Shakespeare's Accent: How Did The Bard Really Sound?

"To be or not to be" may be the question, but there's another question that's been nagging Shakespeare scholars for a long time: What did Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio, Portia or Puck really sound like when Shakespeare was first performed more than four centuries ago?

The British Library has completed a new recording of 75 minutes of The Bard's most famous scenes, speeches and sonnets, all performed in the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's time.

That accent sounds a little more Edinburgh — and sometimes even more Appalachia — than you might expect. Actor Ben Crystal, director of the new recordings, joins NPR's Scott Simon to talk about the effort to perform Shakespeare's works authentically.

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Interview Highlights

On the gradual shift in pronunciation and performance

"There's definitely been a change over the last 50 to 60 years of Shakespeare performance. The trend I think has been to speak the words very beautifully ... and carefully — and some might say stoically — and it's very, very different than how it would have been 400 years ago."

On how researchers study what people sounded like four centuries ago

"We've got three different types of data we can mine — one is the rhymes. Two-thirds of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets don't rhyme anymore. We know that the final couplet in ... Sonnet 116 ... you know it's:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

"You can extrapolate those kind of rhyme schemes across the sonnets, and indeed some of the plays rhyme. That's one set of data.

"They used to spell a lot more like they used to speak, so a word like film in Mercutio's Queen Mab speech is spelled philom in the folio, and we know that's a two syllable word like phi-lom. And if you go over to Northern Ireland, and they invite you to the cinema, they'll invite you to see the 'fi-lm.' That's an Elizabethan pronunciation that's stayed with us. ...

"There were linguists at the time and they very kindly wrote books saying how they pronounced different words. And all of that data brings us to 90-95 percent right, which isn't bad for 400 years."

On how this accent feels familiar

"If there's something about this accent, rather than it being difficult or more difficult for people to understand ... it has flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too. It's a sound that makes people — it reminds people of the accent of their home — and so they tend to listen more with their heart than their head."

On Shakespeare being for young people

"I gave a workshop at a school recently with a bunch of 13- and 14-year-old kids. And their idea of Shakespeare, having never studied it or even really read it, was that it would be difficult to understand and it wasn't for them, and I was like: No, listen, he's written a play about two 13-year-olds or 14-year-olds meeting and discovering life and love and everything for the first time. It's a play for you."

Hear a reading from 'Romeo and Juliet' by Benjamin O'Mahony and Natalie Thomas

Listen:http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/03/24/149160526/shakespeares-accent-how-did-the-bard-really-sound

On class distinctions and changes in pronunciation

"You can't distinguish a character by putting on let's say a posh accent, for want of a better word, or a more common accent. How do you do it? The accent was pretty much the same. The accent was changing over Shakespeare's time.

When King James came to the throne after Queen Elizabeth — he was the Scottish King James VI — and everyone in court started speaking with a Scottish twang."

On connecting with the true meaning of the words

"One of the most famous sonnets ... Sonnet 116 ... everybody has [it] in their weddings because it has the word marriage in it: Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. When I started speaking this sonnet, it changed from something highfalutin and careful and about marriage and it became a real testament of love."

Hear 'Sonnet 116' read by Ben Crystal

Listen: http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/03/24/149160526/shakespeares-accent-how-did-the-bard-really-sound

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Audio extracts from Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation courtesy of the British Library Board.

How Americans Have Reshaped Language

Much of the chapter on Philadelphia is about the city’s use of German in the 18th century. It’s interesting to learn that Benjamin Franklin was as irritated about the prevalence of German as many today are about that of Spanish, but the chapter is concerned less with language than straight history — and the history of a language that, after all, isn’t English. In the Chicago chapter, Bailey mentions the dialect literature of Finley Peter Dunne and George Ade but gives us barely a look at what was in it, despite the fact that these were invaluable glimpses of otherwise rarely recorded speech.

Especially unsatisfying is how little we learn about the development of Southern English and its synergistic relationship with black English. Bailey gives a hint of the lay of the land in an impolite but indicative remark about Southern child rearing, made by a British traveler in 1746: “They suffer them too much to prowl amongst the young Negroes, which insensibly causes them to imbibe their Manners and broken Speech.” In fact, Southern English and the old plantation economy overlap almost perfectly: white and black Southerners taught one another how to talk. There is now a literature on the subject, barely described in the book.

On black English, Bailey is also too uncritical of a 1962 survey that documented black Chicagoans as talking like their white neighbors except for scattered vowel differences (as in “pin” for “pen”). People speak differently for interviewers than they do among themselves, and modern linguists have techniques for eliciting people’s casual language that did not exist in 1962. Surely the rich and distinct — and by no means “broken” — English of today’s black people in Chicago did not arise only in the 1970s.

Elsewhere, Bailey ventures peculiar conclusions that may be traceable to his having died last year, before he had the chance to polish his text. (The book’s editors say they have elected to leave untouched some cases of “potential ambiguity.”) If, as Bailey notes, only a handful of New Orleans’s expressions reach beyond Arkansas, then exactly how was it that New Orleans was nationally influential as the place “where the great cleansing of American English took place”?

And was 17th-century America really “unlike almost any other community in the world” because it was “a cluster of various ways of speaking”? This judgment would seem to neglect the dozens of colonized regions worldwide at the time, when legions of new languages and dialects had already developed and were continuing to evolve. Of the many ways America has been unique, the sheer existence of roiling linguistic diversity has not been one of them.

The history of American English has been presented in more detailed and precise fashion elsewhere — by J. L. Dillard, and even, for the 19th century, by Bailey himself, in his under­read ­“Nineteenth-Century English.” Still, his handy tour is useful in imprinting a lesson sadly obscure to too many: as Bailey puts it, “Those who seek stability in English seldom find it; those who wish for uniformity become laughingstocks.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/books/review/speaking-american-a-history-of-english-in-the-united-states-by-richard-w-bailey-book-review.html?_r=0

The history of the English language in 100 places

A project tells the story of the English language through 100 locations, starting in Suffolk and ending in Vienna - with stops in Hastings, Beijing and the moon along the way

From a piece of farmland in Suffolk, to Vienna, via Hastings, Beijing and even the moon – it may sound like an unusual journey.

But these are the places, identified in a new study, which have helped to create, shape and spread the English language around the globe – and beyond.

They have all been included in a new project which aims to tell the story of the language through 100 locations.

It has been conducted by the English Project, a charity devoted to study of the subject.

The scheme was launched in 2010, with a request for the public to help, by providing suggested locations.

That phase has now been completed and the first 100 locations are described in a new book, A History Of The English Language In 100 Places.

It starts in Undley Common at Lakenheath, Suffolk, in 475 where arguably the first use of English was found on a bracteate – a thin piece of metal worn as jewellery – unearthed by a farmer, and ends in the Austrian capital, in 2012, where the University of Vienna is assembling a database of recordings of more than one million words of English, spoken by people for whom it is not their first language, in order to analyse trends.

Between the two, the book tells how English developed on these shores, before spreading around the world in countries like America, India, and Australia, and was then taken up in other parts of the globe where it is not a first language.

Some time in the last decade, the number of people speaking English as a second language is thought to have overtaken those who speak it as a first language.

Stops along the way include Hastings, in 1066, when the Norman Conquest led to French influence on the language, and Helsinki, in 1993, where text messaging was developed.

Other locations have been chosen to signify a range of historical figures, such as William Shakespeare and William Caxton, movements of people and emerging technology which have helped to shape the language.

Bill Lucas, a professor at the University of Winchester, said: “The language has developed and continuously evolved since its beginnings, some time in the early fifth century. And we are very keen to explore just how significant a role geography has had in these changes,

“What began as the language of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes on a small island has become a global property. It is owned and shaped by almost two billion English speakers across the Earth. Through an extraordinary combination of accidents, conquests and technological advances, English is now the language of the world.”

The project is ongoing and more locations are being encouraged. To submit a suggestion, visit the charity’s website, www.englishproject.org

York, 866

Norse-speaking Danes occupy the city and establish settlements across the east of the country, bringing with them words which enter the language. There are at least nine hundred words of Norse origin in standard modern English, among them ‘egg’, ‘husband’, and ‘leg’. Only the French have had such a profound influence on English as the Danes.

Chancery Street, London, c1419

A letter from King Henry V, on campaign in France, is sent back to his government in England updating them on the latest intelligence he had received about fears of an attack from Scotland. It is thought to have been read out to nobles in the Lord Chancellor’s office, increasingly known as the Chancery. Unlike correspondence from previous kings, written in Latin or French, this one was written in English.

Bruges, 1474

The site of the printing of the first book in English, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. William Caxton, who had translated it himself from French, later returned to England where he set up a printing press in Westminster.

Northolt, 1551

John Hart wrote The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of our Inglish Toung. Never published in his life time, it was about English spelling, and it is thought to be the first systematic study of the subject. He suggested spelling should be phonologically based. Thirty five years later, in Chichester, a schoolmaster published a pamphlet by William Bullokar: Or rather too be saied hiz abbreuiation of hiz grammar for English, extracted out-of hiz grammar at-larg. More generally known as Pamphlet for Grammar, it was the first guide of its kind.

Nimes, 1695

Hard-wearing cotton fabrics produced in the French town, “serge de Nimes”, entered the English language in around 1695 as “denim”.

The town has been included in the list to show how place names have been used to create new words. Other toponyms, as they are known, include: bungalow, a corruption of ‘Bengal’, describing the kind of cottages built by European settlers in that part of India; hamburger – minced beef from the German city of Hamburg in the nineteenth century; and magenta, the distinctive crimson colour discovered at the time of the battle of Magenta in Italy, in 1859.

St Martin-le-Grand, London, 1840

The Uniform Penny Post was introduced, covering the whole of Britain, precipitating the growth of letter writing across the country.

On the first day after its introduction, 112,000 letters were posted – three times the number of letters posted on the same date the previous year.

Salford, 1850

The Royal Museum and Public Library opened in Salford, with 10,000 books. Considered the first public library, it had more than 1,200 visitors a day in its first year. The same year, the Public Libraries Act was passed in England, enabling boroughs to levy a tax to provide free public libraries. The institutions are credited with massively increasing access to reading.

New York, 1913

The first crossword appears in the New York World. The first in Britain followed in 1922, in Pearson’s Magazine. It is included to show the popularity of written word puzzles, which date back to Roman times.

The Empire State Building, 1941

The first television advertisements - for Bulova watches - are broadcast by WX2XBS – later NBC – from its transmitter on the building, during a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. Several trade names have themselves become words, including Hoover, Sellotape, Thermos, and, more recently, Google.

Sea of Tranquillity, 1969

English is spoken on the moon as Neil Armstrong reported the landing of Apollo 11’s lunar module. Once safely touched down, he spoke to those back in Cape Kennedy saying ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed finally’. His more famous words – still the subject of debate – came a few hours later, when he climbed onto the surface of the moon. The space age has contributed many words to the language, among them booster seats, for children, lift off, unmanned, soft landing, and shuttle.

Beverly Hills, USA, 2008

Included to show the influence of “teen speak”, popularised by television shows such as 90210 – which started in this year – set in the area of California and starring AnnaLynne McCord. The language is marked by the rapidity with which it changes and the speed with which it spreads. One characteristic is the use of exclamations, such as: Deezam!, Oh Snap!, Shut up!, That Bites!, Yo!, Who’s Your Daddy!, OMG!. ‘Shut up!’ is not an insult but an affirmation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10405963/The-history-of-the-English-language-in-100-places.html