The Pragmatics of Queenship in Shakespeare's First Tetralogy

This study is collocated in the field of literary and historical linguistics and draws on an interdisciplinary analytical model informed by pragmatics, (Austin 1962, Leech 1983, Brown and Levinson 1987, Culpeper 1996), stylistics (Simpson 1993, 2004, Burke 2014) and rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1973, Kienpointner 1987). It addresses the representation of female authority in Shakespeare’s political plays by collecting the linguistic behavioural patterns of the queens of the first tetralogy - Margaret of Anjou – married to Henry VI –, Elizabeth Woodville – married to Edward IV – and Anne Neville – married to Richard III – and so by detecting the nature and evolution of their agency. The analysis gathers and lists the sequence of linguistic recurrences of definite characters through a rigorous and replicable methodology, aiming to prove whether and how these queens retain the power to influence the course of the story and the other characters through the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of their discourse, the number and length of their turns, their chosen speech acts, the (im)polite verbal behaviour they show in dialogic situations and face-to-face interactions. The study is divided into five chapters. Chapter one outlines the methodology, starting with the basic concepts of pragmatics, its philosophy interconnecting Grice’s cooperative principle and Austin and Searle’s speech acts theory with Lakoff and Leech’s theories of politeness. The chapter further explores different practical approaches to (im)politeness, from Brown and Levinson and Watts to more recent research by Culpeper, Kádár, Haugh, Bousfield, and so forth. Stylistic notions and practices are explored through their link with argumentative structures of discourse and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s approach to rhetoric. These methodologies all converge to the same focus: the linguistic exploration of literary and dramatic texts, intended as contextualised spaces in which meaning is created and interpreted.