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2007-2008 Fellows

Ema Vyroubalova

Stanford University
English Department

Ema Vyroubalová is a Ph.D. candidate in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford. She received her B.A. in English and French from Amherst College in 2002 and also studied at the British American Drama Academy in London and Université de Paris. She focuses on early modern British and continental literature with a particular interest in representations of foreignness in Elizabethan and Jacobean writings.

Project Summary

’These Confusions of Lewd Tongues’: Linguistic Diversity in Early Modern England, 1509-1625 explores the dynamic of multilingual exchanges in sixteenth and seventeenth century England in three major contexts: early modern linguistic discourse, English royal court, and London theatres. It brings into dialogue texts of diverse genres, including plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, Spenser's A View of the State of Ireland, contemporary French and Italian textbooks, and multilingual manuscript documents from Queen Elizabeth's administration. Focusing on the connections between linguistic diversity, foreign presence, and Elizabethan and Jacobean literary and dramatic culture the study uncovers a trans-national component in texts too readily regarded as quintessentially English.