The Place of French in England

Abstract

One of the more unusual methods of this book is to use the graphic typography of non-literary books, particularly French primers, to provide insight into Shakespeare’s staging of England and France. Such an effort requires some methodological groundwork. By now, there is nothing particularly shocking about the idea of working across the anachronistic boundary that we now see between “literary” and “non-literary” texts, but the kind of work practiced in this study is relatively original, so the broad logic employed here needs to be clarified. This chapter addresses some fundamental aspects of this method, including the social history of London in relation to some of these books, as well as current trends in postcolonial, feminist and queer approaches to issues of interlinguistic contact. The goal of this chapter is to assess some of the problems scholars have encountered in using a postcolonial method to approach the Anglo-French relationship and to argue for a method that focuses in part on French primers and draws less from postcolonial theory and more from Lacanian concepts, economic criticism and feminist theory.