How Shakespeare Sounded

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey guys, this is Mike calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Mike.

Hi, Mike. How are you doing?

Hey, doing great. How are you guys?

Super.

Really good.

Well, hey, let me give you a little bit of background as far as what I do.

I am a theater arts teacher.

I teach at a couple of colleges here in the Dallas area.

And oftentimes I’m called upon to teach voice classes, which will every now and then require me to teach certain dialects.

And I’ve always had a fascination with dialects, and I’ve always had this really weird, uncanny ability to pinpoint where someone is from in the United States just by being able to hear a few of their vowel sounds.

And I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to wanting to learn about accents and dialects, and I’ve always had this really, really bizarre fascination and curiosity as to what people may have sounded like in the early part of the 18th and 19th century here in the United States.

I’ve always wondered what people during Shakespeare’s time, how they sounded.

I had this teacher in graduate school.

She was from London, and she worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company for many years.

And she was a big proponent for American actors never, ever, ever using a British accent to do Shakespeare.

Because she said the way that British people speak now is nothing like Shakespeare spoke back then.

And she actually read a monologue from The Merchant of Venice using the accent that she thought Shakespeare probably used.

And it sounded very appellation, like the R’s were very hard.

It sounded a lot like an East Texas or maybe even an Arkansas, Tennessee type of accent.

And believe it or not, Shakespeare’s meter flowed so much more nicely than it ever would with hearing John Gielgud or Ralph Richardson do it.

It was really kind of eye-opening.

Yeah, I can see that.

David Crystal is a British linguist, and he’s written a book called Pronouncing Shakespeare.

And in that book, he talks exactly about the things that you’ve described.

When we think about the difference in American and British pronunciations, Americans and British people both make the mistake of thinking somehow that we’re the deviants and that the British somehow have persevered through the centuries in speaking correct English.

And it’s simply not the case.

Both branches of English have changed with similar degrees of variety.

And the roticity of English, that is, whether or not they pronounce the R’s, has fluctuated, has turned on and off throughout the centuries as different accents have become prestigious and other accents have fallen away.

And Mike, I really think you’d enjoy this book, Pronouncing Shakespeare by David Crystal, if you haven’t seen it already, because he makes some really interesting points in there.

Like, you know, we have a sense of Shakespearean actors getting up there and speaking in sort of a slow, distinct way.

But he’s figured out from texts that actually they probably spoke a lot faster.

And when the company that performs there at the Globe was performing Shakespeare plays in the original pronunciation, or what they’ve extrapolated is the original pronunciation, the plays were always 10 minutes shorter because they spoke faster and they dropped vowels in the middle of sentences, you know, or middle of words, so it would be like natural.

At the bottom of it, Shakespeare, he’s writing comedies.

A lot of his stuff is comedies.

And just like modern sitcoms, they can’t be ponderous.

They’ve got to fly.

They have to just zoom through and across the audience so that the jokes come fast and furious.

Right.

So they would have, for example, dance sequences that they had all figured out that would fit perfectly with the timing of the show.

And they kept going.

They had to redo the dances because the plays were shorter.

Well, this has been a great call.

It sounds like you’ve got some interesting work.

Yeah, and I’m really looking forward to checking out this book.

Yeah, in fact, there are recordings online.

There are, as a matter of fact.

We’ll link to them on the website.

David Crystal has advised a few theater productions on how to do Shakespeare in the original.

And some of these videos are really kind of astonishing.

You’re like, well, that’s not a very good British accent, but they’re not doing the modern British accent.

They’re doing the old one.

And so it’s pretty great.

Thanks a lot, Mike.

Yeah, thanks, guys.

Have a good one.

Our pleasure.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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