When Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought about language, they thought of speech: breathy, ephemeral sounds cast into the air. This very ethereality was taken as a proof of one of the key Renaissance ideas about language: inasmuch as it allowed humans to make evident their ability to reason, it was a divine gift, distinguishing humanity from, and elevating it above, the rest of creation. The gift of language could raise the monstrous to the level of the human, as it does Caliban, and the voluntary abandonment of language suggested a descent: as when the arrogant Ajax, swollen with pride at the prospect of single combat with Hector, loses his ability to distinguish social rank, along with his humanity, to a mumbling silence:

Language is social in the Renaissance in a formal, public sense we no longer quite appreciate: there is a clear link here between Ajax’s loss of language and his mistaking the lowly Thersites for the highest of the Greek generals. His loss of language is not complete: Ajax can still manage a dismissive ‘Thanks, Agamemnon’, and he can proudly declare that speaking is for beggars – but he has lost his reason, and therefore his membership of society. He is instead its laughing-stock.