• 1 https://www.english.uga.edu/scene-stealingravir-la-scene-international-partnership. Accessed 13 Nov (...)

1This volume stems from a three-year Franco-American partnership between the University of Georgia (UGA) and the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (UPVM3), and from a programme entitled “Scene-Stealing/Ravir la scene” (2016-2019), supported by the Partner University Fund of the French-American Cultural Exchange Foundation, IRCL (Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age, and the Enlightenment, UMR 5186 CNRS) of UPVM3 and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts of UGA. The partnership combined the interests of faculty at UPVM3 and IRCL in particular scenes in the French and English drama of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and those of faculty at UGA in adaptations of William Shakespeare. Scholars involved in the programme continued to concentrate on individual types of scene, and to develop issues of ASF, but we also left room for the discussion of modernised adaptations or historical presentations of such scenes.1

• 2 Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus, 6, 2017, Scènes de balcon / Balcony scenes, ed. Bénédicte Louvat, Fl (...)
• 3 Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus, 8, 2019, Scènes de lit / Bedchamber Scenes, ed. Sujata Iyengar, Sara (...)
• 4 Sarah Hatchuel, “Shakespeare’s Humanizing Language in Films and TV Series”, Borrowers and Lenders, (...)
• 5 https://scalar.usc.edu/works/henry-v/index. Accessed 13 November 2021.
• 6 https://www.ircl.cnrs.fr/pdf/2017/scenes_langue_de_autre.pdf. Accessed 13 November 2021.
• 7 https://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/ambassadeurs/?lang=fr. Accessed 13 November 2021.
• 8 https://lpomerle.wixsite.com/otherslanguage2018. Accessed 13 November 2021.
• 9 https://www.drama.uga.edu/events/content/2018/rosetta-theatre-project. Accessed 13 November 2021. O (...)

2This issue of ASF focuses on “Scenes in the Other’s Language / Scènes dans la langue de l’autre”. It is the last output of this programme, which led to the publication of two previous ASF issues, on “Balcony Scenes” (ASF 6, 2017)2 and on “Bedchamber Scenes” (ASF 8, 2019),3 as well as an article in the open access scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation,4 and to the creation and publication of the open access multimedia online resource Focus on “Henry V”: Navigating Digital Text, Performance, & Historical Resources.5 “Scenes in the Other’s Language / Scènes dans la langue de l’autre” derives from three main events. An exploratory work day took place in Montpellier in 2017,6 organised by UPVM3 and UGA, with the CAS (Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes, UR 801, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès) and in link with the “Diplomatica” programme led by Nathalie Rivère de Carles,7 within a partnership that obtained the 2018 ESOF (EuroScience Open Forum) label for the Toulouse Jean-Jaurès-led project on “Créer l’entente”. This 2017 exploratory day notably included MA and PhD students both from UPVM3 and UGA, the Montpellier MA students having specifically worked on the multilingual sequences from Henry V so as to perform them during the workshop. Particularly enlightening for UGA visitors was the introduction to the range of languages within Southern France itself, such as Occitan, just as during the second event, which took place in Georgia in 2018, Montpellier visitors learned about language variations in the Southern United States such as the Gullah-Geechee language spoken among African American communities in the South Carolina and Georgia barrier islands. The main activity during the second visit consisted of an international Conference,8 which also gave the UGA-UPVM3 team the opportunity to visit Sujata Iyengar’s “Shakespeare in the Classroom” Class, usually at Hilsman Middle School, but on that day in the auditorium of Cedar Shoals High School. The Conference also included a partnership with UGA’s Department of Theatre and Film Studies, which designed the Rosetta Theatre Project.9 A third and final event brought UGA MA and PhD students to Montpellier once more, this time to visit a French middle school, the collège Croix d’Argent, where we heard students present scenes from Shakespeare’s Othello in English – a third or even fourth language for some of them – and where Georgia PhD students introduced the school’s pupils to some of the linguistic idiosyncracies of the Southern United States.

• 10 Many thanks to the contributors to the exploratory day for feeding this work-in-progress anthology (...)
• 11 https://english.uga.edu/sites/default/files/BradburyTalkLink.pdf; see also Amy Lifson, “Shakespeare (...)

3This multilingual, multiscale, and multimedia enterprise coheres with its topic. The multidisciplinary work carried out on the subject led to a compilation of early modern multilingual scenes on which the Montpellier exploratory day was based10 and also fed the conference in Georgia. The richness of this anthology revealed that this ASF issue is just the beginning of what could undoubtedly be a long-term research programme to expand the exploration and understanding of multilingual theatrical moments and multiple linguistic modalities. (For example, in 2020 UGA hosted, with the help of Georgia Humanities, a remote presentation from Professor Jill Bradbury about the history of Shakespeare in American Sign Language, a language of the Other and a rich performance tradition that has hitherto received little attention.)11

• 12 On the large topic of linguistic domination, see Langues Dominantes/Langues Dominées, ed. Laurence (...)
• 13 https://www.ircl.cnrs.fr/pdf/2017/scenes_langue_de_autre.pdf. Accessed 13 November 2021.
• 14 Louis-Jean Calvet, La Guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques, Paris, Hachette Littératu (...)
• 15 On the corruption of the tongue or the evil tongues, see Mauvaises Langues!, ed. Florence Cabaret a (...)

4Indeed, the focus of this volume is exclusively Elizabethan, and mainly Shakespearean, as if, in a Babel-like noise of languages and texts, the voice of the Elizabethans had revealed its domination12 and had stifled or silenced the Others. In itself it is symptomatic that a venture that was originally open to multiplicity and variety and aimed at including a large corpus of early modern French and English texts ended up concentrating on a limited number of playwrights: Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood, and John Marston. The Exploratory Day at Montpellier, for example, included an entire session on “Scènes dans la langue de l’autre dans le corpus français / Scenes in the Other’s language in French drama”, including discussions of Occitan and the Théâtre de Béziers.13 In the battle of idioms or what Louis-Jean Calvet termed “La guerre des langues”,14 English seems to have reigned supreme and to have absorbed the other languages but also, maybe, to have been fruitfully contaminated by other idioms that contribute to the hybridity of the dominating tongue.15

• 16 We adapt Bruce R. Smith’s use of the expression “soundscape” in The Acoustic World of Early Modern (...)
• 17 On the French/English couple of languages, see Jean-Christophe Mayer, ed., Representing France and (...)
• 18 Mylène Lacroix is the author of a fascinating thesis on the presence of foreign words in Shakespear (...)
• 19 On the Pistol/Le Fer encounter, see Charlène Cruxent, “Pistol and Monsieur Le Fer: An Anglo-French (...)

5The “tonguescape”16 of the Shakespearean corpus reveals a fascinating centre: Henry V. The multilingual sequences of the play are the object of three complementary contributions that constitute a kaleidoscopic approach, the play’s plurilingual matters being reconfigured into three studies that dialogue with one another. Jean-Christophe Mayer explores how the language lesson and the wooing scene in Henry V, while “questioning the idea of foreignness”, also “question the very notion of Shakespearean scenic division”.17 Mylène Lacroix’s contribution, written in French and thus engaging with these Franco-English scenes from a non-Anglophone perspective, offers a close reading of the same scenes, focusing on the multilingual puns and on the act of language teaching.18 Linguistic conflict is the object of Amina Askar’s contribution, where she studies two other multilingual sequences, the quarrelling Captains’ scene and Pistol’s encounter with the French soldier Le Fer,19 two episodes that question the concept of Englishness and interrogate what the “native garb” of a language can be.

• 20 On national identity in Henry V, see Nora Galland, “Making & Unmaking National Identity: Race & Eth (...)

6Shakespeare also questions and dramatises the zones and modalities of linguistic contact in other plays. Nora Galland’s contribution explores the articulation of language and national identity20 through the character of Armado in Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, while Andrew Hiscock draws upon modern and early modern theorising on the question of language use in order to focus more narrowly on the construction of Community and the Other through language in one of Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, All’s Well That Ends Well, in which the very name of the character Paroles invites us to study linguistic issues in the play. Philip Gilreath explores the legal and intertextual significance and impact of the Latin word “stuprum” (usually translated “rape”) in Shakespeare’s early Roman play Titus Andronicus.