Spectacular Speech: Performing Language in the Late Eighteenth Century

I n papers posthumously published in 1641, Ben Jonson likens language to a mirror. “Speak, that I may see thee,” he commands, for in his metaphor, language is capable of externalizing the internal contours of the hidden mind. By focusing on how language discloses a person’s unique mental “form or likeness,” Jonson prefigures his eighteenth-century intellectual descendants who, agreeing that language was an essential part of self-presentation, fixated on the things that language revealed about a speaker’s social conditions. As figures like Thomas Sheridan, John Walker, and others claimed in the second half of the eighteenth century, language was a public spectacle that immediately identified one’s class origins, vocational potential, and social standing, not to mention one’s national, regional, and ethnic derivation. Spoken language, they argued, was a profoundly evocative social signifier, one that articulated a great deal about a person irrespective of what the speaker was actually saying. Dismayed by nonstandard language’s ability to forestall occupational and social advancement, these writers popularized the discipline of elocution, which was framed as an educational regiment that would allow speakers to hide linguistic traits wrongly associated with ignorance, ill-breeding, and even criminality.