Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Normalization of Norman

Shakespeare’s plays have been widely praised by critics, and endure in the popular consciousness to this day. Although all of his works were written at least 500 years after the Norman invasion, his language, as well as our Modern English, includes vocabulary that was introduced to English through the Norman conquest. In our modern speech, words that have Norman origin such as “famous”, “error”, and “deliver” are fully integrated into the language along with words of native Germanic origin, and using them does not convey an aristocratic background. However, these words must have been novel in the language at some point. The first writers of Middle English literature must have encountered at least mild confusion from readers who encountered newly-borrowed Norman vocabulary for the first time, or perhaps it carried an air of sophistication. In fact, it was often the practice that a Norman legal term would be glossed with an Anglo-Saxon equivalent to help reading comprehension (Mellinkoff 1963:120). Although this novelty in usage has faded with the passage of time, it is still possible that the novelty of Norman vocabulary was present in the dialogue of an Early Modern English work, such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This leads us to our research question for the paper; in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, how can we see the diffusion of vocabulary inherited from the Norman conquest of England in the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Is there a difference in the usage of Norman and Non-Norman vocabulary by characters? And how do characters of different social backgrounds use English words of Norman origin differently, if there are identifiable differences in their speech at all?

The specific impact of the 1066 Norman Invasion of England has been an underrated influence on Hamlet’s linguistic identity. In this paper, I will argue that the overthrow of the Old Anglo-Saxon order of England by Norman French speakers led by William the Conqueror had far-reaching linguistic consequences on English that had fully taken root among the common English of Williams Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to the point that overall rates of the relative usage of Norman-origin vocabulary no were no longer treated as a marker of social meaning. By that I mean, a person or literary character using a Norman word rather than a Germanic one no longer had a clear correlation with their social standing, which can be demonstrated in the text of Hamlet by providing examples of simultaneous use of Germanic and Norman words with the same or similar meaning, such as “carry” and “bear”. In this paper, I will first provide historical context to the languages of Old English and Norman French in anticipation of their contact and conflict. Then I will draw on existing scholarship on language contact and borrowing between the two languages, and summarize the current state of research of Shakespeare’s language and vocabulary. In the following two sections, I will present the data I have collected on the vocabulary of Hamlet, the methods I intend to use to analyze it, and the results of that same analysis. The paper will conclude with remarks on the findings of the data analysis, and will present my conclusions on the ultimate impact of Norman French on Hamlet.