MOWBRAY     The language I have learned these forty years,

My native English, now I must forgo,

And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

Than an unstringèd viol or a harp,

Or like a cunning instrument cased up

Or, being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,

Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips,

And dull unfeeling barren ignorance

Is made my jailer to attend on me.

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now.

What is thy sentence then but speechless death,

Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath? (1.3.159-173)

 

This is one of my favourite moments in the play, and yet another reason why Mowbray’s role, small and unbalanced though it be, must not be undercast (he can go on to double something else…) It’s a startling, vivid account of exile, casting banishment in linguistic terms. Mowbray imagines being alienated from his own language: he is too old, he says, to learn another language, and therefore he will become mute; he will no longer be able to speak his native English because no one will understand him. Banishment, exile are a casting out, but he reimagines his future as one of imprisonment, shutting up, the loss of language leading not only to his isolation and sense of incarceration but the diminution of his ability to think. Without the ability to speak and be understood in English, he will become the prisoner of dull unfeeling barren ignorance. The speech is eloquent, even as it describes the loss of eloquence: the stringless viol or harp, or, worse, an instrument that’s been put away in its case, or put into the hands of someone unable to play it. (The invocation of harmony (and discord), of an instrument out of tune, is politically important here, and it also anticipates a moment of music coupled with imprisonment near the very end of the play.) Then from the more abstract, elevated conceit of the silent musical instrument, Mowbray shifts to a metaphor which is chewily concrete, the audience made simultaneously aware of their own mouths, tongues, teeth and lips, here transformed to heavy gates, double portcullises. (A glance, perhaps, at Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, printed in 1590 and 1596: in Canto 9 of Book 2, the Castle of Alma, an allegory of the human body, has a ‘barbican’ and a ‘portcullis’ for its mouth; the tongue is a porter and the teeth are ‘twise sixteen warders … all armed bright in glistring steele, and strongly fortifide’.) And to be deprived of his native breath, English air, and of speech and language is a kind of death, Mowbray argues. Part of its disingenuous eloquence and poetic appeal is that it’s not quite a sonnet, fifteen lines, ending with a couplet.

 

There’s a reminder here that to be foreign, a stranger, is also on occasion to be termed a barbarian, someone whose language cannot be understood; Mowbray is extending that to suggest that he is being banished into a kind of non-personhood. So there’s a whole cluster of ideas here about English identity and personal identity and how both are linguistically constituted. As well as complementing the anguished accounts of what banishment might mean in Romeo and Juliet, there are perhaps echoes of the articulation of what it means to be a ‘stranger’, and to be human and humane, in Thomas More, in a passage usually attributed to Shakespeare and probably added by him, working alongside other writers, in the early seventeenth century to the play originally written in the mid-late 1590s.

 

A further irony: the historical Mowbray, like all courtiers at the time, would have been fluent in French, and possibly other languages too. But English, Englishness, England have an exceptional, sometimes near-mystical incantatory quality in this play, and Mowbray’s speech is part of that.