ABSTRACT
Drawing on experiences as an actor/director in Antony and Cleopatra at Chesapeake Shakespeare (Baltimore), The Merchant of Venice for Quill Theatre (Richmond), and Love's Labour's Lost at the American Shakespeare Center (Staunton, Virginia), this chapter considers arguments for, and the implications of, voicing Shakespeare's “inside-outsiders.” It examines how clues in grammatical and rhetorical idiosyncrasies among this classification of speakers reveal their status as foreigners, licensing actors to play, literally to accentuate, “the Other.” Whereas Cleopatra's polyglossia speaks of linguistic mastery born of political necessity and Armado's aural Otherness acts as a sounding board amplifying the linguistic traits of his host nation, Shylock portrays a resonantly powerful outsider. Focusing on his use of hyperbolic metaphor, and the rhetorical metastasis he shares with Armado and Cleopatra, I argue that Shylock's uncertain mastery of the abstractions of his learnt language propels his dramatic downfall. Inescapably dissonant and dissident, the accented Shylock reminds Anglophone audiences that the inside-outsider inevitably capitulates to native speakers who self-authorize the linguistic rules of power.
