from the perspective of the play’s deep concern with languages and with the dynamics of their interaction. The drama is characterised by linguistic heterogeneity of various kinds, from the blatant bilingualism that sets it apart from other plays in the canon, to the welter of re- gional dialects, personal idiolects, and stylistic registers that are also played off against one another within it. At the same time as it enacts a confrontation between the English and French tongues, and the mentalities and cul- tural perspectives they respectively encode, it also juxtaposes different voices articulating contrasting evalua- tions of events and discrepant perceptions of the protagonist himself. The linguistic multiplicity of the play is therefore part and parcel of the ambivalence of attitude with which recent criticism of the play has increasingly been concerned. At the same time, it also implicates issues having to do with translation and other forms of cul- tural negotiation, as well as those of names and of the mechanisms through which these are conferred. If on the one hand the king is implicitly attempting to establish linguistic uniformity through his military conquest of France, he is unable to curb the tendency towards linguistic fragmentation that is manifest among his own sub- jects and even in his own use of language. Keywords: Shakespeare, Henry V. 1. At a certain moment on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, the Welsh captain Fluellen, one of the exiguous “band of brothers” preparing to take on the full might of the French army in Shakespeare’s Henry V (4.3.60), indignantly censures a fellow officer for the excessive volume at which he is speaking. As is his pedantic wont, he cites the example of Pompey the Great as a model of military decorum in such matters, reminding his colleague that there was “no tiddle-taddle nor pibble-pabble in Pompey’s camp” (4.1.71–72). Fluellen does not manage to enunciate the word babble correctly, because more often than not he pronounces the letter b as p, and editors have made different decisions as to how the spellings should be rendered in a modern edition of the play. 1 But such confusion is perhaps part of the point, or at least is something that can be adduced to illustrate a point. Babbling of green fields is what, if Malone’s generally accepted emendation of the Folio text is correct, 2 Falstaff is doing in the last hours before he dies in indirect consequence—or so at least his friends believe—of his having been cast off by the newly crowned King Henry (2.3.16–17). Henry’s attempt to bring order and moral clarity into his life has entailed the suppression of alternative voices, including those seductive but anarchic voices represented by Falstaff, and 1 Thus while the New Arden Edition of the play renders the words as “no tiddle taddle nor pibble babble” ( ed. Walter 1993), they appear as “no tiddle-taddle nor pibble-babble” in the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works (eds Wells and Taylor 2006). 2 See the New Arden Edition of Henry V, note to 2.3.17.