Toxic Tricks: Lying as Malady and Remedy in All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure

This contribution aims to examine the strategies of deception employed in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure from the perspective of current linguistic theories on lying. Recent years have seen several publications on the linguistics of lying, the most pertinent being from a neo-Gricean perspective. Notable publications include Lying Misleading and What is Said (Saul 2012) and the Oxford Handbook of Lying (2019), edited by Jörg Meibauer, who boasts several other recent publications on the topic in the past decade (2011; 2014; 2018). There have been several attempts within the philosophy of language to define lying (Carson 2006; Mahon 2016) and some stimulating debates between authors from a pragmatic perspective (Dynel 2015; Meibauer 2016). However, to date, there has been little research which aims to apply recent developments in the linguistics of lying to the language of Shakespearean plays (Rudanko 2007; Del Villano 2016; Scott 2019). Nevertheless, the linguistic turn has undoubtedly produced excellent studies on Shakespearean texts in recent years: in areas such as historical pragmatics (Busse and Busse 2010; Culpeper and Kytö 2010; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013), characterisation (Mullini 1985; Culpeper 2001) and (im)politeness (Rudanko 2006; Del Villano 2018). Linguistic deception will be understood in relation to the key concepts of pragmatics, namely Speech Act Theory (SAT) (Austin 1962; Searle 1969; 1975) and Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) (Grice 1989). Starting from these bibliographical coordinates, this essay will examine the curative and noxious properties of mendacity within the two problem comedies.