The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0190 Monday, 31 January 2000.
[1] From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 28 Jan 2000 13:41:45 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
[2] From: David Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 28 Jan 2000 13:18:15 -0600
Subj: Re: SHK 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
[3] From: William Sutton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 28 Jan 2000 15:01:01 -0800 (PST)
Subj: Re: SHK 11.0173 Re: Shakespeare's French
[4] From: Andrew Gurr <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 29 Jan 2000 16:13:41 +0000 (GMT)
Subj: Re: SHK 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: W. L. Godshalk <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 28 Jan 2000 13:41:45 -0500
Subject: 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
Comment: Re: SHK 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
Dave Evett suggests:
> It would, of course, have been
>possible for Shakespeare to write out the scene in English and get
>somebody like John Florio (a patronee of Southampton, and whose
>translation of Montaigne Sh. seems to have seen before it was published,
>and hence proposed as a friend or acquaintance by many scholars) to
>translate it into English-or for Shakespeare to have written it in bad
>French (the way one does who has primarily a reading knowledge) and
>somebody to have fixed it up before it was performed/printed.
And I ask: didn't Shakespeare live with a French family in London for a
time? I don't have the dates in memory, but this would give Shakespeare
a French connection.
Yours, Bill Godshalk
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 28 Jan 2000 13:18:15 -0600
Subject: 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
Comment: Re: SHK 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
Brian Vickers wrote:
> Many years ago - well, not that many - J. W. Lever showed that the
> French scenes in Henry V displayed Shakespeare's knowledge of John
> Eliot's Ortho-epia Gallica, or Eliot's Fruits for the French (1593). Cf.
> his essay "Shakespeare's French Fruits", Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953):
> 79-90, which illuminates many aspects of the play.
Lever also showed that Eliot's book influenced several other Shakespeare
plays, notably the Henry IV plays. Furthermore, there is plenty more
influence that Lever's short but useful article doesn't mention. The
influence of Eliot's book is all over The Rape of Lucrece (1594),
suggesting that Shakespeare had read it soon after it came out. Given
that Eliot's book was published by Shakespeare's Stratford contemporary
Richard Field (who also published Venus and Adonis and Lucrece), and
that Eliot himself was also from Warwickshire, it seems entirely
possible-perhaps even probable-that the two men knew each other
personally.
Dave Kathman
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: William Sutton <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 28 Jan 2000 15:01:01 -0800 (PST)
Subject: 11.0173 Re: Shakespeare's French
Comment: Re: SHK 11.0173 Re: Shakespeare's French
Hi Everyone,
Where did Sh. learn his French? The scenes from HV show anyone who
speaks French that it was neither brilliant nor was it a mere dozen or
so words plucked from a French dictionary of the time. My thoughts on
this are completely unprovable but what the hey.
The printer that Richard Field worked for was a French/Belgian Huguenot
named Vautrollier. He had a license to hire (top of my head work) I
believe six apprentices plus his wife, a skilled craftswoman and his two
sons. The press produced the English prayer book I believe as well as
works in Greek, Hebrew as well as English. Field was the only English
apprentice who later married the widow (daughter?).
Sh.'s first poem came from this press. It is generally believed he saw
it through the press.(?) I suggest mealtimes are an excellent place to
learn foreign languages, especially in a close knit long term group of
workers. Any person speaking two or more languages will tell you how the
snowball effect of learning is a gradual and not an isolated process.
Then I naturally see the Montaigne/Florio connection, the Huguenot
tiremaker's who Sh. lodged with and testified on behalf of make to me
more sense.
I hope this stream of non verifiable romantic inference hasn't made any
of you nauseous. Does anyone have a list of possible apprentices like
Mac P. Jackson supplied for G.Eld and his Sonnet compositors? Does
anyone have any information pinpointing Vautrollier? (I believe Dave
Kathman has some). Why do Shakespearian scholars spend so much time
debating -isms instead of sifting the available records? Are all the
records checked already?
There were a lot of Europeans in Elizabethan London. Was it Mariette
Chute who said you could learn some twenty languages? The french word
book facsimile I saw at the Univ of A'dam had phrases like 'do you like
to be tickled?' The bilboe is not far away.
Yours suggestively,
William S.
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Andrew Gurr <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Saturday, 29 Jan 2000 16:13:41 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
Comment: Re: SHK 11.0185 Re: Shakespeare's French
Please note that Shakespeare lodged with a Huguenot family, so didn't
need to get anyone outside the house to translate any French for him.
Andrew Gurr