Abstract
Royal voices is an exploration into the language and texts that were produced to construct and maintain the Tudors’ royal power. It surveys many types of royal texts for their textual and visual characteristics in order to establish a possible royal voice of the period. The term “voice,” as used in the book, refers to the complex interplay of “the signs of the utterance; the means for that utterance to be distributed; and the processes that entail, and sustain, the social recognition of those signs as a delineated social voice, or register” (15). “Royal voice” is thus something that the contemporaries would have recognized as a distinct way of communicating royal authority and speaking as a monarch. The main argument of the book is that “social formulation of the royal voice, as achieved through the dissemination of official authentic texts and through unofficial practices of imitation and appropriation, was an integral part of the maintenance and management of royal authority and the sociopolitical dynamics of the Tudor state” (11).
The book approaches the topic with an admirable scope that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, a thorough philological sensitivity to the data, and a rich sociohistorical contextualization. The outcome is an extremely multifaceted and detailed, even breathtaking, picture of language practices constituting royal power during the Tudor period from 1485 to 1603, including the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I.
The book is divided into two parts, which focus on texts conveying authentic royal voices and appropriated royal voices respectively. The authentic royal voices are explored in royal letters and royal proclamations. The scribal letters form the most extensive data set of authentic royal voices including 418 letters (ca. 285,000 words), while the holograph letters are less numerous with 111 exemplars (ca. 43,000 words); the royal proclamations corpus contains 290 proclamations (ca. 207,000 words). The choice of the data enables explorations into the construction of voice in interaction with different audiences, levels of formality, and provenance.
The appropriated royal voices are found in texts imitating, appropriating, or replicating the royal voice in contexts that are claiming authenticity. This definition excludes an otherwise obvious source of royal language, namely, literary representations. The choice of excluding “literary works” such as drama makes sense in this context as they “generally make no claims to their evidential basis” (30) unlike texts meant to be interpreted as authentic. The texts claiming authenticity include letters and proclamations by three impostors, Perkin Warbeck, Edward Seymour, and Lady Jane Grey, as well as royal reported speech in non-royal correspondence and chronicles.
Even though the impostors corpus is a small one with just thirty-eight documents, it provides an innovative perspective on how royal discourse is understood and then produced by those who do not possess the royal authority or have only a marginal claim to it. Such documents provide evidence of the contemporary perception of royal communicative practices and style. The fact that the authentic data set is more extensive than the appropriated one is understandably reflected in the author’s treatment of them. The discussion on authentic voices is longer and more varied as, for example, corpus-pragmatic methods can be used more extensively.
Part I, examining authentic royal documents, first explores royal correspondence and the materiality of letters (i.e., “visual pragmatics,” 22) in chapter 1. Again, the choice is not haphazard but firmly motivated by the significance of visual elements to the ways in which contemporaries interpreted letters. A letter was first seen rather than read. In other words, it did not exist without its materiality embedded with social meanings. The analysis focuses on material provenance, hand(writing), letter orientation as portrait or landscape, signature placement, and signature form, which are all important in constituting royal authority. Scribal letters and holograph letters are shown to rely on different visual means as scribal letters clearly establish an institutional authority, for instance, by placing the signature in the header. Scribal letters are produced relying on the material conventions of scribal correspondence, so that the consistent nature of their production and material aspects emerge as an essential factor in establishing their authority and provenance. Holograph letters, on the other hand, show the monarch’s personal hand and a more individualized way of constructing authority. Holograph letters in general were intended for a more private and limited audience than scribal letters, which is evident for example in Elizabeth I’s worried reaction when she learned that James VI had passed one of her holograph letters around his court (40). Although chapter 1 provides a detailed account of the material practices of royal correspondence, photographs of letters would have helped the reader experience the texts more vividly.
The linguistic analysis of the royal letters adopts an exploratory, data-driven approach, which is how philology is often done today. In other words, corpus tools are used to identify potentially interesting words or other linguistic patterns, which are then explored and interpreted in more detail by close-reading the texts. In chapter 2, keyword analysis is used to identify topics and stylistic characteristics of the letters, and an examination of lexical bundles is used to explore the forms and distribution of formulaic language. Both statistical techniques are nowadays widely used to detect linguistic patterns, even as part of qualitative approaches such as corpus-assisted discourse studies. Keyword analysis compares two text corpora and detects those words that occur significantly more frequently in the focus corpus than in the reference corpus, while the analysis of lexical bundles reveals co-occurrence patterns of N words, such as three-word bundles. The author uses the quantitative findings of these analyses to identify three thematic areas—metacommunication, royal self-reference, and royal epistolary speech acts—that are explored in more detail from a pragmatic perspective in chapter 3.
Four semantic categories of keywords stand out in the analysis when royal letters are compared to non-royal letters of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). These are “abstract and general,” “social actions, states and processes,” “names and grammatical words,” and “linguistic actions, states and processes” (69-72). The semantic category “abstract and general” covers the biggest single portion (21 percent) of the identified keywords. They refer to concepts relating to morality and appropriacy as well as truthfulness and legitimacy, and they can often be placed in opposition with each other like conform/traitorously and natural/unnatural. The author concludes that this prominent semantic group of keywords in royal letters in comparison to non-royal letters “constructs and perpetuates a frame of reference that situates royal power within a particular moral landscape, one in which their recipients and third-party referents are positioned and subsequently evaluated in binary and polarized terms” (69).
When royal scribal and royal holograph letters are compared to each other, holograph letters show a more frequent use of the first-person singular and second-person pronouns, whereas scribal letters are characterized by self-referential first-person plural pronouns and grammatical keywords, such as wherein, nevertheless, forasmuch, and thereof. These differences in keywords point to a different textual organization and legalistic nature of scribal letters. The analysis of lexical bundles also yields results showing systematic differences between scribal and holograph letters as the scribal bundles are predominantly ideational in function, whereas the holograph bundles are interpersonal. Ideational bundles in scribal letters are referential, world building. They identify entities, objects, and their relationships in time and space. In contrast, the prominence of first- and second-person pronouns as keywords and interpersonal bundles in holograph letters brings them closer to the general characteristics of personal correspondence.
The analyses of keywords and lexical bundles could certainly have given rise to many types of pragmatic analyses, but the author has singled out three significant features of the genre for scrutiny in chapter 3, including metacommunication, royal self-reference, and royal epistolary speech acts. The analysis of these three features highlights various facets of the interpersonal work between the royal authority and the recipient. With metacommunication, the writer makes reference to texts in the extralinguistic reality of the current text and as such shapes the recipient’s interpretation of the message (85). Self-reference is an integral part of any interaction, and the variation and switches between I and the royal we have an important role in indexing the royal persona (89). Finally, the kinds of speech acts (e.g., request, promise, offer, assertion) and their formulations found in royal letters can shed light on the nature of the engagement between the monarch and the recipient (99).
The results of these three analyses again testify to consistent differences between scribal and holograph letters. For instance, the scribal metacommunication including the word letter(s) refers systematically to the present document, acknowledges the receipt of past letters, asserts the intended future letters, and refers to letters of third parties. These our letters is an example of a reoccurring legalistic phrase establishing the validity of the letter and authorizing the recipient to perform the activity specified (86). The analysis of speech acts also shows how scribal letters rely on formulaic language: they employ a small repertoire of lexical items in semi-fixed syntactic constructions, such as compound verb phrases (will and command) and first-person framing clauses (our pleasure is that). The author finds further evidence of the social recognition and appropriation of such phrases in contemporary correspondence where they are used by high-ranking noblemen to command subordinate recipients in the king’s name (109).
With the material and linguistic analyses of royal correspondence, the author has by now convincingly established the existence and nature of a Tudor royal voice, which, she claims, constitutes a register in its consistency (114). The rest of the book reaches outside the royal correspondence to see how pervasive the register was in other genres. Chapter 4 focuses on royal proclamations that are “text-based announcements of the royal prerogative made in a public place by a local official,” in other words, “a declaration of lawful will of the monarch” (115). Proclamations have similarities with royal correspondence as they too were prepared by royal clerks and had an interactive purpose alongside of the legal purpose of issuing directives. Linguistically royal proclamations and royal correspondence seem to converge in their legalistic aspects especially in the beginning of the 16th century, but during the 16th century proclamations incorporate more epistolary-like elements. The author concludes that there may be enough visual and verbal similarity in the royal documents that they “would be heard as the same royal voice” (153). This hypothesis is tested in Part II on appropriated royal voices.
After a brief chapter 5 that surveys how royal correspondence and proclamations were described in contemporary documentation, chapter 6 explores the use of royal voice by an impostor, a lord protector and a short-time queen, showing, for example, that the royal we is a central device in all three cases. Since Perkin Warbeck, Edward Seymour, and Jane Grey belonged to court circles and had connections to court clerks and secretaries, they can be expected to be familiar with the royal voice. To broaden the scope of the analysis to other social groups, chapter 7 looks into royal discourse representation in non-royal correspondence, and chapter 8 explores how sixteenth-century chronicles represented royal voices. In both cases, there are traces of formulae and pragmatic markers associated with the authentic royal language, which suggests that at least some features were recognizable enough to people outside of the royal circles to be reproduced in unofficial contexts (234). However, the writers’ needs and the purpose and conventions of the genres seem to have shaped the reporting of royal speech even more. This is perhaps understandable as correspondence reports mostly on royal spoken and private interactions, and chronicles employ more indirect than direct reporting with an emphasis on the narrative and its progress. For example, reports of Henry VIII’s speech include interjections, figurative expressions, interrogatives, and exclamatives, but it is not clear to what extent these reflect his idiolect or the letter writer’s preferences and general characteristics associated with speech and orality (210). In some cases, it is possible to see traces of royal idiolects in these reports looking at words that are quantitatively infrequent in sixteenth-century correspondence overall but somewhat more frequent in authentic royal correspondence. The adverb eftsoon, for example, is identified in this way, and it may have been Henry VIII’s idiolect as it occurs in his authentic correspondence a bit more frequently than in the sixteenth-century letters in CEEC. Furthermore, Stephen Gardiner in his letter states that this is how the king spoke to him (211).
In this book, Evans provides a convincing yet complex case for the Tudor royal voice and shows how the royal register served as a tool in establishing royal power. The Tudor monarchs seem to have had a somewhat personal and private voice, whereas the scribal practices were the machinery that constructed and maintained a constant and recognizable royal voice to the extent that it was imitated and appropriated in unofficial contexts. Although the book stems from a sociopragmatic, sociolinguistic, and corpus linguistic background, it is essential reading for any scholar working on the Tudor period.
ORCID iD
Minna Palander-Collin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8428-4423
Corpus
Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC). 1998. Compiled by Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Jukka Keränen, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, and Minna Palander-Collin at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki.