In the chapter on foreigners in Keywords of Identity, Race and Human Mobility in Early Modern England, Nandini Das and others explain that in early modern England, the identity category of ‘foreigner’ was thought of in three ways: those with a place of origin outside of England, those spiritually estranged from God by way of not being a Christian, and those living in a different part of England than the one they were born in. They highlight that those who had entered England from abroad (and who we would nowadays most readily identify using the term ‘foreigner’) were primarily categorised as ‘stranger’ and instead, the term ‘foreigner’ more commonly ‘referred to a domestic migrant…[who had] moved from one parish or county to the other’.1 William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the anonymous ‘Dutch Church Libel’ of 1593 are both texts that represent difference and reflect the English preoccupation with the figure of the foreigner. But where the representation of foreigners in the ‘Dutch Church Libel’ is one of unequivocal demonisation, by configuring foreignness in more complicated ways, Love’s Labour’s Lost challenges the wholly negative conceptualisation of those deemed foreigners and complicates the identity category of ‘foreigner’ altogether.
The anonymously authored ‘Dutch Church Libel’ is explicit in its xenophobia, employing anti-Semitic tropes to represent the Protestant Dutch community of London as pests. The author depicts the Dutch as such through the repeated imagery of eating and ruination, writing that ‘like the Jews, you eat us up as bread’ and ‘with our store, continually you feast’.2 By choosing bread as the food to liken English consumption by the Dutch to, the poet evokes rodents, figuring the community as pests. This motif is continued by the description of the English supply as a ‘store’, indicative of a state of food scarcity in the country. The poet therefore vilifies the Dutch, representing their relationship to the English as parasitic, which the repetition of the verbs of reception ‘eat’ and ‘feast’ alongside the absence of verbs of giving demonstrates. The connotations of overindulgence carried by the word ‘feast’ further vilifies the Dutch by characterising them as intemperate, and therefore more egregious given the scarcity being experienced by the English. The poet emphasises the disparity in the English and Dutch quality of life through the juxtaposition of the Dutch’s feasting with the starvation of the ‘poor [English] artificers’ (l. 25). Thus, through the binaries of eating and starvation, and prosperity and suffering, the poet creates a correlation between the prosperity of the Dutch and the ruin of the English, representing the Dutch negatively.
The poem’s mercantile focus, demonstrated by the prominence of words denoting trade such as ‘markets’ (l. 10) and ‘retails’ (l.12) reflects the pre-eminence of Dutch migrants in the London economy of the late 1500s. Lien Bich Luu notes that the idea that foreigners were responsible for the financial suffering of natives was acutely felt, writing:
It was believed that strangers caused unemployment among native craftsmen because many of them ‘have introduced foreign Fashions and Inventions, to the Ruin of the honest English handicrafts Tradesman’. It was also thought that native English craftsmen were unable to find work in the new trades, because aliens were unwilling to impart their skills and trade secrets.3
This sentiment is mirrored in the poem’s lament that the English ‘cannot now be set on work’ (l. 26) because the Dutch merchant
doth engross all kinds of wares,
Forestalls the markets wheresoe’er he goes,
Sends forth his wares by pedlars to the fairs
Retails at home, and with his horrible shows
Undoth thousands. (ll. 9-12)
Through the internal rhyme of ‘wares’ and ‘fairs’, ‘home’ and ‘shows’, the poet characterises Dutch trading as well-organised, thus capitalising on the English fear of their own commercial defunction to reinforce the perceived threat posed by the Dutch. This is exacerbated by the repetition of verbs (‘Forestalls’, ‘sends forth’, ‘retails’) which indicate the Dutch’s proactivity, and by the notion of Dutch exclusivity in trading as suggested by the line ‘Retails at home’. The sibilance also figures the Dutch as serpentine and the phrase ‘wheresoe’er he goes’ heightens the poet’s sense of victimhood by conveying the certainty of English suffering at the hands of the Dutch. This sense of suffering is reinforced by the repeated use of ‘And’ to begin lines throughout the poem, which emphasises the multiplication of injuries inflicted by the Dutch to the English in the poet’s eyes. In its vitriolic representation of Protestant Dutch migrants, The ‘Dutch Church Libel’ suggests the synonymy of ‘foreigner’ with ‘enemy’ in the English imagination, implying that the native-foreigner relationship in the 1590s was exclusively hostile.
Unlike the ‘Dutch Church Libel’, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, foreignness is not entirely defined by place of origin and the play’s principal foreigners—the Spaniard Don Adriano de Armado and the French princess and her ladies-in-waiting — are not represented wholly negatively. One of the ways foreignness is configured in the play is through characters’ use of language, with linguistic excess signalling the foreign and the artificial, and plain language symbolising the normative. By using binary opposition, Shakespeare immediately presents the French women as what the Navarrese men should be. The women are masculinised and therefore positioned as reasonable through their pragmatism (symbolised by their hunting and living outdoors for the duration of the play) and the plainness of their language in contrast to the feminine contemplativeness embraced by the men in their dedication to studying.
Shakespeare illustrates the women’s normativity through the Princess’ characterisation of Armado’s letter as the work of a ‘plume of feathers’, a ‘vane’ and a ‘weathercock’, demonstrating her disdain for excessive language and false learnedness.4 As the women’s stance against the men’s affectations is the position favoured by the play, which the humiliation of the men by the end of the play demonstrates, by having the Princess voice disapproval of the male characters’ self-indulgence, Shakespeare therefore identifies the women with the ‘proper’. Thus, despite being foreigners through their French origins, by centering the women as the play’s only conventional characters, Shakespeare destabilises the reader’s and the audience member’s inclination to read foreignness and the foreign body negatively.
Further, Shakespeare imbues the French women with the ability to radically transform the men. As Molly Clark observes, the play does not end with a full ‘linguistic reformation’ on the men’s part, which Berowne’s use of ‘sans’ in his speech renouncing affectation indicates.5 However, while this is true, the play does end with a tonal shift, with the men’s language becoming more beautiful under the influence of the women. At the beginning of the play Shakespeare presents the men’s choice to abstain from women in favour of studying as not only counterintuitive, but also counterproductive through Berowne’s statement that while study ‘doth study to have what it would, | It doth forget to do the thing it should’ (1.1141-42), signalling its futility in comparison to the fruits of the natural relationship between men and women. Although Berowne’s language here reflects the sharpness of his wit, which he repeatedly demonstrates through his wordplay throughout the play, it is also notably devoid of poeticism. That by the end of the play, Berowne is describing women’s eyes as ‘the books, the arts, the academes | That show, contain and nourish all the world’ (4.3.321-22) and expressing that a lover will be able to ‘gaze an eagle blind’ and ‘hear the lowest sound’ (4.3.303-4) is therefore remarkable not because it reflects a linguistic reformation in the sense of removal of excess entirely, but rather because it is demonstrative of a creative quality which Shakespeare portrays as exclusively generated by the women’s presence.
Shakespeare characterises the women’s influence as supernatural in that it imparts ‘in every power a double power | Above their functions and their offices’ (4.3.295-301). By demonstrating that the visiting women are able to inspire in the men feelings that result in a creative capacity which supersedes that which could have resulted from the men’s sole dedication to studying, Shakespeare further elevates the foreigner to a high status.
In an analysis of Richard Verstegen’s complaints against the importation of foreign words into the English language, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton writes that ‘extravagancy might be taken as the defining condition of the stranger’.6 This is evident in Armado, whose linguistic excessiveness specifically distinguishes him from the noblemen. The King’s description of Armado to his peers centres on Armado’s use of ‘fire-new words’ (1.1.176) as the result of his being well-travelled, highlighting his foreignness. However, that the ‘extravagancy’ of the stranger, as Tudeau-Clayton terms it, also applies to Holofernes, a Navarrese schoolmaster suggests that class is more significant than ethnicity or cultural background in the play’s othering of its characters. Holofernes’ speech, like Armado’s, is marked by synonymy such as ‘terra, the soil, the land, the earth’ (4.2.6) and the use of Latin words. But where Armado’s use of foreign words is limited and is indicative of his his ethnic origin, as the wordplay of ‘juvenal’ and ‘signior’ in his introductory conversation with Moth depicts (1.1.7-11), Holofernes’ use of foreign words is exaggerated to disparage his social climbing tendencies as shown by the ‘feast of languages’ (5.1.32) scene. For example, in a scene in which he speaks only twenty lines, Holofernes uses foreign words and phrases in nine of those lines, opting, for instance, for ‘pueritia’ (5.1.42), ‘sans question’ (5.1.70), and ‘Allons’ (5.1.123) instead of their English alternatives. Shakespeare’s use of irony in this scene foregrounds Holofernes’ pretentiousness, pushing Armado, the actual foreigner, to the background. This presents Holofernes as the primary linguistic transgressor, thereby designating him, rather than Armado, as the ‘foreigner’. By ridiculing Holofernes, the play depicts how easily someone’s native status can be eroded by their self-fashioning choices as through their use of language, the play’s natives are transformed into foreigners alongside those who are marked as foreign by their different cultural backgrounds.
The multiple ways foreigners are depicted in the ‘Dutch Church Libel’ and Love’s Labour’s Lost reflects the varied ways in which foreignness was conceived of and the complexity of attitudes towards foreigners in early modern England. While the way the ‘Dutch Church Libel’ represents foreigners showcases the vitriol that foreigners were often subjected to, in the Frenchwomen’s ushering in the restoration of heteronormative desire and pragmatism over the ‘unnaturalness’ of homosociality, the foreigner of Love’s Labour’s Lost represents the arrival of what were deemed the positive contributions of foreign cultures to England. Further, that the excess of the other foreign character, Armado, is mirrored (if not exceeded) by the native Holofernes mitigates a wholly unsympathetic reading of Armado’s status as a foreigner. By figuring foreignness primarily through one’s conformity to the established order rather than exclusively through place of origin, Love’s Labour’s Lost more holistically reflects London’s relationship to its foreign population in the 1590s than the ‘Dutch Church Libel’.
Bibliography
Anon., ‘Dutch Church Libel’, 1593
Clark, Molly, ‘Close Reading: A Couplet From Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare, 18 (2022), 319-321
Das, Nandini, and others, ‘Foreigner’ in Identity, Race and Human Mobility in Early Modern England (Loction: Amsterdam University Press, 2021) pp. 109-115
Griffin, Eric, ‘Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Stranger Crisis of the Early 1590s’ in Shakespeare and Immigration, ed. by David Ruiter and Ruben Espinosa (London: Routledge, 2014) pp. 13-36
Luu, Lien Bich, ‘Migration and change: Religious refugees and the London economy, 1550-1600’, Critical Survey, 8 (1996), 93-102
Shakespeare, William, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. by William C. Carroll, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, ‘Shakespeare’s extravagancy’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 23 (2005), 165-183
- Nandini Das and others, ‘Foreigner’ in Identity, Race and Human Mobility in Early Modern England (Loction: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), pp. 109-115 (p. 109).
↩︎ - Anon, ‘Dutch Church Libel’, 1593, l. 8; l. 24. Subsequent references to be made in text.
↩︎ - Lien Bich Luu, ‘Migration and change: Religious refugees and the London economy, 1550-1600’, Critical Survey, 8 (1996), pp. 93-102 (p. 97).
↩︎ - William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. by William C. Carroll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4.1.87-88. Subsequent references to this edition to be made in text.
↩︎ - Molly Clark, ‘Close Reading: A Couplet From Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare, 18 (2022), 319-321 (321).
↩︎ - Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Shakespeare’s extravagancy’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 23 (2005), 165-183 (172).
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