The Proof Is in the Language

How do we, as 21st century citizens of the great unwashed class, know how our betters speak? Could we who have no connection to the power centers of our universe be able to mimic these people?

Of course we can. We see them, hear them, experience them intimately (perhaps too much so) in our never-ending stream of exposure that pours into us from all sides and angles. Our betters are on parade in all their regal phoniness 24-7.

So naturally we could, should we so desire, be able to create believable verisimilitude of their comings, goings, and in-betweens.

But such was not the case before the 20th century and all its technological gimcracks began to reveal to us the private world of our upper classes. No longer did we have to rely on the breathless hagiography of novels like those of Insider Edith Wharton and Wannabe F. Scott Fitzgerald to know how the rich and famous operated.

Now we had (have) the real thing—and a helluva lot less mystery. The upper classes used to rely on their arcane rituals and language idiosyncrasies to distinguish themselves from the world of us plebeians and to provide the secret handshake recognition of those who belonged and those who did not.

Because the barriers have dropped so utterly because of this familiarity engendered by the electronic media, we have a tendency to assume that people of all time had the same insight into all strata of society. But they didn’t.

In the 16th Century, a person not of noble birth and noble rearing had no idea how his betters (and, at that time in English history, there was a HUGE separation between the noble and the non-noble) spoke, thought, and operated. Any attempts by the low-born to imitate the well-born was patently obvious and artificial and risible, at least to those of the cognoscenti.

Now—on to the point. Traditional Shakespeare was not as low-born as some in 16th Century England, but he certainly wasn’t of the nobility. Glove maker’s son indeed! This was not a man who, regardless of his talent, would have been allowed into the sanctum sanctorum of English aristocracy. Thus he would have been ignorant of the workings and language of that stratum of his society.

Yet Shakespeare’s plays frequently deal with the world of the rich, the famous, the noble. And no one has ever expressed any argument that the artificial and florid interchanges of regal-speak is anything less than dead-on imitations of the way in which nobility spoke to one another at that point in history.

In a recent re-reading of Macbeth, I was particularly noting the way people spoke to Duncan and comparing it to the way people spoke to Macbeth, particularly when he was king. There is an excessive intricacy of the former and a flat prosaic nature of the latter. My point here is that Macbeth, the interloper who has committed what for Shakespeare was the unforgivable sin of regicide, doesn’t get the full-on royal language treatment—and by this, anyone who WAS anyone could have told you that the nobles had absolutely no respect for him.

Now, how could an outsider (Shakespeare of the traditional Stratford variety) have been able to make such a completely accurate albeit subtle picture of a language that he had never heard? He wouldn’t have had access to the nobility (they would have seen to that!) so, brilliant as he was, he couldn’t have re-created such talk. We must assume that his brilliance was such that he could, in his mind, create perfect re-creations of what he had never encountered.

That would be like me being able to give an uncannily accurate picture of life and talk in a Beijing toy factory at lunchtime without ever doing anything other than buy a product made in China. It’s absurd. Yet that is what Stratfordians would have us believe that Shakespeare was able to do.

Only the nobility knew how the nobles talked. Period. As the French referred to life at Versailles during the reign of the Bourbon kings—Ce pais ici—This separate country.
In their cloistered world of privilege and arrogance, nobles treated language as their plaything, their invention and, ultimately, their ID. It wasn’t as if their special language was some kind of pig Latin that any rube could master in a matter of minutes. This language was so complex and otherworldly as to be the prerogative of only the insiders.

The Stratford Shakespeare was NOT an insider, and he did not have access to the language of the nobility. Yet the man whom we call Shakespeare DID have access to and DID have command of this specialized language that he worked into his plays. Noblemen of the 16th Century viewing the plays would have identified the language as belong to their own ce pais ici and would have known that only one of THEIR kind had written the play.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, moved from birth to death in the world of highest privilege and connection. The language spoken to him as a babe would have been that of the nobility. The language spoken BY him was that of the nobility. Thus, that he could have reproduced such language in written form is not surprising. But that the Stratford Shakespeare reproduced a perfect simulation of that language requires us to believe in the unbelievable, that a peasant of minimal education could transcend the absolute rules of the universe and perfectly recreate that which he would have no idea had ever been created.

Now, which of these two scenarios is more believable? Remember Occam’s Razor. Whoever wrote the “Shakespearean” plays was undeniably noble, not low-born. This point is irrefutable. You cannot speak a language you have never heard.

Your clumsy accent will give you away.

And Shakespeare’s accent was perfect. For one of the manor born.