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| Bawdy song from Love's Labour's Lost |
William Shakespeare never visited France. Nor did he study the French language in a formal sense. French was sometimes used at court, but speaking French was generally seen as an exotic skill, even amongst those wth a formal education.
When French is used directly in Shakespeare, 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 very idea of those funny foreigners with their strange language. Perhaps the most famous example of this is in the English lesson scene in Henry V:
There are many other examples of French vocabulary across the plays and sonnets. These are typically loanwords that have been given a new anglicized 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 (anglicization of escrimeurs fencers).