“Gallia and Gaul, French and Welsh” (MWW, 3.1.89): Transposing Shakespeare’s ‘Favourite’ Foreign Accents into French

Mylène Lacroix

doi:10.1515/mstap-2017-0019

Authors

Mylène Lacroix Université d’Angers

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2017-0019

Keywords:

multilingualism, cross-language comedy, (un)translatability, national stereotypes, stage dialects, foreignness

Abstract

The Merry Wives of Windsor has long been compared to a great babel of languages. The play contains a smattering of Spanish, Italian and Dutch and even a whole scene dedicated to the mistranslation of Latin. A large part of the play’s humour also heavily relies on the foreign accents of two characters: the French Doctor Caius and the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans. If Christopher Luscombe’s 2008/2010 production of The Merry Wives at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London bears testimony to the success of cross-language and accent-based comedy as a source of laughter on today’s English stage, it seems rather implausible, at first sight, that French translations, adaptations and stagings of these accents and linguistic idiosyncrasies should be greeted with the same degree of hilarity. Indeed, how should the Welsh and French accents, both representing real stumbling blocks for French-speaking translators of the play, be transposed into French? What translation strategies can the latter devise? And to what extent can some of those strategies be said to be politically correct? Focusing on Shakespeare’s ‘favorite’ (predominant) accents and the significance and impact of such linguistic comedy, I shall examine the question of their problematic translation through the analysis and comparison of a number of translations and stagings of The Merry Wives of Windsor into French.

Author Biography

Mylène Lacroix, Université d’Angers

PhD in English Literature from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France. She wrote her thesis on the use of foreign words and discourses as well as polyglot puns in Shakespeare’s drama and their various renderings into French. Her first M.A. thesis, a critical comparison of four translations of The Winter’s Tale into French, was awarded the Grand Prize by the Société Française Shakespeare in 2006. She has published articles on contemporary French translations of The Winter’s Tale, the heteroglossia of plays such as Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor, as well as the various functions of foreign word and dialect usage in Shakespeare’s plays. She has had a long-standing interest in translation studies and is currently particularly interested in the study of cross-language humour, dialect comedy, and the afterlives of Shakespeare’s “macaronic” scenes on the French page and stage.

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