ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare published extensively on medical and other topics in Latin as well as English. He then chooses to make the object of the exclusionary performative of the 'King's English' Frenchman who belongs to two speech communities within England: the court and the professional community of physicians. In associating the linguistic practice of the man from the north with Protestant bourgeois ideology, Shakespeare may have remembered Puttenham' point that the English spoken beyond the river Trent 's the purer English Saxon at this day' closer to the original ideal invoked by the purists. Terence Hawkes, 'Bryn Glas', in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin Post-olonial Shakespeares. First explicitly introduced by Thomas Wilson in 1553, the trope is invariably used in early instances not descriptively, as scholars have assumed, but, as in this instance, performatively in negative exclusions to produce as an effect of exclusion the centre it represents.
