ABSTRACT
This book is about Renaissance literary dialects, the representation of linguistic differences in English literature of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is also about the rhetorical description of those differences, the ways that Renaissance writers define and interpret the English language in all its contemporary diversity. As early as 1414, language was closely associated with national identity; English representatives at the European Council of Constance cited the “difference of language” as one “which by divine and human law is the greatest and most authentic mark of a nation and the essence of it.”1 Broken English examines some of the early modern discourses that contribute to the “nationalization” of English. But rather than exploring how English was understood in relation to other languages (the international “difference of language”), my subject is the Renaissance discovery, and elucidation, of differences within the national vernacular. By focusing on how writers represented dialects, I suggest the ways in which “English” itself was a construct of the period, produced, in large part, by discriminations made among competing “Englishes” then current. Broken English shows how Renaissance authors contribute to the construction of early modern English by distinguishing its dialects, and making a “difference of language.”
