SHAKESPEARE ON MONOGLOTS
March 22, 2010
Following my last post, I came across this while reading Shakespeare's only play about financial services, ‘The Merchant of Venice'. Portia is talking to her maid, Nerissa, about the suitors from foreign countries she has met. The German is a drunk, the Frenchman is too cold, and so on; but of the UK suitors, it goes like this:
"Nerissa: What say you, then, to Falconbridge, the young baron
of England?
Portia: You know I say nothing to him, for he understands
not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latin, French,
nor Italian, and you will come into the court and
swear that I have a poor pennyworth in the English.
He is a proper man's picture, but, alas, who can
converse with a dumb-show? How oddly he is
suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his
round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany
and his behavior every where.
Nerissa: What think you of the Scottish lord, his
neighbour?
Portia: That he hath a neighbourly charity in him, for he
borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman and
swore he would pay him again when he was able.
I think the Frenchman became his surety and sealed
under for another. "
The Englishman is so monoglot that he is dismissed for his incapacity to communicate, as a ‘dumb show'; and the Scotsman is diverted from his suit by his arguments with the English. So our relative lack of appetite for learning others' languages is far from new.
Owen
