Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 252 p

In Shakespeare’s Englishes, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton brilliantly exposes how language in late sixteenth-century England was part and parcel of the Protestant reformation ideology that sought to establish a normative “true” Englishness by way of exclusion. She suggests that Shakespeare’s plays in the 1590s “evoke only to resist the project of a cultural reformation ideology” (9), notably through the presence of “non-conformist” characters, and the linguistic practices they—and their creator—ind...