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Abstract

Studies of language and power in Shakespeare usually treat colonial, psychological, political, and familial domination as separate problems belonging to separate plays. This article asks what happens when the target of linguistic domination takes up, repeats, or withholds the discourse through which domination is exercised. It proposes linguistic counter-power as a comparative analytical concept: a change in who can define, command, or be believed within the dramatic world that outlasts and exceeds the speaker’s own act of resistance. The concept is distinguished from discursive resistance, linguistic agency, counter-discourse, and resignification, and is operationalised through three tests: uptake, durability, and structural effect. Using a qualitative, theory-informed close reading of speech events in Richard III, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest (Folger edition), the study codes manipulation, internalisation, refusal, and reappropriation against explicit criteria. The analysis shows that these four modes are not equivalent forms of counter-power. Manipulation and internalisation belong to domination, while refusal and reappropriation are only candidates for counter-power, and their effects depend on the listener’s position, on transmission, and on institutional support. The article identifies the limits of the framework.

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