When Prince Hal boasts that he ‘can drink with any tinker in his own language’ (1H4 2.4.15–16), he is claiming to have mastered what might be termed a sociolect – ‘a variety of a language used by a particular social class or group’ (OED) – along with its associated behaviours.

Rhetoric aimed to teach pupils how to argue persuasively and how to analyse other people’s speeches and writing in order to understand what they were saying, to reply to them effectively, and, at times, to learn from their use of language.

Royal legislation issued in English between the baptism of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 600 ad) and the reign of Cnut (r. 1016–35) comprises one of Europe’s more remarkable records of early political and legal thought. In it we see the transformation of England from a collection of disputing kingdoms to a nation united under the rule of Wessex in resistance to Viking incursions – all before one such Viking, Cnut (or ‘Canute the Great’), overcame Æthelred II (‘Ethelred the Unready’) and then made full use of the laws maintained by Æthelred and his ancestors, thereby easing the shock of alien rule. No polity of early Western Europe (save Ireland) left such a lengthy record of its reflections on matters of law in its own language. As we will see, this corpus encompasses a range of prose genres beyond those issuing from the royal court; most were read and copied long after the Norman Conquest.

In his discussion of speech act theory, Jacques Derrida argues that all language is subject to the principle of iterability, the capacity for language to be repeated in all sorts of new contexts.

How does Shakespeare speak of style? Among his twenty thousand or so words, ‘style’ is not especially prominent, occurring fewer than twenty times. The range of those few uses, however, is wide enough to show the complexity of the concept, and to suggest how vital it is for his work even when it goes unnamed.

This chapter will provide an overview of how both major and lesser-known Lancastrian writers and texts engage with the law and legal contexts. Covering the period between Henry IV and Prince Edward of Westminster, this chapter will address legal aspects in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, Osbern of Bokenham’s Mappula Angliae, George Ashby’s Active Policy, John Fortescue’s De laudibus legum Angliae and such anonymous works as the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye in order to demonstrate how they intervened in and commented on shifting legal ideas and practices during the first two-thirds of the fifteenth century.

William Langland’s Piers Plowman, one of the most influential poems of the English Middle Ages, is a poem steeped in law. The poet’s profound engagement with legal concepts, with fourteenth-century legislation and with legal instruments, such as charters and seals, is key to his innovative poetics as well as to his larger project of making English verse a discourse of theology, ethics and reform. Throughout the poem, Langland explores the dynamics of justice and mercy; along the way he touches on such bread-and-butter legal topics as contract, crime, inheritance and bondage. As the poem shows, legal language, whether derived from scripture, from canon, civil, or common law, or from contemporary practice can forge creative, even daring links between politics, religion and social life.

There are inherent complications involved in discerning how the English, French and Latin languages were used to facilitate legal process in late medieval England. These problems relate, for the most part, to the vernacular languages – English and French – for reasons that will become clear in due course. Latin is more straightforward. This is because it was employed principally as a language of the formal written record and its impact is plain to see in the reams of legal records held in The National Archives and in print. Latin was used to compile the main records of the royal courts – the plea rolls – from their very first appearance in the mid-1190s. It was also used in the writs which initiated legal proceedings (‘original’ writs) and in the writs subsequently issued to control these proceedings (‘judicial’ writs). It predominated in other branches of central government, particularly within the main administrative offices of the royal bureaucracy: the exchequer and the chancery. The status Latin enjoyed as the foremost language of the legal written record remained undiminished throughout the Middle Ages and it was not until 1731 that it was finally replaced by English. It occupied this position because it was considered a prestige language and a universal language of learning and culture. It was also understood to be the most effective language to convey meaning with precision and exactitude, and to preserve this meaning for posterity. Some of the earliest law manuals, written by Glanvill, Bracton and Hengham, were written in Latin for these reasons. French, and to a much lesser extent English, could also be used for the written record, but it was their employment as spoken languages which has, above all, created complications for historians. A key point to note is that the language chosen to record what was said in court did not always indicate the language that had actually been verbalised. This is what makes measuring the respective shares of English and French in the oral/aural legal culture of late medieval England so problematic. In what follows, I explore how historians have approached this particular conundrum. I also consider more generally how languages were used and how a trilingual legal culture determined the way contemporaries both experienced and accessed late medieval law.

The Middle English Rosarium (c. 1375–1415) an alphabetic compendium of religious knowledge compiled by sympathisers with John Wyclif (c. 1330–64), begins its discussion of ‘Lex’ in this way:

Sonnet 18 is one of Shakespeare’s best-known lyrics. What is Shakespeare doing in it? How is he using language, and to what effect?

To understand the origins of the legal culture of witnessing, we will begin with institutional church history, specifically the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Better known in recent scholarship as a watershed in the history of confession, the Fourth Lateran Council catalysed a major shift in legal practice by promoting the witness trial and effectively outlawing the ordeal and trial by battle. In its aftermath, witness depositions became, in practice, the most common form of proof in late medieval English church courts. In contrast to the ordeal and trial by battle which relied on direct divine intervention to determine the outcome, the trial gave new power to ordinary people to act as witnesses in court. This emphasis on testimony in both ecclesiatical and secular courts led to the wide participation of the community in legal culture as victims, neighbours and jurors, ensuring that legal concepts of evidence were not, in Lorna Hutson’s words, ‘esoteric professional doctrine’, but widely diffused through society.

Conventional wisdom holds 1330 to be the year the English poet John Gower was born, following a line of speculation that he was older than his friend and fellow poet Geoffrey Chaucer, whose birth traditionally has been assigned to 1340. No contemporary records are known to exist to confirm either date, for either man, however – and as is not the case with Chaucer, no accounts at all have surfaced to shed light on Gower’s early life. Lacking firm evidence to the contrary, and for a variety of circumstantial reasons, his birthdate is perhaps better set a bit later, between 1335 and 1340. Most likely John Gower hailed from armigerous gentry, with lands in Kent. His father – or more plausibly, the poet’s uncle – may have been one Sir Robert Gower (d. 1349), buried in Brabourne, south-east Kent – a township where John Gower also owned property, at least in his later years. Armorial blazons on a manuscript of Gower’s Latin poems Vox Clamantis and Cronica Tripertita match both one on the poet’s tomb, preserved in Southwark Cathedral, and those of Sir Robert Gower; another indication of the poet’s Kentish origins are the many Kentish dialectal elements present in the language of his English poetry. If Sir Robert Gower was indeed John Gower’s father, the family also possessed properties in Suffolk and East Anglia along with Kent, and probably had landed relations in Yorkshire as well.

At first sight, it may seem odd for this Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Language to include a chapter on Shakespeare’s language and translation. After all, a translation renders a text into another language; inasmuch as a translation of Shakespeare is a real translation, it will no longer be in Shakespeare’s language.

At the heart of Shakespearean drama is the dialogic encounter. Whether as arresting as the clash of irreconcilable opponents or as seemingly mundane as the everyday conversation of acquaintances, the performed encounters of plays deploy language in a special manner that differs from discursive writing or narration.

Everyone knows that Shakespeare wrote iambic pentameter. This fact is familiar even to those who know little else about Shakespeare and nothing else about prosody.