Drawing on scholars like Paula Blank, Janette Dillon and Tim Machan, this article argues that, in the Tudor university and court plays of Shakespeare’s youth, the stigmatization of non-standard, dialect speakers demonstrates a cultural renegotiation of the contemporary linguistic climate. By defining the English language and the English people not against a foreign Other, but rather against the domestic, servile, and dialect-speaking Other, sixteenth-century playwrights demonstrated the threat of non-standard speaking and advocated the standardization of language through education while effecting cultural change through negative reinforcement.