A Great Feast of Languages: The Translator

The Translator
ISSN: 1355-6509 (Print) 1757-0409 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrn20
A Great Feast of Languages

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Comedy in ‘King Henry V’ and the Translator
Dirk Delabastita
To cite this article: Dirk Delabastita (2002) A Great Feast of Languages, The Translator, 8:2,
303-340, DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2002.10799136
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2002.10799136
Published online: 21 Feb 2014.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 414
View related articles
Citing articles: 5 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtrn20
The Translator. Volume 8, Number 2 (2002), 303-340 ISBN 1-900650-58-4
A Great Feast of Languages

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Comedy in ‘King Henry V’
and the Translator
DIRK DELABASTITA
FUNDP Namur, Belgium
Abstract. Shakespeare’s ‘King Henry V’ is a play which exploits
multilingualism for both comic and non-comic purposes. These
various functions are described before the paper moves on to ex-
plore the unique challenges that this polyglot play poses to the
translator. Special attention is given to the rendering of the French-
English bilingual comic scenes into French. Given that much of
Shakespeare’s joking in ‘Henry V’ involves national stereotyping
and serves a nationalistic agenda, the translators have understand-
ably been swayed in their choices by political sensitivities, but a
range of other factors play a role as well (knowledge of foreign
languages, historical connotations attached to languages, con-
ventions for language representation, translation norms, textual
norms, etc.). The complexity of the field of forces and pressures
surrounding the translator is such as to cast doubt on the notion
of a ‘general’ theory of humour and (its) translation. We need
further empirical study of texts and contexts, involving a cautious
interpretation of possible reasons and possible effects.*
Shakespeare’s Henry V from 1599 describes the successful French campaign

of King Henry V, culminating in the miracle victory of Agincourt (1415).
The play basically dramatizes historical facts, but, as usual, Shakespeare
granted himself considerable poetic licence. In act one, learned clergymen
provide Henry with a legal justification or pretext for his claim to the French
throne. Henry’s resolve is further strengthened by the French ambassadors
who bring him tennis balls from the Dauphin, a gift that scornfully alludes to
Henry’s frivolous youth. Act two begins in London, where Pistol, Nym and
Bardolph learn from Nell that their (and the King’s) old crony Falstaff has
just died. The three of them decide to follow the King to France, hoping for
*
Thanks are due to Delphine Piraprez (FUNDP) for her bibliographical assistance, to
Georges Legros (FUNDP) for help with the French dialects, and to Ton Hoenselaars (Uni-
versity of Utrecht) for various inspiring suggestions. Source-text quotations are from Craik
(1995).
ISSN 1355-6509 © St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

304 A Great Feast of Languages
the spoils of war. Before sailing, Henry orders the execution of three English
noblemen – Cambridge, Grey and Scroop – who had accepted French bribes
to assassinate him. Act three describes the successful siege and occupation of
Harfleur. The French Princess Katherine has an English-vocabulary lesson
with her tutor Alice. Henry decides to take most of his men back to Calais to
recover from disease and fatigue, but on their way, near Agincourt, they find
themselves facing a formidable French force. Act four shows the different
attitudes on either side the night before the battle: soberness and responsibil-
ity on the English side, overconfidence and vanity on the French. The English
defeat the French against all odds. In act five, Captain Fluellen forces the
swaggering Pistol to eat the leek (national emblem of Wales) which he had
earlier derided. His old mates Nym and Bardolph having been hanged for
theft, Pistol slinks back to England. The wooing scene between Henry and
Katherine and the outcome of the peace talks show the King equally victori-
ous in love and warfare, providing a triumphal conclusion.
1. History, language(s) and comedy
Henry V is a history play, i.e. a play depicting scenes from the life of an il-
lustrious historical character and using the past as a source of insight and
guidance for the present. Many plays of this typically Elizabethan genre dealt
with England’s troubled recent past: the Wars of the Roses and its precedents.
The genre rose into prominence after the Armada’s defeat in 1588 and soon
proved hugely productive, illustrating the upsurge of nationalistic feeling in
that period, as well as the cultural anxieties that accompanied it. A lot has
been written about the genre’s ambivalent complicity with the so-called Tu-
dor myth (the royal house of Tudor had brought unity and national greatness
to England after the bloody Wars of the Roses and the Tudors’ role as na-
tional saviours and their acts of valour and piety should wipe out the memory
of any past faults and the lingering doubts about the legitimacy of their rule).
Formally speaking, the genre was rather loosely defined, with some his-
tory plays tending more to comedy (e.g. Henry IV, Part two) and others to
tragedy (e.g. Richard III). While Henry V is a fairly serious play, whose theme
and general atmosphere have even caused it to be described as a kind of a
national epic, there are also several comic scenes in the play. Falstaff, who
was so central to the comedy in Henry IV, Part two (as well as in The Merry
Wives of Windsor), dies off-stage at the beginning of the play, quite heart-
broken after his rejection by Henry, who dumped his old mates to rise to the
challenge of a splendid kingship. With Falstaff gone, the comedy in Henry V
rests mainly on the following characters: Nym, Bardolph, Nell and especially
Pistol (who is the only one of Henry’s former pals to survive until the end of
the play); Fluellen (to a slighter extent also Jamy and Macmorris), the brave
and loyal Welsh captain, hot-tempered but slightly simple-minded; Katherine
Dirk Delabastita 305
and Alice, who butcher the English language in the vocabulary lesson scene
as well as in the wooing scene; and Burgundy (a French nobleman), who
engages with Henry in a series of bawdy double-entendres at the end of the
wooing scene.
What is particularly interesting from a translation viewpoint is Shake-
speare’s ample use of national stereotypes, regional stage dialects and different
languages. The lowlife characters speak an English whose special flavour
owes more to class dialect than to regional dialect, while also displaying a
fondness for learned words and foreign phrases. Fluellen, Jamy and
Macmorris, who are meant to embody the typical Welshman, Scotsman and
Irishman respectively, are not heard in their own Celtic languages, but they
speak the regional English accent typical of their home country. Katherine
and Alice speak either their native French or poor English; and so forth and
so on. In fact, Henry V has been called “arguably one of the most babylonian
texts in the English language” (Hoenselaars 1999:xiv). As such, the play
acutely confronts translators with two questions that are in normal cases too
trivial to even think about: what language(s) does the text have to be trans-
lated from, and what language(s) does it have to be translated into? More
concretely, the notion of source language (SL) has to be broken down into
the following:
• SL Eng [now archaic]: in the majority of speech turns, Shakespeare

employs a ‘normal’ stage English, with of course variations depending
on character, class and circumstance; from the viewpoint of the text’s
later reception, it is worth noting that Shakespeare’s English has over
the centuries acquired an archaic flavour it didn’t possess initially;
• SL Eng [Fr]: in certain scenes, English is spoken by French characters
and correspondingly shows traces of linguistic interference (broken
English);
• SL Fr [Eng]: Henry and Pistol speak a few phrases in abominable French,
showing traces of linguistic interference in the opposite direction (bro-
ken French);
• SL Fr [now archaic]: in certain scenes, unmarked French is spoken by
the French characters; here too, it is worth noting that Shakespeare’s
French has meanwhile acquired an archaic flavour and shows a degree
of ungrammaticality it wasn’t meant to have initially;
• SL Eng [Welsh]: Fluellen, who is present in many scenes, speaks an
English which is strongly coloured by his Welsh provenance;
• SL Eng [Irish] and SL Eng [Scottish]: Macmorris and Jamy speak Eng-
lish with an Irish and a Scottish accent respectively;
• SL Latin: there are a few snatches of Latin, used as the medieval lingua
franca of law and religion; moreover, Pistol likes to show off the little
Latin that he has.
Pistol, furthermore, uses a few isolated loanwords (SL Spanish) and in scene
4.4 (partly quoted below) the French word qualité strikes him as so obscure
and cacophonous as to remind him of the equally incomprehensible refrain
of a popular Irish song (SL Irish).
2. Comic and other functions of the play’s multilingualism
Given the great number of dramatic situations in which different languages

and/or language varieties converge or clash, it is hazardous to attempt broad
generalizations about the functions of the multilingualism in Henry V. But
the risk has to be taken, for we know that translators tend to be alert to the
functions of ST items as much as to their intrinsic features.
2.1 The mimetic function
The production of humour is a prominent function of the multilingualism in

Henry V, but we must first of all acknowledge the importance of the mimetic
(historical, representational) function, which by adding ingredients such as
historical authenticity and couleur locale has to ensure that in the mind of the
spectator or reader there is conformity between the representing text and the
represented reality. Thus, the recourse to stage dialects and foreign languages
helps to give substance and credibility to individual characters and dramatic
situations. Consider for example the propensity of Nell to slip into mala-
propisms when she ventures beyond her habitual tavern vocabulary by using
Latin loanwords, or Pistol’s love of bombastic rhetoric which keeps him
quoting foreign phrases either within or beyond the pale of correctness and
relevance.
Fiction here draws on geolinguistic and sociolinguistic fact (even if we
allow for the effect of cliché and convention, which may create a wide gap
between real dialects and their representation on stage). The mimetic function
can only make individual characters and their personal verbal idiosyncrasies
come to life against the background of more collective linguistic norms,
defined in terms of social, regional or national identities. When characters
such as Fluellen or Katherine resort to ‘foreign’ languages or ‘funny’ accents,
this adds further strokes to their individual portraits in the play, but not without
simultaneously giving them a position and an identity in a wider spatio-
temporal setting which was known to be historically authentic. The campaign
of Henry V was part of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France
and it is therefore only appropriate that Shakespeare’s play should oppose
English-speaking against French-speaking characters. In the same way, it
hardly comes as a surprise that soldiers enlisted in the Celtic fringe speak
their regional accent. Henry V re-enacted historical events, rooted in authentic
settings, and not some imaginary romance set in a geographically or historically
remote world or in some fairy-tale wonderland.

Vehicular matching is the scholarly term that Meir Sternberg (1981)
coined for the mimetic technique I have just described, i.e. the allotment of
specific languages or language varieties to characters and groups of charac-
ters in accordance with the historical reality represented. As a mimetic device,
it helps to enhance the credibility of characters and dramatic situations.
Yet, vehicular matching is not universally favoured by authors, nor is it
indispensable to the aesthetic effect. This may be illustrated by most of the
Roman (e.g. Antony and Cleopatra) or Mediterranean plays (e.g. Romeo and
Juliet) in the Shakespearean canon, where English is used more or less through-
out, quite regardless of the demands of historical accuracy and geolinguistic
reality. Sternberg (1981) here speaks of the homogenizing convention: lin-
guistic difference within the fictional world is neutralized and dissolves in
monolingual discourse.1 We are dealing here with a non-mimetic policy, which
may entail the risk of a credibility gap appearing. But in such cases we can
usually fall back on the viewer’s or reader’s willing suspension of disbelief,
to use Coleridge’s famous phrase, by which is meant a temporary state of
impressionability and credulity, a willingness to suspend critical questions
and scepticism about truth and historical accuracy, making it possible to en-
ter the text’s fictional universe on its own terms. This mechanism frequently
has to come to the rescue in matters of linguistic policy. In films, for in-
stance, most of us are perfectly content to go along with such bizarre
phenomena as Ben Hur, Robin Hood, or aliens from outer space expressing
themselves in accent-free modern English. In such situations the English lan-
guage simply becomes language, functioning as a supposedly universal means
of self-expression and communication, rather than as the structurally and his-
torically specific polysystem that it really is.
For all its multilingualism and despite the many instances of vehicular
matching, Shakespeare’s Henry V, too, has abundant recourse to the homog-
enizing convention. Two main sets of cases have to be distinguished. First,
the French King, the Dauphin, and the other French noblemen in the play
normally express themselves in fluent and idiomatic English, not in French.
Metrical evidence would seem to suggest that Shakespeare actually intended
the actors performing their roles to deliver their lines in an accent-free man-
ner (Craik 1995:187). Moreover, their lines are rich in those two conventional
hallmarks of rhetorical skill, metaphor and wordplay. Shakespeare does give
his French noblemen a few isolated short stretches of text (e.g. oaths or ex-
clamations) in their native tongue. Such intermittent use of French has a signal
1
Besides vehicular matching and the homogenizing convention, Sternberg also distin-
guishes referential restriction (the text is monolingual quite simply because the social
milieu of the fictional world is monolingual), as well as the much rarer case of vehicular
promiscuity (shifts of linguistic medium are mimetically gratuitous, with multilingual
means being used to express monolingual realities).
value (‘remember that these are French noblemen’) and its function is to help
maintain the illusion of geolinguistic correctness.
Second, English is the sole linguistic medium in the various diplomatic
encounters, during which ambassadors and aristocrats from either side use
idiomatic English. There are no traces of linguistic interference or of any
form of cross-language mediation (through an interpreter, for example). But
would the French heralds have spoken English to the English? Even in Eliza-
bethan times, English was known to be an insular language, hardly known or
taught overseas. Whatever the exact historical reality of the cross-language
policies adopted by negotiators during the middle stage of the Hundred Years’
War, or the Elizabethan perception of that reality, it is clear that Shakespeare’s
monolingual account of the diplomatic proceedings can hardly be accurate in
mimetic terms. In these scenes Shakespeare invokes the homogenizing con-
vention and diverts attention from the language question altogether.
2.2 The comic function
The clash between (unmarked) English and its regional varieties, as well as
between English and the various foreign languages present in the play (French
especially), is systematically exploited to generate humour. This happens in
at least three different ways. First, there are a number of comic moments
which depend on a character’s utter ignorance of a foreign language, leading
to a breakdown of ‘normal’ linguistic behaviour, both semantically (form-
meaning relationships) and pragmatically (conversational rules), and
illustrating what Pierre Guiraud (1976:12) called the defunctionalization of
language. An amusing instance of this is to be found in scene 4.4, hence-
forth referred to as the surrender scene, where Pistol has just captured a
chicken-hearted Frenchman:
PISTOL: Yield, cur!

FRENCH SOLDIER: Je pense que vous êtes le gentilhomme de bonne
qualité.
PISTOL: Qualité? ‘Caleno custore me’!
Art thou a gentleman? What is thy name? Discuss.
FRENCH SOLDIER: O Seigneur Dieu!
PISTOL: O Signieur Dew should be a gentleman. [...]
FRENCH SOLDIER: O prenez miséricorde! Ayez pitié de moi!
PISTOL: Moy shall not serve, I will have forty moys,
Or I will fetch thy rim out at thy throat
In drops of crimson blood.
FRENCH SOLDIER: Est-il impossible d’échapper la force de ton
bras?
PISTOL: Brass, cur?
Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat,
Offer’st me brass?
FRENCH SOLDIER: O pardonnez-moi!

PISTOL: Say’st thou me so? Is that a ton of moys?
Come hither, boy;
Ask me this slave in French what is his name.
BOY: Écoutez. Comment êtes-vous appelé?
FRENCH SOLDIER: Monsieur le Fer.
BOY: He says his name is Master Fer.
PISTOL: Master Fer? I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him. Dis-
cuss the same in French unto him.
BOY: I do not know the French for fer, and ferret and firk.
PISTOL: Bid him prepare, for I will cut his throat.
FRENCH SOLDIER: Que dit-il, monsieur?
BOY: Il me commande à vous dire que vous faites vous prêt, car ce
soldat ici est disposé tout à cette heure de couper votre gorge.
PISTOL: Owy, cuppele gorge, permafoy [...] (4.4.1-37)
The entire exchange is propelled by a series of interlingual misunderstand-

ings finding their origin in Pistol’s ignorance of French (and in the French
soldier’s ignorance of English, of course). For Pistol, spoken French is ulti-
mately sound with no sense attached to it, strings of odd-sounding signifiers
severed from any signifieds and floating free in a space where anything can
mean anything. Pistol’s incomprehension of what the French soldier says
(compounded by his irritable temper, naturally, as well as by the limited span
of his memory) makes it impossible for him to remember or repeat anything
beyond the last few syllables of the various messages that his desperate French
prisoner tries to get across. It is those last syllables that Pistol concentrates all
his absurd interpretive efforts on, thereby investing his readings with the
strange self-confidence that only true simple-mindedness can breed. The dia-
logue uses the same pattern throughout: Pistol manages to pick up the last
words of the Frenchman and recovers them in English, making them comply
with the promptings of his greedy nature.
This gives rise to the following interlingual puns (also underlined in the
fragment quoted above): qualité (Fr. ‘quality’, ‘distinction’) # caleno custore
me (snatch of an Irish song); Seigneur Dieu (Fr. exclamation addressed to
God) # Signieur Dew (Eng. and pseudo-Fr. ‘lord Dew’, which Pistol takes to
be the prisoner’s name); moi (Fr. personal pronoun ‘me’) # moy (pseudo-Fr.
imagined name of a non-existent coin); bras (Fr. ‘arm’) # brass (Eng.);
pardonnez-moi (Fr. ‘spare me’) # a ton of moys (Eng. and pseudo-Fr.);
Monsieur le Fer, Master Fer (Fr. name, having the incongruous literal meaning
‘Mr Iron’ or ‘Mr Steel’) # fer (Eng. meaningless nonce word) # firk (Eng.
‘beat’) # ferret (Eng. ‘worry’). Semantic misunderstandings often breed
pragmatic misunderstandings. Thus, Pistol’s Seigneur Dieu # Signieur Dew
mistranslation involves not only a linguistically inane mismatching of sig-
nifiers and signifieds, but also a misconception of the French soldier’s intended
speech act, with Pistol taking the Frenchman’s despondent invocation of God’s
help to be a reply to his earlier command that the man should identify himself.
Pistol’s linguistic ignorance creates a world where we are freed from the
precepts of linguistic sense and conversational logic. Arbitrary coincidences
of sound are all that’s left to cement syntagmatic connections between words,
sentences and speech turns. This freedom of verbal association places Pistol
(and, vicariously, the reader or spectator) in a situation which is not unlike
that of the infant toying with sounds and exploring the possibilities of lan-
guage, quite unhampered by the rules and norms that society imposes on
language and its communicative uses. Such a regressive state and the social
transgressions that it accommodates have a pleasurable effect of psychical
relief, which Freud has described as an essential comic mechanism. This pleas-
ure is illustrated by the sheer gusto with which Pistol engages in the
sound-based ad-libbing of lines 4.4.29-30 (Fer, fer, firk, ferret).
Second, multilingualism and imperfect translation are also used in Henry
V to create a pretext and a context for sexual humour. To illustrate this I
shall quote part of the aforementioned English-lesson scene between Katherine
and Alice:
KATHERINE: [...] Je m’en fais la répétition de tous les mots que

vous m’avez appris dès à présent. [...] Écoutez: d’hand, de fingres, de
nails, de arm, de bilbow.
ALICE: D’elbow, madame.
KATHERINE: O Seigneur Dieu, je m’en oublie! D’elbow. Comment
appelez-vous le col?
ALICE: De nick, madame.
KATHERINE: De nick. Et le menton?
ALICE: De chin.
KATHERINE: De sin. Le col, de nick; le menton, de sin.
ALICE: Oui. Sauf votre honneur, en vérité, vous prononcez les mots
aussi droit que les natifs d’Angleterre.
KATHERINE: [...] Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe?
ALICE: De foot, madame, et de coun.
KATHERINE: De foot, et de coun? O Seigneur Dieu, ils sont les mots
de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames
d’honneur d’user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les sei-
gneurs de France pour tout le monde. Foh! De foot et de coun! [...]
(3.4.22-51)
While Katherine has very little English (she will make a quite remarkable
progress by the time we reach act five), modern EFL experts would probably
rate Alice’s command of the language somewhere closer to the intermediate
mark. The linguistic errors that are made between the two ladies occur mainly
at the level of phonetic realization (e.g. elbow ÷ bilbow, neck ÷ nick, chin
÷ sin, gown ÷coun) and do not show the flippancy of the lexical anything-
goes policy that exposes Pistol’s much grosser linguistic incompetence in

scene 4.4. In one case, the French ladies are conscious of the incongruity
between the two languages, namely where they cannot help noticing the awk-
ward sound resemblance between English foot and gown and French foutre
(‘fuck’) and con (‘cunt’). Note that the bilingual context of the vocabulary
lesson is in several ways crucial to this sexually loaded comic moment: with-
out it, these two French taboo words would never have entered the ladies’
polite conversation, to start with; the relative cleverness of the paired cross-
language association provides a Freudian forepleasure, making it possible to
enjoy the even greater pleasure that results from the temporary lifting of the
social taboo on sexuality; furthermore, the taboo words are suggested (in
broken English) rather than stated (in French), partly exonerating and partly
implicating those who author the joke and those who enjoy it; and, last but
not least, the mispronunciation à la française of foot and gown is required to
reduce as well as rationalize the considerable phonetic distance that sepa-
rates these words from French foutre and con respectively.
The scene may well contain more bawdy double-entendres. According to
Frankie Rubinstein’s Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns (1989:49),
the words neck/nick, chin and sin in this scene have sexual overtones (‘vulva’,
‘penis’ and ‘fornication’ respectively) which may have been beyond Alice
and Katherine but which would not have escaped an Elizabethan audience.
However, bawdy is often in the ear of the beholder. There are many other
commentators who fail to acknowledge any such further bawdy interpretations,
or who even positively dismiss them (e.g. Craik 1995:223), showing the hope-
less difficulty of the hermeneutic balancing act between under-reading and
over-reading.
I want to refer to one more example of a possible sexual joke, a monolin-
gual French one this time, occurring towards the end of the wooing scene in
act five, where Katherine and Alice explain to Henry that it is not customary
for unmarried ladies to be kissed in France. Some amusing embarrassment
may have followed from the fact that the French verb baiser (‘to kiss’) had
by the 16th century developed the secondary sense ‘to copulate’. It is hard to
say, however, to what extent this ambiguity would have been within the aver-
age Elizabethan’s understanding (see also Craik 1995:362). Since that time,
popular French usage has further consolidated the derived sense, causing polite
modern French to avoid the word altogether and to prefer embrasser to baiser
for ‘to kiss’ in most grammatical contexts. I shall now quote at length from
this scene, both for ease of later reference and to give the reader a taste of
Shakespeare’s extraordinary cocktail of English, French, Franglais and
Anglish (with puns underlined):
KATHERINE: Your majesty shall mock at me; I cannot speak your

England.
KING: O fair Katherine, if you will love me soundly with your French
heart I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English
tongue. Do you like me, Kate?
KATHERINE: Pardonnez-moi, I cannot tell vat is ‘like me’.
KING: An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel.
KATHERINE: Que dit-il, que je suis semblable à les anges?
ALICE: Oui, vraiment, sauf votre grâce, ainsi dit-il.
KING: I said so, dear Katherine, and I must not blush to affirm it.
KATHERINE: O bon Dieu, les langues des hommes sont pleines de
tromperies!
KING: What says she, fair one? That the tongues of men are full of
deceits?
ALICE: Oui, dat de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits: dat is de
Princess.
[deleted: lines 122-168]
KATHERINE: Is it possible dat I sould love de enemy of France?
KING: No, it is not possible you should love the enemy of France,
Kate: but in loving me you should love the friend of France; for I love
France so well that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all
mine: and Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, then yours is
France, and you are mine.
KATHERINE: I cannot tell vat is dat.
KING: No, Kate? I will tell thee in French, which I am sure will hang
upon my tongue like a new-married wife about her husband’s neck,
hardly to be shook off. Je, quand j’ai le possession de France, et quand
vous avez le possession de moi – let me see, what then? Saint Denis be
my speed! – donc votre est France, et vous êtes mienne. It is as easy
for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so much more French.
I shall never move thee in French, unless it be to laugh at me.
KATHERINE: Sauf votre honneur, le français que vous parlez, il est
meilleur que l’anglais lequel je parle.
KING: How answer you, la plus belle Katherine du monde, mon très
cher et divin déesse?
KATHERINE: Your majesty ‘ave fausse French enough to deceive
de most sage demoiselle dat is en France.
KING: Now fie upon my false French! By mine honour, in true Eng-
lish, I love thee, Kate [...]
KING: Therefore, queen of all, Katherine, break thy mind to me in
broken English: wilt thou have me?
KATHERINE: Dat is as it sall please le roi mon père.
KING: Nay, it will please him well, Kate; it shall please him, Kate.
KATHERINE: Den it sall also content me.
KING: Upon that I kiss your hand, and I call you my Queen.
KATHERINE: Laissez, mon seigneur, laissez, laissez! Ma foi, je ne

veux point que vous abaissiez votre grandeur en baisant la main d’une
de votre seigneurie indigne serviteur. Excusez-moi, je vous supplie,
mon très-puissant seigneur.
KING: Then I will kiss your lips, Kate.
KATHERINE: Les dames et demoiselles pour être baisées devant leurs
noces, il n’est pas la coutume de France.
KING: Madam my interpreter, what says she?
ALICE: Dat is not be de fashion pour les ladies of France – I cannot
tell vat is baiser en Anglish.
KING: To kiss.
ALICE: Your majesty entend bettre que moi.
KING: Is it not a fashion for the maids in France to kiss before they
are married, would she say?
ALICE: Oui, vraiment. (5.2.102-265)
This long quotation may also serve to illustrate a third way in which the
multilingualism of Henry V is harnessed as a comic device. There is a well-
established tradition in humour studies which emphasizes that humour can
arise from a sense of superiority or even aggression towards an individual
or group of individuals, serving as scapegoat or ‘butt of the joke’ (e.g. gays,
Jews, mothers-in-law). A similar effect seems to be at work here, as well as
in many other instances in the play. For reasons linked with their social (e.g.
Nell), regional (e.g. Fluellen) or national provenance (the French), certain
characters in the play are so blatantly and laughably incapable of speaking
English properly that spectators or readers will situate those characters out-
side the norm of linguistic correctness and place themselves (rightly or
wrongly) within that norm. This produces a sense of in-group solidarity and
superiority among those who believe to embody the notion of linguistic nor-
mality (‘us’) and an attitude of distance and disparagement towards those
who do not (‘them’). Consider the following example:
GOWER: [...] O, ‘tis a gallant king!

FLUELLEN: Ay, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower. What call
you the town’s name where Alexander the Pig was born? (4.7.10-13)
Fluellen’s humorous linguistic blunder results from two consecutive errors,

one of which is due to his ignorance (‘Alexander the Big’ for ‘Alexander the
Great’) and the other to his Welshness (‘Pig’ for ‘Big’). This double slip
owes its comic character to the conceptual incongruity of comparing the leg-
endary emperor with a grunting farmyard animal, but also to the rather more
dubious kind of gratification that we experience when we suddenly see peo-
ple assumed to be above us stumble and fall (here: Alexander the Great) or
when we see people we hold to be below ourselves display their inadequacy
and so confirm our own supremacy (here: Fluellen).
2.3 The ideological function
As I have just suggested, Shakespeare’s dramatic uses of linguistic ‘normal-

ity’ and ‘abnormality’ have social implications through the twin mechanisms
of inclusion and exclusion. In a political play like Henry V this mechanism is
almost bound to be powered by ideological interests. Does the humorous
exploitation of the multilingualism in the play serve an end of its own, or is it
also part of a political agenda? Would it be just a coincidence that Fluellen’s
unintended pun on ‘Alexander the Great’ advertises his ignorance along with
his Welshness, or is there more at stake?
Some critics see Henry V as a noble and heroic king and Shakespeare’s
play as a glorious national epic, authored by a true patriot. Others dismiss
Henry V as a cynical hypocrite and hail Shakespeare’s Henry V as a fine
piece of subversive satire. A third group of critics position themselves at
some point between or beyond these two extremes, arguing that Shakespeare’s
play somehow (consciously or not, successfully or not) combines or tries to
negotiate the patriotic and the critical attitudes towards Henry V and his Tu-
dor successors. One might be inclined to adopt this third type of position,
but, for the purpose of the present analysis, it is the patriotic dimension of the
play that I’d like to highlight. Both jingoistic and critical voices are heard in
the play, but I am interested here in the former only, and more specifically, in
how the play’s multilingualism gives them extra resonance.
The play is a good example of national myth-making. Trying to smooth
over inner divisions, it creates a sense of national unity, fostering a spirit of
integration and consent. To be sure, such unity has to be forged out of differ-
ence, but once achieved, it will benefit all. Such at least is the hopeful prospect
that is symbolically offered by the three brave captains Macmorris (Irish),
Fluellen (Welsh) and Jamy (Scottish), who represent their respective home
countries. In actual reality, of course, tensions between England, Ireland, Wales
and Scotland were quite high in the early 15th century – as they were, for that
matter, at the time of the play’s composition, the past serving as a mirror for
the Elizabethan present. As I have suggested, the three characters’ regional
speech habits are markers of otherness and inferiority as seen from the play’s
English position. Yet, the three captains display bravery and utter loyalty to
the English king.
Danger comes from England’s own bosom. With a keen sense of nu-
merological symmetry and counterpoint effect, Shakespeare locates disloyalty
in two other threesomes, Nym–Bardolph–Pistol and Cambridge–Grey–Scroop.
The former are English, but as thieves and rogues they are outside of regular
society. The latter are English too, noblemen even, but they sold their integ-
rity for French cash. Those two groups embody lawlessness and foreign
interference respectively as a double menace to Henry’s campaign, but both
are promptly exposed and duly punished.
The home country representatives, on the other hand, survive the war and
are rewarded with everlasting honour. At the same time, the Celtic threesome
permanently have to be kept under very firm English control. As their lin-
guistic imperfections never stop reminding us, they have as yet a long distance
to travel on the road from their respective states of barbarity to full civiliza-
tion. The allusions to the danger of Scottish invasions (scene 1.2), the quarrel
that flares up between Fluellen and Macmorris (in scene 3.2), and the con-
temporary hint at the 1599 Irish rebellion (Chorus act 5) make it clear that the
colonial integration by England of its British and Irish neighbours was very
much a matter of wishful thinking and was to remain so.
The effort to consolidate national unity at home goes hand in hand with
conflict and expansion abroad. Inner divisions have to be overcome in the
face of hostile powers from overseas: France in the play, Spain in Elizabethan
England. Needless to say, linguistic difference has emblematic value here
too, in this externally oriented process of self-definition. The main ‘other’
language is here a language of power and culture, French. What is ideologi-
cally significant is that the play presents Henry as an essentially monolingual
speaker of English, with only a smattering of French. He speaks French far
worse than the young boy-translator in the surrender scene. And Henry seems
to have no strong wish to improve his French. When he intends to unite Eng-
land and France in a cross-Channel empire, this is expected to happen on
England’s terms and in her language. Note that Shakespeare is again bend-
ing historical reality. While it is true that expert opinion varies strongly over
the question of the precise chronological, geographical and social extent of
the knowledge of French in the Middle English period, as well as over the
pattern of its decline, most specialists would agree that the royal family was
one of the strongest bastions of English-French bilingualism in England and
that French continued to be prominent as a language of government, law and
diplomacy until the reign of Henry VI (for a useful survey, see Kibbee 1991).
Given his personal background as well as his continental ambitions, Henry V
must have been very comfortable indeed with the French language.
This piece of poetic licence enables Shakespeare to create some interesting
contrasts with the alleged attitudes of the French nobility towards English.
First, while Henry and his noblemen in the play can hardly be bothered to
learn or use French, the French characters turn to English most of the time,
not only within the homogenizing convention, but also in the passages
governed by the mimetic convention of vehicular matching. Much more than
the English, the French go out of their way to learn and practise the ‘other’
language. Second, while all non-native linguistic performance under the
mimetic convention of vehicular matching – SL Fr [Eng] no less than SL Eng
[Fr] – entails clumsy errors and therefore involves an element of stigma and
mockery, a power differential emerges when we take a closer look at the
French speakers of English and the English speakers of French. On the one
hand, Henry is conscious of the inadequacy of his French and perfectly

unapologetic about it, and he controls the amusement that follows from it,
putting it to rhetorical and erotic use by trying to make the Princess fall for
his sense of humour. On the other hand, Katherine and Alice are in many
instances naively unaware of their poor performance in English, so that the
verbal humour resulting from it is made over their heads and at their expense.
Whereas Henry’s few phrases of broken French bespeak a position of strength,
national pride and self-sufficiency, the ladies’ more sustained but somewhat
pathetic efforts to master English display a combination of compliance and
ineptitude.
Moreover, Shakespeare subtly genders the two languages, English being
more of a soldier’s language, plain and manly, as opposed to more ‘effemi-
nate’ French. This ties in with the general characterization of the French as
being loquacious, vain, superficial and self-pleased.
3. Translating Shakespeare’s multilingual comedy
The correlations between punning, multilingualism and comedy in Henry V

are by no means straightforward. The Chorus produces the following pun
when announcing the treachery of the three English conspirators, about to be
disclosed in act two:
[CHORUS:] [they] Have for the gilt of France, – O guilt indeed ! –

Confirmed conspiracy with fearful France [...] (2.0.26-27)
The pun on gilt (money, gold) # guilt (sin) is monolingual, and so are most of
the puns in this play. More unusually perhaps, the pun is humorous in neither
intention nor effect: the Shakespearean critic Kenneth Muir coined the term
‘the uncomic pun’ precisely to denote grim thematic puns like these. In the
same way, there are multilingual exchanges in the play that are not amusing,
comic moments that do not depend on multilingualism, etc. Each individual
passage in the play therefore deserves to be examined separately, with due
attention given to the dynamic interplay between the different textual func-
tions at work. However, space restrictions are getting in our way here. These
restrictions also frustrate any effort to present a contextualized and fully docu-
mented analysis of all the translations in my collection. I shall have to limit
myself to constructing a framework of basic distinctions and working hy-
potheses within which a more systematic investigation might take place. For
the sake of simplicity (and because non-British theatres have been very un-
welcoming to Henry V anyway), I shall not systematically consider the
performance-related dimension. Having discussed on other occasions the spe-
cific issue of wordplay and its translation, I shall direct all my attention here
to the nexus between multilingualism, comedy and translation.
3.1 Translating multilingualism: exploring the field
The dazzling range of cross-language situations and exchanges in Henry V

means that there is not one single source language for the translator to work
from, but several. Of course, among these, English remains the primary source
language, while the other languages could be said to have a secondary (French)
or tertiary status. To get a better grip on the various possible translation policies
that may be adopted towards this linguistic plurality, I will now discuss Willy
Courteaux’s Dutch translation of the play (1987 [1967-1971]). Courteaux’
translations are on the whole strongly source-oriented and have earned a wide
and lasting reputation for reliability. The following table sums up his linguistic
strategies with respect to Henry V:
(a) SL Eng [now archaic] TL Dutch

(b) SL Eng [Fr]: scenes 3.4 (vocabulary TL Eng [Fr]: scene 3.4
lesson) and 5.2 (wooing scene) or
TL Du [Fr]: scene 5.2
(c) SL Fr [Eng]: scenes 4.4 (surrender TL Fr [Eng] or TL Fr [Du]
M. le Fer) and 5.2 (wooing scene)
(d) SL Fr [now archaic]: scenes 3.4 TL Fr [mode rnize d/e dite d + te xtual
(vocabulary lesson), 4.4 (surrender M. le inte rve ntions ]
Fer) and 5.2 (wooing scene)
(e) SL Eng [We ls h]: scene 3.2 (siege
Harfleur) et passim TL Du [s ociole ct, idiole ct, or s ome
(f) SL Eng [Iris h]: scene 3.2 (siege uns pe cifie d re gional diale ct]
Harfleur)
(g) SL Eng [Scottis h]: scene 3.2 (siege TL Du [s tandard]
Harfleur)
(h) SL Latin: passim TL Latin
(i ) SL Spanis h: passim TL Spanis h
(j) SL Iris h [de fe ctive ]: line 4.4.4 TL Iris h [de fe ctive ]
Since Courteaux basically translates from English into Dutch and since the
‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’ source languages are all foreign tongues to the Dutch
spectator or reader more or less as they would have been to the Elizabethans,
one might think it would have sufficed for Courteaux to render all English
into Dutch and to simply leave the non-English source-text passages alone.
Reality turns out to be far more complex than that.
(a-b) Not surprisingly, Courteaux translates ‘normal’ English as ‘normal’

Dutch. His Dutch has been noted to have a slight archaic ring about it, but
this could by no stretch of the imagination be construed as an attempt to
replace Elizabethan English with some sort of ‘equivalent’ temporal dialect.
Of course, such deliberate archaizing does exist as an option for the transla-
tor and several Shakespeare translators have availed themselves of it, but not
Courteaux.
Certain English words, however, were not translated into Dutch at all. I
am referring to the vocabulary scene (3.4), which in its entirety presents an
example of non-translation. Courteaux’s choice of SL Eng [Fr] ÿ TL Eng [Fr]
for this scene is easy to account for. While the scene is almost completely in
French, most of the dialogue centres on some ten English words which
Katherine is eager to learn from Alice (but which neither pupil nor teacher
can help mispronouncing). Left untranslated, these English words hardly pose
a comprehension problem. Courteaux could trust his prospective audience to
have a sufficient knowledge of the language’s basic vocabulary, and the words
are explained anyway through French translation, possibly supported by ges-
ture in a performance. In point of fact, it is difficult to see how the translator
could have avoided quoting the English words. Banning them through an
overhaul of plot, character or historical setting would have clashed with the
translator’s source-oriented poetics of translation. Preserving all details of
the dramatic context except for the substitution of ill-pronounced Dutch words
for the English ones might have been another option, but then making Dutch
words serve as the theme of an English lesson would have run counter to the
constraint of verisimilitude (see also 3.2 below).
Broken English also occurs in the wooing scene. Courteaux has in this
case adopted a different modus operandi: broken English (SL Eng [Fr]) be-
comes broken Dutch (TL Du [Fr]). Courteaux is obviously capitalizing here
on the existence in the Low Countries of a well established variety of defec-
tive Dutch expressly associated with native speakers of French. Holland and
even more so Flanders (i.e. the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium)
have known a long tradition of exposure to French influence. It was only in
the course of the 20th century that Flanders gradually emancipated itself from
a situation of diglossia in which French and Dutch ranked as high and low
languages respectively. Even in today’s much altered sociolinguistic con-
text, Flemish and to a lesser extent perhaps Dutch readers would instantly
respond to the comic aspect of a sentence like
KATHARINA: Is het mogelijk dat ik zou bemin de vijand van la

France? (5.2.169-170) (Courteaux, p. 565),
recognizing it in terms of grammar and intended phonetic realization as a

typical example of the faulty Dutch spoken by the arrogant Francophile so-
cial élite of the past.
One could argue that Courteaux was fortunate enough not to have to invent
an artificial broken Dutch (Du [Fr]) as a target language. It was readily avail-
able as a linguistic format and, what is more, it lends itself perfectly well to
comic exploitation. Flemish native speakers of Dutch have a long-standing
tradition of resorting to heightened Du [Fr] for the sake of parody. The main
target of such linguistic satire is usually what remains of the old French-
speaking élite, as in the popular jokes about members of Belgium’s royal
family. This tradition definitely places Courteaux in the advantageous position
of being able to give the dialogue a comic drive very similar to that of
Shakespeare’s Eng [Fr]. However, we must also recognize that the humour
generated by the broken Dutch in Courteaux’s version taps its satirical energy
from a different ideological source than Shakespeare’s broken English. The
‘other’ who is suffering ridicule in the translation is defined not only by
Shakespeare’s national vs. foreign opposition, but also, latently perhaps but
nonetheless substantially, by a set of mutually dependent oppositions which
spring from the target culture’s domestic historical consciousness, such as
French vs. Flemish (Dutch), bourgeoisie vs. working class, and high culture
vs. low culture. We need to be aware of the ideological residues that social
history has left behind in the target languages and linguistic varieties chosen.
(c-d) What does the translator do with Shakespeare’s French? Among many
things to be considered is the extent of the prospective audience’s familiarity
with la langue de Voltaire. True, in some of the French passages of Henry V,
the text is so generously characterized by informational redundancy that hardly
any semantic data get lost if the overseas reader or spectator misses out on
the French. An example would be the surrender scene, where the spectator
and reader derive as much benefit as Pistol from the boy’s capable interpret-
ing. But in other passages where French is spoken, the vocabulary scene for
instance, the recourse to non-translation will inevitably push the text beyond
the semantic grasp of foreign spectators and readers who don’t speak the
language. This need not necessarily be an insuperable barrier, since a sense
of linguistic alienation was of course exactly the effect that the same French
passages would have produced on a major section of Shakespeare’s original
audience. We are witnessing here one of those paradoxical cases where for-
mal correspondence in translation also achieves a similarity of effect.
Willy Courteaux grew up at a time when most Flemish and many Dutch
intellectuals were fluent in French. As a translator he found himself writing
for an audience gifted with a fairly good passive command of the language.
So one imagines it would have been a natural choice for him to consistently
resort to French wherever Shakespeare has it. But which – or whose – French
was to be used? As with SL English, it makes sense to distinguish between
the correct usage of the language (French spoken by the French, also by the
bilingual boy in the surrender scene) and its ill-treatment by foreigners (French
spoken by Pistol and Henry). Let us consider the latter first. For these phrases,
which are relatively few in number, Courteaux followed Shakespeare in his
deliberate and comic use of bad French. Thus, Henry’s French phrases in the
wooing scene are copied literally from the original, showing instances of
non-translation in its strictest form. However, his rendering of Pistol’s rather

awful mispronunciation of ‘Oui, couper la gorge, par ma foi!’ (quoted above,
line 4.2.37) shows a rather interesting variation:
Owie, koepee le gors, wie, permafoi! (p. 558).
Courteaux’s phonetic spelling draws on the rules of Dutch rather than Eng-
lish orthography. This not only makes the text more transparent to Dutch
readers, but also prompts a phonetic realization which sounds more like Fr
[Du] than Fr [Eng].
Many of the phrases in Henry V which Shakespeare intended to be ‘good’
French really turn out to sound archaic, odd, or even downright ungrammatical
to modern French ears. Hence my shorthand notation SL Fr [now archaic].
Translators who wish to preserve the original’s French, like Courteaux, are
therefore confronted with a choice between copying the French more or less
exactly as they find it in the original, and revising it stylistically to bring it up
to modern standards of correctness. At this point, it is worth recalling that the
idea of ‘the original’ when applied to Shakespearean translation is at best a
helpful simplification and at worst a misleading myth. Even though the tex-
tual history of Henry V is far less complicated than that of other plays, a huge
range of textual variants exist which give an extremely fluid character to the
translator’s ‘source text’. The French lines in Henry V have understandably
occasioned numerous transcription errors, emendations and other variants,
so that, when Shakespeare’s French comes out edited in a translation, it may
not always be possible to determine where along the line the revision oc-
curred and what the exact role of the translator would have been.
One way or the other, Courteaux felt that Shakespeare’s ‘good’ French
required correcting and updating. Apparently, he wanted to avoid giving the
text an antiquarian aspect or distracting an audience whose proficiency in
French he knew would have enabled them to spot any awkward expressions.
However, Courteaux’s textual interventions in the French passages go sig-
nificantly beyond mere stylistic revision. Consider the corrections and
additions (underlined) in the following excerpt:
FR. SOLDAAT: Est-il impossible d’échapper à la force de votre bras?

de grâce, lâchez ma gorge, vous allez me la couper!
PISTOOL: Koper? Gij hond! (4.4.16-18) (p. 558)
The insertion of the preposition à and the replacement of ton by the more
deferential pronoun votre serve the modest purpose of grammatical and con-
versational well-formedness. But the translator decidedly went out of his way
when he interpolated the unprecedented phrase (meaning ‘please, let go of
my throat, you’re going to cut it’) at the end of the French soldier’s speech.
The aim here was to prepare the ground for Pistol’s next comic misunder-
standing. Indeed, the last word of the interpolated sentence, French couper
(‘cut’), sounds similar to Dutch koper, which means ‘brass’, and this enables
Courteaux to reproduce Shakespeare’s bras # brass pun in bilingual fashion
and with only a slight semantic shift. Other interventions in the French text
serve the same purpose of making adjustments to the contextual needs of
adjacent comic puns. They show that Shakespeare’s French in a SL French
ÿ TL French rendering is not necessarily inert matter, impervious to the
translator’s action, but that it may play an active role in an integrated strategy
that subordinates form to function.
(e-f-g) The tension between form and function poses itself very acutely when
it comes to rendering the three regional varieties of English in Henry V. In
this domain, form tends to prevail over function in Courteaux’s version. Shake-
speare’s Fluellen speaks SL Eng [Welsh], signalled mainly by the devoicing
of [b] and [v]. Courteaux renders this by giving Fluellen an idiosyncratic
variety of Dutch that displays the same phonetic oddity, in an amplified way
even. For example, Fluellen pronounces tapper for what should have been
dapper where the original has falorous for valorous. The peculiar English of
Macmorris, the Irishman, undergoes much the same treatment, with Courteaux
carefully reproducing the phonetic shibboleth that is indicated by the origi-
nal’s deviant spelling. For example, Macmorris’s Chrish (for Christ) comes
forth as Chrisjtus (for Christus) in the Dutch version.
In either case, the phonetic markers are formally mimicked, but, crucially,
they no longer connote the same sociolinguistic realities, namely Welshness
and Irishness. So what is it that Fluellen’s and Macmorris’s curious use of
Dutch is supposed to betoken instead? Despite being a native speaker of Dutch,
I find it impossible to give their dialects ‘a local habitation and a name’.
Fluellen’s Dutch with its devoicing of consonants could be argued to match
in part the pattern of broad uneducated speech from Holland, but even so, it
strikes one as being more of a social dialect than a regional one. Actually, it
could just as well be an idiolect, distinguished by some personal affectation
or by a speech defect. The special flavour of Macmorris’s Dutch, too, de-
pends more on idiosyncrasy or social class than on region.
In this way, the regional provenance of the three captains has been lin-
guistically neutralized. But then, the demand of geolinguistic correctness with
regard to the specifics of the play’s British setting is probably bound to go
down the list of priorities whenever the play travels abroad. For a start, it is
hard to imagine ways in which, technically speaking, varieties of Dutch could
have been used to represent Welsh or Irish regional English. Furthermore,
overseas audiences will as a rule show less familiarity and a lesser personal
engagement with the ‘local’ particulars of Britain’s national politics than the
play’s home audiences. In this respect, then, the translators may count on
their audience’s willingness to settle for a lower degree of mimetic precision
(section 2.1 above) and for a lessening of the play’s ideological load (section
2.3 above). Courteaux was presumably arguing along similar lines when he
decided to focus his efforts on the comic function (section 2.2 above), giving
Fluellen and Macmorris a linguistic variety that is comically different from
the standard norm without attempting to reflect the tensions between English
colonization and Gaelic nationalism. The dialect remains, as a badge of other-
ness and inferiority and as a source of mild humour, but it gets delocalized,
functioning more in the way of a personal or social dialect.
We have not mentioned Jamy so far. In the source text his stage Scottish
is signalled orthographically much more obtrusively than the dialects of ei-
ther Fluellen or Macmorris: e.g. “It sall be vara guid, guid feith, guid captains
baith” (3.2.103-4). Strangely enough, Courteaux does not follow the model
he had set himself for the other two captains, translating instead Jamy’s broad
dialect into a Dutch that is perfectly normal phonetically. We could say that
the special flavour of Jamy’s dialect is so much watered down, or standard-
ized, as to lose its linguistic distinctness and consequently its comic aspect.
One can only speculate about the reasons for this inconsistency. Perhaps the
translator wanted to avoid an overkill effect; or, perhaps, having given up the
principle of authentic regional differentiation anyway, he felt he had run out
of distinguishable and theatrically viable stage accents.
To put Courteaux’s strategy in perspective, I would now like to anticipate
section 4 below with a few notes about how the French translators have tack-
led Shakespeare’s three regional dialects. Four of the translators in my corpus
(Laroche 1839-1840, Guizot 1860-1862, Messiaen 1944, and Lavelle 1947)
simply went for full standardization, making their three non-English captains
speak regionally unmarked French. These translators apparently acted on the
assumption that the reproduction of the abnormal phonetic features of the
captains’ discourse and of the related mimetic, ideological, and comic func-
tions were a lower priority than sacrosanct target-culture norms such as ‘good
taste’ or linguistic ‘correctness’. French literary texts, whatever their origins,
must not indulge in ‘low comedy’ and they must observe the rules of ‘le bon
usage’.
The most recent translation, Déprats (1999), offers a mixed solution which
is basically identical to that of Courteaux. While Jamy’s Scottish English is
largely standardized, Macmorris and the omnipresent Fluellen see their anoma-
lous speech patterns imitated formally, which results in a delocalized type of
dialect. Delocalization is the solution favoured for the three officers by
Montégut (1867-1870), but in his rendering the strong pressure of the norm
of linguistic correctness manifests itself in the use of italics for all ‘abnor-
mal’ words, intimating an apology for the text’s lack of stylistic decorum and
subtly shifting the blame for it to Shakespeare. Le Tourneur (1776-1783) and
Hugo (1859-1865) offer another mixed solution. They employ delocalized
substandard French for two of the officers, but for the third one they engineer
a kind of relocalization, by which I mean that the captain’s regional English
is transposed into a specific regional French dialect. Thus, Le Tourneur casts

Macmorris as a recognizable speaker of the Gascon dialect. Similarly,
François-Victor Hugo gives his Jamy “une prononciation créole assez
surprenante” (according to his editor J.-B. Fort, p. 735 n.1) or, perhaps, a
black African French accent. The principle of dialect relocalization is adopted
across the board in Sylvère Monod’s (1957) version of Henry V. In one of the
endnotes this translator writes:
Our translation reduces somewhat, without imposing a rigid system,

the irregularity of these pronunciations (sometimes transforming, if
the need arises, grammatical anomalies into special features of diction).
Moreover, to give the French reader an impression corresponding at
least approximately to that produced by the original text, we have
assumed that the phonetic and psychological particularities of Fluellen
bring to mind those of someone from eastern France [un Français de
l’Est], while Macmorris reminds one of a southerner [un Méridional],
and Jamy of a Norman [un Normand]. (1957:243, my translation)
As far as Fluellen is concerned, Monod was helped by the fact that the formal
imitation of Fluellen’s English phonetic habits goes a long way towards giv-
ing his French a distinct Alsatian touch (a fact which really blurs the conceptual
distinction between delocalization and relocalization of source-text dialect).
In mimetic terms, these attempts at relocalization will of course invite
criticism for their blatant anatopism (i.e. the spatial counterpart of anachro-
nism). Judged in terms of the comic and the ideological functions, the verdict
is likely to be less adverse. Referring as it does to established dialects, the
linguistic satire permitted by dialect relocalization has an authenticity and
thereby a comic force that might have been difficult to achieve by means of
an artificially created stage dialect. Politically speaking, the strategy of dia-
lect relocalization manages to recuperate at least a sense of the original play’s
tensions between centre and periphery, between colonial expansion and the
local nationalisms resisting it. Such concerns certainly strike a chord in France,
a culture that is known for its uncompromising centralist policies and for its
former colonial involvement abroad. Thus, through subliminal analogy, the
translated play can function as a political allegory urging the French prov-
inces and (former) colonies to unite in acquiescent recognition of the
superiority of Paris as the centre of power, culture and true Frenchness. Upon
reflection, ideological innocence may be impossible to achieve. Even when
delocalization is resorted to, the preservation of the dialectic between lin-
guistic norm and dialectal deviation, between standard and substandard
language, can only pay its comic dividend on the basis of an ideology of
social conformity which is always ready to mock difference as aberration.
(h-i-j) Courteaux does not reduce the multilingualism of Henry V by render-

ing the little Latin, Spanish and Irish of the play into Dutch. The few words
and phrases in these three languages are simply left untranslated, albeit with
the addition of explanatory glosses in footnotes which do offer a Dutch trans-
lation. It is worth observing here that Latin (as the old lingua franca of religion
and high culture), Spanish (as an exotic southern but not entirely opaque
language), and Irish (as a mysterious and obscure Celtic tongue) all relate to
modern Dutch in a comparable way to how they would have appeared to
Elizabethan English and its users. It is this relative degree of neutrality which
enables the technique of non-translation to be reasonably effective. Of course,
this situation may alter when the condition of neutrality is not fulfilled, or
when Latin, Spanish or Irish become the target language. But the actual amount
of textual material in those languages is so small in the play that it will detain
us no further in the rest of this paper.
3.2 The metalingual dimension
Before we abandon Courteaux’s Henry V to turn again to the French transla-

tions, we should highlight a crucial problem that we have left aside so far,
namely the ample presence of metalingual information in the play. When the
metalingual function (Jakobson) is triggered into operation, language is no
longer merely referential but it curls back upon itself, making itself into the
object of the message. Whenever that is the case, the translator may be faced
with the problem of how to avoid overt contradictions between what is
metalingually suggested or claimed about the linguistic medium and the real-
ity of the actual linguistic performance (see also Hermans 1996). This problem
does not trouble Courteaux too often, because he left many of the critical
passages – those in French – untranslated and so bypassed the trap of self-
contradiction. However, in the following example he does get caught in it:
ALICE: Dat het is niet de gewoonte pour les dames de France – ik

weet niet wat is embrasser in Engels.
K. HENDRIK: Kussen. (5.2.259-261) (p. 565)
This passage is a fairly literal translation into broken Dutch of an extract I

quoted above, nearly at the end of the wooing scene. Language functions
metalingually here. Alice is saying that French ladies don’t usually ... but at
this point she realizes that she doesn’t know the English word for embrasser.
Her acknowledgement of this linguistic obstacle is implicitly a request for
translational help. Well, there is a double mismatch between what is said
about language and what is said in language. First, Katherine’s metalingual
observation becomes perfectly irrelevant in Courteaux’s translation and causes
a non sequitur. Why indeed would she need an English translation when she
is obviously trying to speak Dutch like most other people in the play? Sec-
ond, the reply she gets is plainly mistaken, for the translation provided is the
Dutch equivalent kussen and not the English word asked for.
To be sure, such contradictions are easily absorbed by the text receiver.

We have through constant exposure become familiar with texts in which the
convention of vehicular matching is not systematically observed, or not at
all, and in which the plausibility of linguistic representation depends a great
deal on the receiver’s suspension of disbelief. It so happens that one of the
recurrent thematic concerns of the play is precisely the gap between dramatic
representation and its object, and therefore the need for the spectator’s im-
aginative participation to make the theatrical make-believe successful: “Piece
out our imperfections with your thoughts” (Prologue, line 23). One is tempted
to argue that translation problems of the kind we are referring to have a curi-
ous thematic aptness within Henry V and show a close affinity with the play’s
representational logic.
Be that as it may, it should be pointed out that a relatively minor transla-
tional sleight of hand would have sufficed to avoid, or to camouflage, the
mismatch between the linguistic reality of the text and the medium-oriented
comment it makes about itself. Indeed, instead of saying something like ‘I
don’t know how to translate the word embrasser from French into English’,
Courteaux might have given his Katherine a less specific metalingual com-
ment of the type ‘I don’t know how to translate embrasser’. The trick consists
in avoiding the mention of the specific languages in which or between which
communication takes place. The possibility of de-specifying the metalingual
information might be modelled as in the table below:
aware ne s s of me dium and aware ne s s of pragmatic

conte xt s ucce s s or failure
(I) me talingual information I’m using language in a given communication is successful,

is language -ne utral communicative situation or runs aground
(II) me talingual information I’m using a (named) language cross- language L1- L2
is language -s pe cific L1 in a situation of choice or communication is successful,
contact (between L1 and L2) or runs aground
The question of what to do with the play’s many metalingual self-references

must have been a major headache for the French translators of Henry V.
4. The special case of French translations
Henry V is not usually considered one of Shakespeare’s ‘great’ works, but,

partly because of its convenience as a vehicle for nationalist sentiments, the
play has gradually moved towards the core of the English Shakespeare canon.
Never dropping below a certain level of prominence from the 1720s onwards,
Henry V has proved particularly popular at times of national crisis. For ex-
ample, performances were very frequent during the wars with France in the
18th century (Craik 1995:83). Laurence Olivier’s film version from 1944 is
another good example of how the play’s fortunes can serve as a barometer
indicating the intensity of English or British nationalistic feeling. Of course,
as far as France is concerned, the picture could hardly be more different. Its
powerful anti-French elan made Henry V into something less than the ideal
play to introduce and endear Shakespeare to Parisian theatregoers and read-
ers. Thus, early French defenders of the Bard positively avoided engagement
with Henry V, and this situation didn’t really change after Shakespeare’s repu-
tation in France got firmly established in the course of the 19th century. In
fact, until the 1999 Avignon production of Henry V (Jean-Louis Benoit, trans-
lation by Jean-Michel Déprats), the play was neglected in France “even by
those theatre people who were most audaciously committed to taking up
Shakespeare’s challenges” (Déprats & Venet 1999:397; my translation).
I have been able to collect ten published translations: Le Tourneur (1776-
1783), Laroche (1839-1840), Hugo (1859-1865), Guizot (1860-1862),
Montégut (1867-1870), Sallé (1928), Messiaen (1944), Lavelle (1947), Monod
(1957) and Déprats (1999). Apart from a few revised editions of Le Tourneur,
this amounts to nearly the full corpus. Of all the versions in my collection,
the Déprats translation is the only one to have been written with a perform-
ance in view. Déprats (again) and Sallé being the most notable exceptions,
the large majority of them are entirely in prose. All the new twentieth-cen-
tury translations except Messiaen’s came out in bilingual editions. Every single
one of the French Henry V translations is part of a complete edition or a
multi-volume Shakespeare series. They were all done by des traducteurs
universitaires or by one of their forerunners. Judged against the general back-
drop of French Shakespeare translation (surveyed in Delabastita, forthcoming),
these observations would seem to justify the conclusion that Henry V has
been translated and retranslated into French more out of a sense of philologi-
cal scrupulousness than as a labour of love. That same stern sense of duty has
apparently informed the French translators’ actual translation strategies, since
nobody’s imagination was fired sufficiently to produce a creative adaptation.
4.1 The neutralization of language difference
What makes the case of the French versions so interesting for the scholar is
that “the passages in French blend with the target language, thus disappear-
ing as audible markers of national difference” (Hoenselaars 1999:xiv). The
translators themselves were of course the first to become aware of this prob-
lem. Not without a sense of frustration, Benjamin Laroche (1876) summarized
it as follows, speaking about the surrender scene: “In the text, Pistol speaks
English, the soldier speaks French: one sees the difficulty of making the dia-
logue convincing, using one single language” (p. 59, n.1; my translation).
Whereas Shakespeare clearly marked and exploited the difference between
the two main source languages, in French translation that difference simply
dissolves. Or does it? It appears that a few qualifications are in order.
Actually, none of the ten translations does away with the language differ-
ence in the vocabulary-lesson scene. French remains French – either copied
verbatim or stylistically revised (on this, see section 4.3 below) – and the
English words remain in English. The reasons underlying this universal pref-
erence for non-translation are in several respects similar to those that informed
Courteaux’s version (section 3.1, points a-b and c-d above) and need not be
repeated here, though perhaps we should add an explanation we have over-
looked thus far, namely the well-known impulse of human beings to follow
that line of action which offers maximum effect for minimum effort (J. Levý’s
minimax principle).
In the other two crucial bilingual scenes – the surrender scene and the
wooing scene – the English usually melts away into monolingual French dis-
course. Not surprisingly, the characters who already spoke French in the
original stick with that language in translation, whereas those who spoke
English in the original now adopt French too, thereby becoming linguisti-
cally indistinguishable from the former group. However, there are two major
exceptions to this rule: the wooing scene in the versions by Pierre Messiaen
(1944) and Jean-Michel Déprats (1999), to which we shall turn later. There
are several minor exceptions too. More precisely, there are a number of iso-
lated cases where an individual English word or phrase is copied for the sake
of preserving a source-text wordplay. Here is an example from the surrender
scene (originally quoted in 2.2 above):
LE SOLDAT FRANÇAIS: Est-il impossible d’échapper à la force de

ton bras?
PISTOL: Brass! Roquet! Quoi, du cuivre? Tu m’offres du cuivre à
présent, maudit bouc des montagnes? (Guizot, p. 200, 4.4.16-20; ital-
ics in original)
This text is a fairly literal rendering of the source, except for the insertion of
an intratextual gloss (“Quoi, du cuivre?”, literally ‘What, brass?’), which,
along with the explanatory note at the bottom of the page, ensures that some-
thing of the bilingual joke survives. A second example is taken from the
wooing scene (the original is quoted in 2.2 above):
ROI HENRI: [...] je serai heureux de vous l’entendre confesser dans

votre anglais hésitant. Do You [sic] like me, Kate?
CATH.: Pardonnez-moi, je ne sais pas ce que c’est que like me!
ROI HENRI: Un ange est like you, Kate, et vous êtes like un ange.
CATH.: Que dit-il? que je suis sembable aux anges? (Lavelle, p. 243,
5.2.105-112; italics in original)
The recourse to the original’s English was motivated by the concern to pre-
serve the English pun on like. No intratextual glossing was added in this
case. French readers are thrown back on their own resources to grasp the first
meaning of like (as a verb), whereas sufficient metalingual comment explaining

the second use of like (as a preposition) was already present in the original
and only needed to be copied.
But, all in all, these cases of TL English are few and far between in my
corpus. Linguistic homogenizing is the general rule and is even frequently
found in the punning passages. For instance:
LE ROI HENRI: [...] je serai charmé de vous entendre exprimer vos

sentiments dans votre maivais anglais. M’aimez-vous, Catherine?
CATHERINE: Pardonnez-moi, je ne comprends pas ce que veut dire
aimer.
LE ROI HENRI: Un ange vous ressemble, Catherine, et vous êtes
semblable à un ange.
CATHERINE: Que dit-il? que je suis semblable aux anges? (Laroche,
p. 77, 5.2.105-112)
With the English pun gone, a one-line footnote explaining the two senses of
English like is all there is to neutralize the absurd incongruity between
Katherine’s request for clarification (‘I do not understand what aimer [‘to
love’] means’) and Henry’s lexical explanation (‘An angel resembles you
and you resemble an angel’). This solution will win few awards for creativity
or elegance, but its non sequitur does have the merit of warning the reader
that something is afoot in the text which the translator has not quite managed
to render. This is not the case in the following example:
R.H.: [...] je serais bien aise de vous l’entendre avouer dans votre
mauvais anglais! Que vous semble de moi, Catherine?
CATH.: Pardonnez-moi, je ne sais ce que vous entendez par ces mots:
«Que vous semble?»
R.H.: Un ange semble comme vous, Catherine, et vous semblez comme
un ange!
CATH.: Que dit-il? Que je suis semblable à un ange? (Sallé, p. 221,
5.2.105-112)
The English pun on like is fully frenchified. Henry uses the verb sembler in a
rather archaic construction (literally ‘what seems you of me?’, i.e. ‘what do
you think of me’), which puzzles Katherine, whereupon Henry explains the
word by using it in a more conventional phrase (‘an angel seems like you,
etc.’). This exchange will kill few readers with laughter, but it has more wit
and (above all) greater textual cohesion than Laroche’s literalist solution.
But then, the cracks in Laroche’s version at least allow a glimmer of the
English to shine through, enabling one to see the gap between the bilingual
original and the monolingual translation, whereas the textual smoothness of
Sallé’s French-only version glosses over the impossibility of equivalence and
covers the translator’s tracks.

Several of the homogenizing translations are more upfront than Sallé about
their reduction of the original play’s bilingualism. Partly to signal its loss,
partly as a desperate attempt to salvage some sort of illusion of it, they resort
to metatextual devices such as stage directions, annotations, inverted com-
mas, and/or italic print. In the wooing scene, for example, Sylvère Monod
(1957) completely renounces the original’s linguistic mimesis and settles for
an all-French text, but not without specifying, for each and every single speech
turn, in which language it is ‘really’ spoken by adding tags like “en anglais”,
“en mauvais anglais”, “en français”, “faisant alterner l’anglais et le mauvais
français”, etc. The marking of linguistic difference by visual devices such as
italics was anticipated by the First Folio edition of the original Henry V (1623),
and the practice has also been followed by a number of modern editions. Of
course, in the English editions the italics are strictly speaking redundant,
whereas in the French homogenizing translations, italic print (or the use of
inverted commas) is often the only means of signalling the massive presence
of linguistic difference – to be sure, a heavy semiotic load for such a slender
textual device.
One of the side effects of linguistic homogenization is that many of the
original play’s metalingual comments either become irrelevant or redundant
– or even downright false. Let us reconsider the three versions of lines 5.2.105-
112 we have just discussed. In Lavelle’s translation, which keeps parts of the
dialogue bilingual, Katherine’s request for translation or clarification
(‘Pardonnez-moi...’) makes perfect sense situationally, as the French Prin-
cess may reasonably be assumed not to know the meaning of like (used as a
verb). Her metalingual request for confirmation (‘Que dit-il? ...’) is in char-
acter too, since her understanding of Henry’s explanation is only tentative.
Importantly, these metalingual checks on meaning serve the linguistic needs
of the audience as well as those of the characters, and they do so likewise in
the translation (where the French explains the English) and in the original
(where the English explains the French).
By comparison, the monolingual French versions by Laroche and Sallé
put a far greater strain on our credulity. It is very hard to believe that Laroche’s
Katherine wouldn’t know the meaning of aimer. Sallé deliberately gives Henry
a somewhat less elementary phrase for Katherine to be bewildered by (que
vous semble...), but here too, her incomprehension is less than convincing.
When it comes to Katherine’s request for verification (Que dit-il?...), that
becomes so redundant as to be positively absurd. One could only rationalize
it by invoking some situational circumstance for which the text furnishes no
further authority (e.g. Katherine is absent-minded, hard of hearing, not within
conversing distance, she cannot believe what she hears, etc.). Here is an even
more extreme example of the same effect:
CATH.: O bon Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleines de

tromperies!
ROI HENRI: Que dit-elle, belle demoiselle, que les langues des
hommes sont pleines de tromperies?
ALICE: Oui, que les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies;
c’est ce que dit la princesse. (Lavelle, p. 243)
In the original (5.2.116-121, quoted in 2.2 above), these three speech turns
are semantically synonymous but show great expressive variety, being spo-
ken as they are in French, English, and humorous broken English respectively.
The translation has unmarked French only, so that, with all Shakespeare’s
exercices de style gone, threefold repetition is all that remains. Note that
Lavelle’s edition is a bilingual one, so that three more variants of the same
basic proposition appear on the facing page! The original dialogue carefully
balances linguistic perplexity and metalingual explanation in its ironic repre-
sentation of a half-successful, half ludicrous Anglo-French exchange. What
emerges in Lavelle’s French version borders on pure tautology, and if it can
be said to have any comic force at all, it is generated by quite involuntary
associations with the linguistic nihilism of the théâtre de l’absurde of the
1950s. The heart of the matter, of course, is that translation loses its function
and meaning when everyone present speaks the same language to start with.
My corpus also offers several examples of how French translation can
twist the play’s metalingual information into factual error. An example of
blatant self-contradiction is found in the following extract from the surrender
scene (original quoted above in 2.2), where the boy says he cannot produce
the words which he then blithely goes on to quote:
PISTOLET: Maître Fer! Eh bien, je vais le ferrer, le laminer, le

marteler! Rends-lui ça en français.
LE PAGE: Je ne sais pas les mots français pour ferrer, laminer,
marteler. (Hugo, p. 767) (4.4.28-31)
The same incongruity occurs in Le Tourneur (p. 216), Montégut (p. 258),
Sallé (p. 173), and Lavelle (p. 203). Laroche (p. 60) saves himself the embar-
rassment by simply dropping this part of the dialogue. All the other translators
slightly modify the object of the boy’s metalingual scruple by making it less
language-specific in the way I suggested at the end of section 3. Thus, Guizot
(p. 201) and Messiaen (p. 1114) have the boy utter the vague complaint that
he ‘doesn’t understand’ what Pistol means, whereas Monod (p. 177) and
Déprats (p. 275) adroitly avoid the reference to the prisoner’s French by speak-
ing about translation ‘into his language’.
4.2 The neutralization of language difference: broken French and broken

English
In the wooing scene Messiaen and Déprats are the only translators to have
resisted the strong current of linguistic homogenizing by applying a policy of
non-translation for a selection of English phrases – including phrases not
supported by intratextual paraphrase or translation and whose informational
redundancy is consequently low. They are all speech turns by either Katherine
or Alice in which broken English is used. Messiaen (rarely) and Déprats (less
rarely) sometimes also preserve neighbouring phrases by Henry, in correct
English, as a buffer for the pidgin English that is about to follow. This policy
of preserving broken English raises various interesting questions. Did (or
does) the intended audience of the two translations know enough English to
follow the drift of the dialogue (surely, the more recent of the two translators
must be at an advantage here)? To what extent would the audience also be
able to recognize and appreciate the broken English for what it is (after all,
sensitive as we are to accent and error when foreigners speak our native tongue,
we tend to be deaf to our own accent when we speak theirs)? And how to
account mimetically for the often unmotivated changes of language that the
technique entails (e.g. Henry inexplicably switching from French to English
in the middle of a speech)?
Whatever the answer to these questions, the solutions adopted by Messiaen
and Déprats enable them to skirt a difficulty that besets any homogenizing
French version of Henry V, namely, that of the broken English and the bro-
ken French. Consider the following typical fragment:
LE ROI HENRY, en anglais, puis en mauvais français: [...] Que

réponds-tu, ‘la plus belle Katharine du monde, mon très cher et devin
déesse?’
CATHERINE, mêlant anglais et français: Votre Majesté savoir assez
de ‘fausse’ français pour tromper le plus ‘sage demoiselle’ qui soit ‘en
France’. (Monod, p. 229, 5.2.213-217)
There are problems here, even if we stop short of considering what this should
have to sound like in performance. First, how to explain that Henry’s French
in this passage is very ungrammatical (TL Fr [Eng] for SL Fr [Eng]), whereas
in most other speech turns he is perfectly proficient in the language (TL Fr
for SL Eng)? A similar inconsistency is found when Katherine in her reply
appears to sympathize with Henry’s mysterious decline into linguistic inepti-
tude to the point of making even grosser mistakes against her own native
tongue (TL Fr [Eng] for SL Eng [Fr]). In terms of both intratextual consist-
ency (Henry, Katherine) and realistic representation (Katherine), this situation
makes huge demands on the text receiver’s imaginative goodwill. Second,
the translator’s bad French will always require an extra level of decoding
since it is not immediately clear, without contextual clues, whether it stands
for broken English or for broken French in the original play. The following
diagram visualizes the convergence of the two:
SL Eng TL Fr [grammatical]
SL Fr
SL Eng [Fr]
SL Fr [Eng] TL Fr [ungrammatical]
In a literary culture which has conventionally had a low tolerance for sub-
standard grammar, the issue is a highly sensible one. When incorrect French
is used, who is to be blamed for the transgression? The question will have to
be looked at again from a functional perspective.
4.3 A functional perspective
We have on several occasions observed how the French translators’ deci-

sions can affect the play’s realism (see section 2.1 above) by defusing or
creating inconsistencies of various types: e.g. unmotivated code-switching
and other text-internal contradictions; incongruities between linguistic per-
formance and metalingual statements; or mismatches between textual
representation and historical reality. We may safely conclude that the various
French versions are on the whole more strongly governed by the homogeniz-
ing convention than Shakespeare’s Henry V. Importantly, however, none of
them is fully monolingual. Conversely, the English original is nowhere near
as multilingual as it should have been to fully embody the convention of
vehicular matching. This confirms Meir Sternberg’s views about “literary
practice [being] marked, above all in referentially-oriented genres like fic-
tion and drama, by the spirit of mimetic compromise, manifesting itself in
various mixtures, combinations and contextual adjustments [of the] basic
possibilities” (1981:224). Therefore, judged in the mimetic terms of
geolinguistic realism, the difference between the original Henry V and the
various French translations is not one of kind, but merely one of degree. And
also one of textual location, of course, since, in terms of the mimetic ideal of
vehicular matching, the original performs much better with the speeches of
the English characters than with those of the French characters, whereas the
French translators present exactly the inverse picture.
The play also harnesses multilingualism to generate different types of
humour (see section 2.2 above). The first one we distinguished results from
the defunctionalization of language, as illustrated most typically by Pistol in
scene 4.4. It appears that several French translators have reduced or even
eliminated this type of comic effect by providing a semantic motivation for

what is in the source-text phonetic wordplay. Consider Sallé’s rendering of
lines 4.4.27-29 (original quoted above):
PAGE: Il dit qu’il se nomme Maître Fer.

PIST.: Ah! Maître Fer! Eh bien! moi, je vais le ferrer, le laminer, le
marteler. Dis-lui ça en français! (p. 173)
This is a fairly straightforward translation, except for the rendering of the

three English verbs fer (nonce word), ferret (‘worry’) and firk (‘beat’). These
are three rare or even non-existing words which share no semantic features
beyond vaguely suggesting the threat of physical aggression. Their sound
similarity to the name Fer is essentially what provides the basis for the se-
quence. Sallé renders this with the string ferrer (‘to fit with a steel tip, rim,
etc.’) # laminer (‘to roll metal’) # marteler (‘to pound, to hammer into shape’),
i.e. verbs which constitute a semantic paradigm rather than a phonetic one,
naming as they do forms of metalwork and thereby enlarging on the literal
meaning of the French soldier’s name. Meaning takes over from sound as the
text’s main cohesive principle. Though not always going to the same lengths,
several of the other French versions display a similar semanticizing process,
which bridles the anarchic force of the signifier and so brings language back
under the rule of reason.
Pistol’s outburst “Qualité? ‘Caleno custore me’!” (4.4.4) meets pretty much
the same fate. Monod (p. 175) and Déprats are the only translators to take it
on board, phonetic momentum, semantic opacity and all. All the others some-
how suppress the obscure Irish phrase, making Pistol wonder instead about
the meaning of the word qualité. Here is a typical example:
LE SOLDAT FRANÇAIS: Je pense que vous êtes gentilhomme de

bonne qualité.
PISTOL: Qualité? Explique-moi ça! (Messiaen, p. 1113; literally ‘Qual-
ity? Explain that to me!’)
As a result of these and similar shifts, the dialogue in most French versions
of scene 4.4 depends less on fortuitous sound similarity and more on seman-
tically based repartee. Apparently, Pistol’s thoughtless loosening of the bonds
between forms and meanings didn’t go down very well in a culture where
austere institutions like the Académie française have for centuries propagated
the virtues of la clarté française.
Shakespeare’s use of multilingualism to produce sexually charged
humour, as exemplified most typically by the twin ambiguities of foot [foutre]
and gown [con] in the vocabulary-lesson scene (3.4), was of course no less
likely to cause offence. But this joke is the comic cornerstone of the entire
scene and it is there already, in French, so that little could be done to neutralize
it except deleting the scene altogether. That is exactly what certain older
English editors of the source text did, including Thomas Hanmer (Works,
1743-44), who relegated the scene to a footnote, “improper enough as it all is
in French, and not intelligible to an English audience”. Le Tourneur followed
his lead, deleting the scene from the main text and offering it as an appendix
under the rather fanciful pretext that “this scene is not by Shakespeare:
everything combines to prove it” (p. 213; my translation). Messiaen (p. 1083),
Fort (Hugo, p. 735) and Monod (p. 243) too raise the question of the authorship
of this scene, but, bound by philological loyalty, they and all the others seem
to have felt compelled to preserve it within the play’s dialogues.
Given that decision, the scene as it is affords precious little textual room
for manoeuvre to bowdlerize the foot/gown joke. Two of the older French
translators – Le Tourneur and Laroche – ‘corrected’ the spelling of coun into
gown (in spite of leaving the other badly spelled/pronounced English words
intact). The effect is obviously to increase the orthographic and phonetic dis-
tance from the French taboo word con, thereby barring for many readers the
access to the bawdy joke. This sanitizing operation is not free of cost. The
more successful it is, the further off-target the ensuing metalingual comment
will get, for what could be “corruptible, gros, et impudique” about such inno-
cent words as foot or gown? All the other translators copy one of the original’s
two variant spellings (coun or count), in some cases expressing their per-
sonal disapproval of “cette scène de gros comique” (Messiaen, p. 1083) or
raising suspicions about its authenticity. The most recent translator, Jean-
Michel Déprats, shows a much less apologetic approach, going so far as to
throw into prominence the taboo words foutre (used as a noun, ‘come, sperm’)
and con:
CATHERINE: [...] Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe?

ALICE: «Le foot», madame et «le coun».
CATHERINE: «Le foutre» et «le con»? Ô Seigneur Dieu! [...] (p. 171)
Déprats avails himself of the expressive freedom of our modern feminist and
permissive age. The Flemish-Dutch translator Courteaux (p. 549) likewise
spells out the taboo word con (while sticking with foot). Yet, Courteaux is
the only translator in my corpus to edit Katherine’s and Alice’s baiser into
embrasser in the wooing scene, apparently believing that no bawdy pun could
possibly have been intended here and that any hint in that direction would
have been misleading. Somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, none of the French
translators uses the same substitution. The older ones probably use baiser in
its original sense in the confident assumption that context and character would
have sufficed to nip any possible indecent associations in the bud. Conversely,
the more recent ones may have left the word intact to preserve at least the
possibility of a bawdy reading. But not a single one has picked up the much
more elusive bawdy puns on neck/nick, chin and sin.
Finally, Shakespeare satirizes linguistic deviation as an emblem of

otherness and inferiority. The comic function here really blends with the ideo-
logical one (see section 2.3 above), so that both may be considered together
here. We have earlier explored how the French translators dealt with Shake-
speare’s representatives of Wales, Ireland and Scotland (section 3.1, e-f-g
above). But how did they react to Shakespeare’s anti-French satire? This sat-
ire pervades the basics of character, plot and historical setting, and thereby
places the prospective translator in a take-it-or-leave-it type of situation. The
same philological scrupulousness which made the relatively few French trans-
lators of Henry V put up with the play’s Gallophobia and devote their best
efforts to its translation, also kept them from messing with those basics.
But then, there are the textual spaces surrounding the dialogues – annota-
tions, prefaces, introductions, and other paratexts – and several of the French
translators used those to mark their disapproval of the play’s jingoism. The
politics of Henry V being controversial enough in English literary criticism,
the French translations that come with a critical apparatus rarely fail to quote
those English critical voices that most debunk the play’s patriotic heroics.
William Hazlitt, the romantic critic noted for his radical politics and author
of Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), proves to be the greatest fa-
vourite. He is quoted by Sallé, Messiaen, Lavelle, Monod and Déprats. Sallé
actually has a quotation from Hazlitt prefacing his translation, while Éric
Dayre (editor of Monod) devotes an entire section of his critical discussion
to the theme of “William Hazlitt: contre le patriotisme de Henry V” (pp. 275-
79).
Where they occur, the critical remarks made by the French translators not
only target the play’s patriotism, but also the perceived shallowness of its
comedy. J.-B. Fort (editor of Hugo) believes that “the comic parts ... have
less flavour than those of Henry IV, and the French-English scenes will hardly
amuse anyone on either side of the Channel” (p. 698; my translation). For
Sallé (p. xvii), Shakespeare’s humour with all its “grosses plaisanteries” may
have pleased the less refined palate of the Elizabethans but it can hardly sat-
isfy us today. But of all the French translators, it is Pierre Messiaen who
adopts by far the most hostile tone in his paratextual comments. For this trans-
lator, most of the play was not written by Shakespeare at all, and his
introduction and footnotes amount to a running commentary on its artistic
and moral flaws. Messiaen concludes his introduction on a reassuring note,
saying that we (i.e. Frenchmen) need not be distressed by the “grossière cari-
cature des Français”, insofar as it cannot be attributed to Shakespeare himself
(p. 1033). Moral indignation, artistic disapproval and hurt national pride are
difficult to disentangle here.
Lavelle, too, feels a raw nerve painfully touched by Shakespeare’s unflat-
tering portrait of the French and is less than impressed by the play’s comic
scenes. Thus, in the surrender scene, with all its silly misunderstandings, he
says, Shakespeare’s humour slips from comedy into farce (p. 36). Lavelle notes
quite perceptively that the play’s politics and its comedy – two of the main
obstacles over which French appreciation has stumbled more than once –
are not at all separate issues. Speaking about the wooing scene, he writes
(my translation):
[Henry] courts her like a soldier, not without a certain brutality, not
without glimpses of the contempt of the strongest for the weakest, of
the Englishman for the foreigner, of the victor for the defeated [...] (p.
31). [Katherine] herself is there only for the king to complete his con-
quest and to enable his ribald verve to come into the picture. If she is
amusing, it is by her ignorance of the language of her conqueror, which
gives every single phrase of hers the ridiculous inadequacy of a pro-
longed childhood. (p. 33)
It turns out that the author of these critical observations flatly refuses in his
translation to follow Shakespeare on the point of Katherine’s bad English.
Indeed, in contradistinction to five of his fellow French translators, Lavelle
could not bring himself to give Katherine broken French as an equivalent of
her broken English in the original. For instance, her woefully incorrect “Your
majesty shall mock at me; I cannot speak your England” (5.2.102-103) is
rendered in flawless French as “Votre Majesté se moquera de moi; je ne sais
pas parler votre anglais” (p. 243). Lavelle is not simply bowing to the target-
culture expectation of linguistic correctness, since on other occasions he does
use broken French. Unease with the politics of the scene might be a more
likely explanation. The wooing scene stages a political and erotic contest in
which power is so unevenly balanced against the French that the translator
may well have felt he had to step in somehow and at least spare Katherine the
ridicule of being reduced to a babbling infant. Moreover, the perfection of
her French now covers up her ignorance of English (her broken English is
both translated and corrected), while serving as a foil for Henry’s linguistic
blunders (his broken French remains untranslated and uncorrected). This yields
the following situation:
SL Eng TL Fr [grammatical]
SL Fr
SL Eng [Fr]
SL Fr [Eng] TL Fr [ungrammatical]
Lavelle manages, if only for a moment, to beat Shakespeare at his own game,
Henry being the only character in his version of the scene to display linguis-
tic incompetence. Some older English text editors (such as Pope) were loath
to see Henry make mistakes in French and obligingly corrected them, leaving
all the linguistic stumbling in the scene to be done by the French characters.
Lavelle shows himself less merciful to Henry (“Il faut laisser le roi
s’embarrasser dans les mots français”, p. 291), bestowing all his editorial
kindness on Katherine instead. The same reconfiguration occurs in the trans-
lations by Le Tourneur and Sallé. (Laroche erases the difference by having
both King Henry and Katherine express themselves in flawless French.
Messiaen and Déprats resort to non-translation, and the other translators fol-
low the pattern explained above at the end of section 4.2.)
If the shift just described seems to express a nationalistically inspired re-
sistance to Shakespeare’s politics of the linguistic blunder, I want to conclude
by suggesting that this argument provides an interesting perspective on the
question of editing Shakespeare’s French. In the vocabulary-lesson scene,
Shakespeare meant Alice’s and Katherine’s French to be correct, but, from
the later viewpoint of the French reader and translator, it strikes one as
unidiomatic as well as archaic. Not all of the ungrammatical or odd expres-
sions can be accounted for by the factor of historical change: the Bard’s French
was far from perfect. Correspondingly, when non-translation is resorted to
for the French passages, translators may decide to edit the text for greater
modernity and/or greater correctness, or they may decide not to edit the French
at all. The translations here appear to show a cline ranging from the literal
copying of Shakespeare’s French (which renders it alien to the modern French
reader or viewer) to its thorough adaptation to the rules and norms of modern
French (which gives it fluency and naturalness today). The translation’s po-
sition along this cline does not necessarily follow from the edition being
bilingual or not. Compare the bilingual editions of Déprats and Monod: the
former rewrites the scene for the target text in a strongly naturalized French
idiom, the latter shows virtually identical texts on either side of the facing
pages.
The refusal to weed out clumsy expressions from Shakespeare’s French
text may spring from various motives, including a commitment to the utmost
fidelity, or the wish to inject a dose of ‘authenticity’ and historical ‘local
colour’ into the translation. But sometimes one wonders if there isn’t a hid-
den ideological agenda. Montégut’s monolingual edition, for instance, does
not correct the French of Shakespeare’s Alice and Katherine, adding in a
footnote: “This whole scene is in bad French in the original” (p. 240; my
translation). On p. 257, the same phrase (“mauvais français”) is used to de-
scribe the French originally used in the surrender scene, making no difference
between the now archaic French of Master Fer and the pidgin French of Pis-
tol. In other words, Montégut refuses to discriminate between archaic French,
involuntary linguistic error of the author, and linguistic blunder used expressly
for comic effect. The blanket phrase “bad French” collapses these semiotically
important distinctions.
Shakespeare is thus cast as a writer of great natural genius but little learn-
ing, whose poor knowledge of matters French really disqualifies him as a
chronicler of the English-French wars. Somewhat like the parenthetical addi-

tion of the word sic to a quotation, Montégut’s footnotes about Shakespeare’s
“mauvais français” hover between satirical intent and editorial fastidious-
ness. The translator’s philological concern to establish responsibilities for
any odd usage to be found in his text created a not-to-be-missed opportunity
to give Shakespeare a taste of his own medicine. If Shakespeare’s own French
is so abominable, how could he then be in a position to make fun of the
imperfect English of the French characters? Similar remarks occur in
Laroche’s translation of the vocabulary-lesson scene. Unlike Montégut,
Laroche offers Shakespeare the service of editing his French ... but not with-
out settling the score in a footnote: “Dans le texte, toute cette scène est en
français, et en français incorrect, bien entendu” (p. 34). Note the poisonous
sting in the tail: “bien entendu” (‘of course’).
5. Further perspectives
Many English readers will expect their edition to provide a translation of the
French bits in Henry V, while many French readers will expect the play’s
translation to edit them: editions have to translate, translations have to edit.
Steering clear of the ingenious speculation that similar paradoxes might have
inspired, the preceding pages have followed an empirical line by trying to
develop a framework of concrete questions and possible answers about what
may happen when translators in real life tackle the bilingual humour of Henry
V, and what does happen, and why, and with which foreseeable implications.
This hands-on approach rarely yields flashes of postmodern intellectual bril-
liance, but it has hopefully demonstrated that translation is not entirely beyond
our descriptive grasp. Translators of Henry V engage with things like know-
ledge of foreign languages, norms of linguistic correctness, textual norms
regulating cohesion and informational redundancy, mimetic conventions,
genre conventions, ideological sensibilities, translation norms, and so on. It
helps a lot if you take on board the effects of this wide variety of pressures
and constraints, if only to save your theorizing from profitless abstraction.
The present analysis has done little more than provide the groundwork
for such empirical study as far as Henry V is concerned. The study of the
French translations should be deepened by looking at each of the translations
separately and in a more contextualized way, and also by further investigating
the difference between translating for the ‘page’ or for the ‘stage’. Indeed, a
vista of further semiotic complications is opened when we consider the
possible effects of performance. Just imagine a French actor playing Henry
in a French production and trying to pronounce his few English lines (SL
Eng ÿ TL Eng) to BBC-perfection ... but proving unable to suppress his
foreign accent. Our study should also be broadened by considering translations
of Henry V into other languages, and the various translations of its two film
versions. The influence of the changing tide of political circumstances and

beliefs (e.g. pro-British or anti-French sentiments, monarchist vs. republican
convictions) on the foreign reception of the play definitely deserves further
scrutiny. So do translations of other Shakespearean plays that present bilingual
comedy (e.g. The Merry Wives of Windsor), translations of non-Shakespearean
multilingual comedy (e.g. the British sitcom ’Allo ’Allo), and so on.
DIRK DELABASTITA
Department of English, FUNDP, rue de Bruxelles 61, B-5000 Namur,
Belgium. dirk.delabastita@fundp.ac.be
References
Shakespearean texts and translations

Courteaux, Willy (tr) (1987 [1967-1971]) William Shakespeare. Verzameld werk,
Kapellen: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel/Pelckmans, Kampen: Kok Agora.
Craik, T.W. (ed) (1995) William Shakespeare. King Henry V (The Arden Shake-
speare), London & New York: Routledge.
Déprats, Jean-Michel (tr) and Gisèle Venet (ed) (1999) William Shakespeare. La
Vie du Roi Henry V, Édition bilingue, Paris: Gallimard.
Guizot, François (tr) (s.d. [1860-1862]) Œuvres complètes de Shakespeare, Paris:
Garnier. 8 vols. [Henry V in vol. 7.]
Hugo, François-Victor (tr) and J.-B. Fort (ed) (1961-1964) Shakespeare. Œuvres
théâtrales complètes, Genève: Edito-Service. 4 vols. [Henry V in vol. 2.]
Hugo, François-Victor (tr) (1859-1866) Œuvres complètes de W. Shakespeare,
Paris: Pagnerre. 18 vols.
Laroche, Benjamin (tr) (51876 [1839-1840]) Œuvres Complètes de Shakspeare,
Paris: Charpentier. 6 vols. [Henry V in vol. 6.]
Lavelle, M.-J. (tr) (1947) Shakespeare. Henri V, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne.
Le Tourneur, Pierre (tr.) (1776-1783) Shakespeare traduit de l’anglais, Paris:
Vve Duchesne. [Henry V in vol. 11, publ. 1781.]
Messiaen, Pierre (tr) (1944) William Shakespeare. Les drames historiques et les
poèmes lyriques, s.l.: Desclée, De Brouwer.
Monod, Sylvère (tr) and Éric Dayre (ed) (2000 [1957]) Shakespeare. Henry V,
Édition bilingue avec dossier, Paris: GF Flammarion.
Montégut, Émile (tr.) (1867-1870) Œuvres complètes de Shakespeare, Paris:
Hachette. 3 vols. [Henry V in vol. 2.]
Sallé, Marcel (tr) (1961 [1928]) La Vie du Roi Henri V (Collection Shakespeare),
Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Secondary references
Blank, Paula (1996) Broken English. Dialects and the Politics of Language in
Renaissance Writings, London & New York: Routledge.
Chan, Leo Tak-hung (2002) ‘Translating Bilinguality: Theorizing Translation in
the Post-Babelian Era’, The Translator 8(1): 49-72.
Cronin, Michael (1997) ‘Rug-headed Kerns Speaking Tongues: Shakespeare,

Translation and the Irish Language’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona
Wray (eds) Shakespeare and Ireland. History, Politics, Culture, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 193-212.
Delabastita, Dirk (2001) ‘Aspects of Interlingual Ambiguity: Polyglot Punning’,
in Paul Bogaards, Johan Rooryck and Paul J. Smith (eds) Quitte ou Double
Sens. Articles sur l’ambiguïté offerts à Ronald Landheer, Amsterdam & At-
lanta (Ga): Rodopi, 45-64.
------ (forthcoming) ‘Shakespeare Translations in Romance-Language Countries
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Übersetzung. Ein internationales
Handbuch zur Übersetzungswissenschaft, Berlin & New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Guiraud, Pierre (1976) Les jeux de mots, Paris: PUF.
Hawkes, Terence (1997) ‘Bryn Glas’, EJES 1(3): 269-90.
Hermans, Theo (1996) Translation’s Other (Inaugural lecture, UCL).
Hoenselaars, Ton (1995) ‘Shakespeare for ‘the People’. François-Victor Hugo
Translates Henry V’, Documenta 13(4): 243-52.
------ (1999) ‘Introduction’, in Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning (eds) English
Literature and the Other Languages, Amsterdam & Atlanta (Ga): Rodopi, xi-
xxi.
Kibbee, Douglas A. (1991) For to Speke Frenche Trewely. The French Language
in England, 1000-1600, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rubinstein, Frankie (²1989) A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and their
Significance, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Sternberg, Meir (1981) ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’,
Poetics Today 2(4): 221-39.
Williams, Deanne (1997/1998) ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor and the French-
English Dictionary’, in Rostislav Kocourek, Michael Bishop and Lise Lapierre
(eds) Le Shakespeare français: sa langue (special issue of Alfa, vol. 10/11),
Halifax (Canada): Dalhousie University, 233-42.

A Great Feast of Languages: The Translator

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Great Feast of Languages: The Translator

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Great Feast of Languages: The Translator

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Translator

ISSN: 1355-6509 (Print) 1757-0409 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrn20

A Great Feast of Languages

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2002.10799136

Published online: 21 Feb 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 414

View related articles

Citing articles: 5 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

A Great Feast of Languages

Shakespeare’s Henry V from 1599 describes the successful French campaign

ISSN 1355-6509 © St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

1. History, language(s) and comedy

• SL Eng [now archaic]: in the majority of speech turns, Shakespeare

2. Comic and other functions of the play’s multilingualism

Given the great number of dramatic situations in which different languages

2.1 The mimetic function

The production of humour is a prominent function of the multilingualism in

remote world or in some fairy-tale wonderland.

2.2 The comic function

PISTOL: Yield, cur!

FRENCH SOLDIER: O pardonnez-moi!

The entire exchange is propelled by a series of interlingual misunderstand-

KATHERINE: [...] Je m’en fais la répétition de tous les mots que

goes policy that exposes Pistol’s much grosser linguistic incompetence in

KATHERINE: Your majesty shall mock at me; I cannot speak your

KATHERINE: Laissez, mon seigneur, laissez, laissez! Ma foi, je ne

GOWER: [...] O, ‘tis a gallant king!

Fluellen’s humorous linguistic blunder results from two consecutive errors,

2.3 The ideological function

As I have just suggested, Shakespeare’s dramatic uses of linguistic ‘normal-

hand, Henry is conscious of the inadequacy of his French and perfectly

3. Translating Shakespeare’s multilingual comedy

The correlations between punning, multilingualism and comedy in Henry V

[CHORUS:] [they] Have for the gilt of France, – O guilt indeed ! –

3.1 Translating multilingualism: exploring the field

The dazzling range of cross-language situations and exchanges in Henry V

(a) SL Eng [now archaic] TL Dutch

(a-b) Not surprisingly, Courteaux translates ‘normal’ English as ‘normal’

KATHARINA: Is het mogelijk dat ik zou bemin de vijand van la

recognizing it in terms of grammar and intended phonetic realization as a

non-translation in its strictest form. However, his rendering of Pistol’s rather

FR. SOLDAAT: Est-il impossible d’échapper à la force de votre bras?

is transposed into a specific regional French dialect. Thus, Le Tourneur casts

Our translation reduces somewhat, without imposing a rigid system,

(h-i-j) Courteaux does not reduce the multilingualism of Henry V by render-

3.2 The metalingual dimension

Before we abandon Courteaux’s Henry V to turn again to the French transla-

ALICE: Dat het is niet de gewoonte pour les dames de France – ik

This passage is a fairly literal translation into broken Dutch of an extract I

To be sure, such contradictions are easily absorbed by the text receiver.

aware ne s s of me dium and aware ne s s of pragmatic

(I) me talingual information I’m using language in a given communication is successful,

The question of what to do with the play’s many metalingual self-references

4. The special case of French translations

Henry V is not usually considered one of Shakespeare’s ‘great’ works, but,

4.1 The neutralization of language difference

LE SOLDAT FRANÇAIS: Est-il impossible d’échapper à la force de