Kath. De nails, de arme, de ilbow.
Alice. Saulve vostre honneur, de elbow.
Kath. Ainsi dis-je; de elbow, de nick, et de sin: comment appelez-vous le pied and la robbe?
Alice. De foot, madame; et de coun.
Kath. De foot, et de coun? O Seigneur Dieu! ce sont mots de son maulvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user. Je ne vouldrois prononcer cez mots devant les Seigneurs de France, pour tout le monde. Il fault de foot, et de coun, neant-moins. Je reciteray une aultre fois ma leçon ensemble: de hand, de fingre, de nails, de nick, de sin, de foot, de coun.
Alice. Excellent, madame!
Kath. C'est assez pour une fois; allons-nous à disner.
It is not surprising, remembering Shakespeare's friendship with the Huguenots, to find him quoting from the Genevan Bible in the same play.[333] When he composed it, he must have FRENCH NEGLECTED IN GRAMMAR SCHOOLShad a strong inclination to write French, as he sometimes uses the language rather inconsistently, making the Dauphin, for instance, speak French one moment and English the next.
On the whole, Shakespeare's French seems to have been fairly correct grammatically, if not quite idiomatic.[334] It contains just enough mistakes and anglicisms to make it extremely unlikely that he received help from any Frenchman; for example, we find the Princess Katharine of France saying, "Je suis semblable a les anges." On other occasions, when Englishmen are speaking, Shakespeare purposely makes their French incorrect and clumsy. That he could read French is shown by the fact that some of the originals on which he based his plays were not translated into English.[335] Moreover, he probably read Montaigne in the original, unless, like Cornwallis, Florio allowed him to see his translation in manuscript—a rather remote possibility, as the French would be easier of access. No doubt many others besides Shakespeare owed a good deal of their knowledge of French to direct intercourse with Frenchmen, a means of improvement strongly advocated by the professional teachers of the time. "Get you acquainted with some Frenchman" is their cry.
In addition to the refugees, students or men belonging to no particular craft or profession who took up the teaching of their language on their arrival in England, there were also professional schoolmasters—French, Flemish, and Walloon. Many of the latter, we may surmise, were no doubt driven from their country by the edict issued by Margaret, Duchess of Parma, in 1567. One clause was particularly directed against schoolmasters who might teach any error or false doctrine. None of these teachers, however, would find any opening in the grammar schools, which were then "little nurseries of the Latin tongue." The memorizing of Latin grammar, with the study of rhetoric in the Latin writers, both in verse and prose, formed almost the whole of the curriculum.[336] In the books on education of the time the study of French was equally ignored. These works, however, are mainly from the pen of pedants, and have but little bearing on practical education.[337] For them French was not a 'learned' tongue, in spite of the efforts of Palsgrave to secure its recognition as such.