Performative Language and Social Status in Shakespeare's Plays

This dissertation attempts to clarify some aspects of the operation of speech acts as they relate to power, authority, status, and rank in Shakespeare’s plays. At its core, it consists of three arguments. The first is that the ultimate index of power is the ability to have one’s words felt. That power then may translate – in terms that are neither simple nor fixed – into authority, rank, and status. The second is that such assertions or deployments of power (unless authorized by broad cultural consensus) are almost always met with resistance, and that consequently the assertions most likely to succeed are those that are least visible. The third point brings the first two together. If speech acts are often a means of asserting and exercising power, then paradoxically those speech acts that are least overt will be those most likely to succeed in that assertion: speech acts that are indirect, off-record, ambiguous, or perlocutionary. Bearing these arguments in mind, I will consider the operation and either the frustration or fruition of social ambition in Shakespeare’s plays, particularly his comedies. The plays bear out the pattern that speakers who make subtle, incremental assertions of status, by means of exploiting expectations of speech acts and genres, can then consolidate those incremental assertions into more enduring changes in status.Ph