Listen to what Shakespeare looked like in the original pronunciation

What was the English of Shakespeare looks like Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know something like the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experience in the Globe Theater of London, the 1994 reconstruction of the theatrical house of Shakespeare. As Linguist David Crystal Explain, the goal of the theater has always been to take up as much as possible the original appearance of a Shakespearean production – costume, music, movement, etc., but until recently, the globe thought that trying a piece in the original pronunciation alienated the public. The opposite turned out to be true, and people claimed more. Above, Crystal and his son, Ben Crystal actorDemonstrate us that certain Shakespearian passages would have sounded their first audience, and in doing so, pull a subtle play of words that are lost in modern languages.

The English of Shakespeare is called by academics, the beginning of modern English (not, as many students say, “old English”, an entirely different and much older language). Crystal dates its first modern Shakespearean around 1600 (in its Excellent manual On the subject, the linguist Charles Barber tightens the period almost between 1500 and 1700.) David Crystal cites three types of important evidence which guide us towards the recovery of the original pronunciation of the beginning of the modern (or “op”).

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1. Observations made by people who write on the language at the time, commenting on the sound of words, what words rhyme, etc. Shakespeare Contemporary Ben Jonson Tells us, for example, that the speakers of English in its time and its place pronounced the “R” (a characteristic known as “rhoticity”). Since then, as Crystal points out, the language evolved quickly, and there was not a single type of OP, there are a lot of contemporary comments on this evolution, that the first modern writers as Jonson had the chance to observe first.

2. Spelling. Unlike today's very frustrating tension between spelling and pronunciation, the beginning of modern English tended to be much more phonetic and the words were pronounced much more as if they were spelled, or vice versa (although the spelling is very irregular, a clue to the wide variety of regional accents).

3. Rimes and word games that only work in op. The crystals demonstrate the important pun between “kidneys” and “lines” (as in genealogical lines) in Romeo and Julietwhich is completely lost in the so-called “pronunciation received” (or “appropriate” British English). Two -thirds of Shakespeare sonnets say the father and son team have rhymes that only work in OP.

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Not everyone agrees what Shakespeare's PO could have looked like. Eminent shakespeare The director Trevor Nunn claims That it could have looked more like American English today, suggesting that the language that has migrated through the pond has preserved more Elisabethaine characteristics than that which has remained at home.

You can hear an example of this type of OP in the recording of Romeo and Juliet above. Shakespeare's scientist John Barton suggests that OP would have looked more like Irish, Yorkshire and West Country pronunciations, an accent that crystals seem to favor in their OP interpretations and is much more obvious in reading the reading of reading Macbeth Below (the two audio examples come from a CD organized by Ben Crystal).

Whatever the conjecture, scholars tend to use the same set of criteria of David Crystal describes. I remember my own experience with modern English pronunciation at the start in an intensive graduate class on the history of the English language. Hear a class of amateur linguists Read passages from Shakespeare familiar in what we have perceived as OP – using our phonological knowledge and the criteria of David Crystal – had exactly the effect that Ben Crystal described in An NPR interview::

If there is something about this accent, rather than it is difficult or more difficult to understand for people … He has spots of almost all British English accent, and in fact American and in fact Australian too. It is a sound that makes people – it reminds people the accent of their house – and therefore they tend to listen to more with their hearts than their heads.

In other words, despite the strangeness of the accent, the language can sometimes feel more immediate, more universal and even more of the moment, than the sometimes guincted and pretentious ways to read Shakespeare in the accent of a modern London stage actor or an anchor of BBC news.

To find out more about this subject, do not miss this related post: Listen to what Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear looked like in Shakespeare's original pronunciation.

Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2013.

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