Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters

Abstract

Lynne Magnusson 's excellent new book presents an unusually apt and original interweaving of cultural studies and close reading.(^Caveat emptor.I served as a referee for this project in 1991, when it was only a plan.)The author's starting point, familiar from Bakhtin and Bourdieu, is that language is inherently interactionist and dialogic: focus properly falls on exchanges more than speeches, and on the social what flows between interlocutorsmore than the psychological -what arises from within the individual.Typical exchanges fall into sets here called social speech genres or collective repertoires, adapted to perform various kinds of incremental repair work that together accomplish the production, reproduction, and maintenance of the quotidian, as well as its adaptation to the needs and desires of its inhabitants.There is room here for both eulogy and dyslogy of the received social order, along with considerable social creativity, as tools developed in one kind of situation get modified by adaptation to others.Magnusson works with three kinds of texts: Shakespearean dramatic dia- logue, early modern English business letters, and the letter-writing manuals that sought to codify as commodities the strategic logic exemplified in the first two.Erasmus's De conscribendis epistolis (1522), the earliest manual and the most influential, aimed to model above all the epistolary maintenance of friendship between equals (most often seen as exchanges between learned men).Angel Day's The English Secretary (1586, 1592) offers detailed models for letters serving and seeking ambition, performance, and social advancement in a hierarchical context.William Fulwood's The Enemie of Idleness (1568) and John Browne's The Marchants Avizo (1590) adapt, in surprising ways, many of the other manuals' techniques to the scene of mercantile discourse.The conjuncture of early modern and modern discourse analysis, letter-writ- ing, and dramatic dialogue goes forward here principally by means of a theory developed by cultural anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson in Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).They propose that the activity of politeness is fundamen- tally reparative, meant to minimize "face-risk," the instability of what Erving Goffman called "face," one's publicly projected and sustained self-image (p.20).They propose a fundamental division of these mechanisms into those concerned with positive face ("the positive consistent self-image or 'personality' [crucially including the desire for its social acceptance and support]") and negative face ("freedom of action and freedom from imposition") (ibid.).The threats one may fear from or impose on another, which arouse the use of the repair strategies, take their weight from shifting interactions among social Distance (between speaker and hearer), relative social Power (of speaker and hearer), and Ranking (the culture-specific ranking of different kinds of impositions).Together these concepts propose a rhetoric for performing and receiving face-threatening acts with minimal risk.Most of the book consists of exemplary

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