French words in Shakespeare?
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| Bawdy song from Love's Labour's Lost |
William Shakespeare never visited France. Nor did he study French formally. French was sometimes used at court, but speaking it was generally seen as an exotic skill, even among the formally educated.
French comedy
When Shakespeare uses French directly, it is generally for comic effect, with double entendres, etc. The bawdy song in Love's Labour's Lost, for example, puns on conccolinel as a euphemism for impotency.
In other cases, the joke is simply the idea of funny foreigners with strange language. Perhaps the most famous example of this is in the English lesson scene in Henry V:
Many other examples of French vocabulary appear across the plays and sonnets. These are typically loanwords that have been given a new anglicised form
Non-Anglicized French Words
- foison (harvest), sans (without),
- carcanet (necklace),
- antres (“antres vast and deserts idle” in Othello I.3), “gouts of blood” (Hamlet II.i.625)
- •mal content—used for the first time in Love’s Labour’s Lost, III.i.185
New Words based on French:
omittance, abidance, deracinate, rejoindure, legitimation, prophetic, control, confin’d, mortal (as adjectives), eclipse, augur, scrimeurs (anglicisation of escrimeurs fencers).
