But your English is so good!
Romeo and Juliet, as you know, concludes with the tragic deaths of two star-crossed lovers, but it opens with a bit of fun: two servants of the house of Capulet, not quite understanding each other.
Sampson: Gregory, on my word we’ll not carry coals.
Gregory: No, for then we should be colliers.
Sampson: I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.
Gregory: Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar.
About this exchange unprepared readers will have many questions, not likely including “Why are these guys speaking English?” Let us ask it now. The play is set in Verona, a long time ago. In that time and place, fluent English speakers, being rare, would have had employment opportunities far more lucrative than biting their thumbs on Lord Capulet’s behalf. Something funny is definitely going on.
You might say that the answer is obvious: Sampson, and Gregory, and indeed every character, speaks English because the play was written by an Englishman, for an English audience. And that is indeed the obvious answer—but not to the question I asked. It’s an honest mistake; the sentence Why are Sampson and Gregory speaking English? is ambiguous. It exhibits analytic philosophy’s favorite kind of ambiguity—an “ambiguity of scope.” With the use of some brackets, the ambiguity may be removed. The sentence may be used to ask an External Question, a question from “outside” the play:
EQ. Why is it that [in Romeo and Juliet, Sampson and Gregory speak English]?
The answer will have the form “[In the play, Sampson and Gregory speak English] because such-and-such.” But the sentence may also be used to ask an Internal Question:
IQ. In Romeo and Juliet, [why is it that Sampson and Gregory speak English]?
Now the answer’s explanatory information, the stuff after “because,” is inside the brackets: “In the play, [Sampson and Gregory speak English because this-and-that.]” The difference in bracketing makes for a difference in what can go in the answers: facts about Shakespeare, his time and place, the world he lives in, may appear in answers to EQ, but for answers to IQ, only facts about Sampson and Gregory, their time and place, and the world they live in—the world of the play—may appear. Nothing, therefore, about the listening habits of Globe Theater attendees is of any help.
Once the distinction is drawn, IQ may look hard, even impossible to answer; something for the PhD student in English Lit to tackle, maybe, but to be set aside by the casual reader. I am not studying for an English degree, but nor can I ignore IQ, for about internal/external question pairs like this one I have put forward a conjecture:
When a question about a story that calls out for an answer lacks an internal answer, but has an external one, then that is a flaw in the story.
For some quick evidence favoring the conjecture, note that it (if it is true) explains why some plot holes are bad. We tend to complain when a deux ex machina appears to save an otherwise unsavable hero, or defeat an otherwise undefeatable foe. This complaint, I suggest, is justified when “Why did this amazing device suddenly appear?” calls out for an answer, but has only an external one—namely, to get the story to an acceptable resolution.
But I now find myself in a bit of a pickle. In the Romeo and Juliet example, EQ has an answer and IQ lacks one. And certainly IQ (the internal question) calls out for an answer. How weird is it for a bunch of Italians to be speaking fluent English? If you went to Verona and observed such a thing, you would wave away anyone who insisted that the question of why it was happening was silly. Yet IQ’s lack of an answer is no flaw in the play. People have lodged many criticisms against Romeo and Juliet over the centuries, but not once has it been “Shakespeare never explains how they learned English.”
In Mimesis as Make-Believe Kendall Walton calls questions like IQ “silly questions.” Such questions, he writes,
are pointless, inappropriate, out of order. To pursue or dwell on them would be not only irrelevant to appreciation and criticism but also distracting and destructive. The paradoxes, anomalies, apparent contradictions they point to seem artificial, contrived, not to be taken seriously. We don't take them seriously. Ordinarily we don't even notice them.
Yes but what exactly is a silly question? In what does a question’s silliness consist? There are a couple of possibilities. The question “How many blades of grass are there in Arizona?” is silly because it is too hard to answer and no one cares anyway—but it does have an answer. By contrast, “How many hairs are there on the King of France’s head?” is silly in a different way: the question does not arise in the first place, there no longer being any non-beheaded Kings of France around. By which one of these analogies is the silliness of IQ best explained?
Walton explores both options, but seems to lean more toward the first. Maybe “Sampson and Gregory speak English,” and other “fictional truths” like it, are “deemphasized,” “unimportant,” “not to be dwelt on or even noticed particularly.” And maybe internal questions about such fictional truths, like IQ, are “inappropriate.” Of course you can notice, dwell on, and question those fictional truths, if you like; the questions are there to be asked, they do “arise,” and if you ask them the aesthetics police will not break down your door and revoke your reading license. But if you do those things, you are doing something wrong; you are not reading or watching (or, more generally, appreciating) correctly.
How does this conception of silly questions help the conjecture under discussion? Re-phrased a bit, the conjecture says
When an internal question that calls out for an answer lacks one, and the corresponding external question has an answer, then that is a flaw in the story.
This will not, after all, entail that Romeo and Juliet is flawed, so long as a why-question cannot call out for an answer, if the fact the question questions does not call out for attention. So long as asking IQ is inappropriate, everything’s cool.
When is a fact in a story deemphasized or unimportant? It’s hard to say. It’s not simply when the author wants readers to give it little attention, or when few readers do so. A minor character may carry a major theme, and the author may want only the cognoscenti to notice. Anyway, the author’s say is not authoritative; he may be wrong or confused about what is important in his own story, either out of simple ignorance or sophisticated ideological blindness.
Maybe, then, the second conception of a silly question is superior; many think so. (I’ve seen this view in work by Catherine Abell, Gregory Currie, and Alan Goldman.) On that conception, an internal question about a story is silly if it does not arise in the first place: if the “fact” the question questions is not even there. The problem with “In Romeo and Juliet, why does everyone speak English?” is not that nothing in the world of the play is well-poised to answer it; the problem is that those people aren’t speaking English in the first place. Certainly the actors, up on stage, are speaking English, but when the actor playing Romeo says the words “O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”, all that is true in the play is that Romeo says something in Italian of which those words are an adequate translation.
At first this suggestion is shocking, and then it can have a kind of sideways neatness to it. And then it falls apart. Many parts of the play simply make no sense, if the characters are speaking Italian. The opening, repeated here, is a perfect example:
Sampson: Gregory, on my word we’ll not carry coals.
Gregory: No, for then we should be colliers.
Sampson: I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.
Gregory: Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar.
Sampson means “carry coals” in its metaphorical sense (“suffer humiliation patiently”); Gregory takes him literally. Then when Sampson says “in choler” (choler causes anger, in the bio-psychological theory of the four humors), Gregory mis-hears it, either mistakenly or deliberately as a joke, as “in collar,” that is, “in a hangman’s noose.” On the present suggestion, all this wordplay and confusion is actually happening in Italian, and just so happens to translate perfectly into a sequence of puns in English. That, I submit, is impossible.
Note added in proof: Doesn’t every external question have an answer, if only “because the author made the story that way”? And so isn’t the clause in the conjecture about external questions always satisfied? I suppose I mean something more demanding: I suppose the focus is meant to be on external questions that have answers of a certain kind, where “because that plot development or something like it was the only way to achieve some other artistic goal” is the paradigm.
But your English is so good!
I am tempted to deny the premise of the Internal Question: In the play, Sampson and Gregory do not speak English. They speak Italian, in exactly the way that people closest to them in the Verona of that time would have spoken.
Reading a text or watching a performance in English, we find them talking, misunderstanding, and punning. But to focus on the fact that they do this in English would be to miss the point in just the same was as, say, to focus on the fact that there is neither a Montague nor a Capulet on stage at any point, that this is a frigid winter evening at the Globe in London in the 21st century rather than a hot summer's day in feudal Verona, that the people lying on the stage at some point aren't even dead, and so on.
There are counterparts to this point in relation to reading. After all, the reader may flit from the internal monologue of one character to the pre-conscious impulses of another, all laid out on the page in English, without having to worry about whether English is the universal language of conscious thought or of pre-conscious drives.
I suppose the point is that, while we may wonder about the IQ if reading what we take to be reportage, we seek to engage in a different enterprise when reading fiction, and the IQ is simply irrelevant.
This may be in the neighbourhood of Walton's position, though I have not read him. Further or alternatively, I may have missed the point entirely, since this is not my area.
I think I generally agree with the point that if a work of art raises questions that have no internal answer, but have an external answer, then that is, at least by default, a flaw in the work of art.
However, I think there are some standard ways these flaws can be defeated, usually by demanding that audiences don't ask certain questions.. A big set of ways is somehow going to be related to genre conventions. The one you mention about the use of English for works in which the characters wouldn't normally speak English is a wide-ranging convention. But other genre conventions give rise to these exceptions as well. Some genres call for a McGuffin to drive the plot, but have no need for an internal explanation of the McGuffin - asking what's in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction is missing the point. Some genres call for the hero to succeed through extreme adversity, but have no need for an internal explanation of the plot armor - asking why Rambo didn't get more than grazed by any of the swarm of bullets while each of his shots kills an opponent is missing the point.
But outside of genre, these can become real questions that become flaws. If your spy drama has the Russian, Chinese, and French characters speaking in their language, with subtitles, then it's suddenly a flaw when the Germans are speaking English with no explanation, but not if all the actors just speak accented English as the genre convention. In Game of Thrones, once they established that main characters could in fact die if they did stupid things, some of the late season improbable survivals of characters became flaws.