Babel and the Bard: The Naked Englishman in the European Literary Polysystem.

The article highlights Andrew Boorde's The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge and its association with Shakespeare's identity as the nearly-naked Englishman in the European Literary Polysystem. Topics include that the book sets translingual skills as the epistemological foundation for knowledge about other cultures; and that Boorde's chapters introduce different cultural groups, each with an image, a poem, a language sample, and discussions of regional people.