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Article: Staging the vernacular: language and nation in Thomas Kyd's 'The Spanish Tragedy.'
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- March 22, 1998
- Author:
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The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning - there could be human beings to whom all this was alien.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Now to express the rupture of my part First take my tongue, and afterward my heart.
- Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
In his preface to A Table Alphabeticall (1604), Robert Cawdrey imagines the discomfort engendered by the English language in strangely familial terms: "Some men seek so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers' language, so that if some of their mothers ...