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This paper takes a fresh look at the one Shakespearean instance of the trope of “the King’s English” in the Folio version of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which, it argues, is a Jacobean version that thus ironically references the language of the new king from across the linguistic as well as political border with Scotland. The irony is, however, prudently ambivalent, as is the treatment of the ideal of linguistic plainness with which the trope was associated and which James advocated both publicly and privately. Consistently critiqued in Elizabethan plays, the claim to plainness – a class-inflected ideal associated by cultural reformers with the defining national character of the English – is advertised as a value in King Lear and asserted insistently by the eponymous ‘mirror’ for a king in the Folio version of Henry V which, again, I argue, is a Jacobean version. The staged humiliation (Merry Wives) and banishment (Henriad) of John Falstaff offered, moreover, a strategy for dealing with linguistically extravagant English courtiers for a king who sought to occupy the cultural centre of his new kingdom despite the exclusion of his language from ‘the King’s English’. However, the ambiguity with which the claim to plainness is treated in the Jacobean plays leaves open the interpretation of such a claim as a strategy of coercion, or a cover for malicious purposes, in particular the will to power., Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies, Vol. 9 (2022): HiStories Re-Told

This piece explores, first, the transition to modernity as this is marked by the emergence into the lexis of the word underworld and the elaboration of its semantic boundaries from the first decade of the XVIIth century to the last decade of the XXth; second, the anticipation of the modern sense of the word (to denote the urban criminal class) in the work of Ben Jonson. Associating the universe of the world-as-spectacle with the Virgilian place of the dead from the outset of his career as a playwright (in the 1590s) Jonson subsequently inflects this association in the direction of the modern sense of underworld (without using the word itself), as critics' use of the word to characterise the universe of Bartholomew Fair (1614) signals. By tracing the development of this association in his writing we thus trace the emergence of an ideologically loaded topography of the “new world” of modern, urban London.

À la Renaissance, les inventions techniques comme la boussole, les lunettes ou l'imprimerie, mais aussi les cabinets de curiosité, les monstres, les merveilles ou les grotesques fascinent les esprits. Les amateurs de surprise et de nouveauté se recrutent aussi bien parmi les souverains et leur cour que parmi les lettrés, les humanistes, ou dans le peuple épris de fêtes et de spectacles. Les récits de voyages, les jardins, les réalisations architecturales qui se multiplient alors donnent l'impression d'un foisonnement de choses inédites, voire insolites, où l'innovation, mais aussi l'exagération, ont leur part. Avec Shakespeare, Ben Jonson et bien d'autres, la scène élisabéthaine va s'efforcer de répondre à ce goût grandissant pour la nouveauté, dont elle donne parfois une image grinçante et satirique. Au XXe siècle, après la remise en cause du drame bourgeois par Antonin Artaud qui redécouvre en France le théâtre élisabéthain, les mises en scène audacieuses de Patrice Chéreau (Hamlet) ou de Peter Sellars (Le Marchand de Venise) font apparaître la nouveauté de ces textes. Les différents parcours proposés dans ce recueil sont à lire comme autant d'invitations à voir ailleurs ou autrement, à s'ouvrir à ce qui apparaît bien comme autant d'expériences et d'esthétiques de la nouveauté. Ce terme parfois décrié à la Renaissance prend donc ici tout son sens et ouvre clairement la voie vers la modernité.