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.

Poets, meet translators

Several noted Spanish-language poets are visiting Harvard this week in a unique event that pairs the poets and their works with top translators in the field.

Argentinian poets Washington Cucurto and Tamara Kamenszain and Chilean poet Malú Urriola read their works in the original Spanish Tuesday evening in the kickoff event of “Transversal: A Latin American Poetry Lab,” sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Woodberry Poetry Room, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Poet Forrest Gander, a professor at Brown University and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, read English translations of Cucurto’s frenetic, slang-laced works culled from the streets of Buenos Aires. Anna Deeny, a lecturer on history and literature and noted translator of Raúl Zurita, read Urriola’s downbeat, introspective works. And Laura Healy, managing editor of the Harvard Reviewand translator of three collections of Roberto Bolaño’s poetry, also conjured the livelihood of Buenos Aires in Kamenszain’s poems.

Healy, who learned Spanish in high school and lived in Uruguay for a time, “was interested in working with an Argentine poet because — after spending so much time in Uruguay — the rioplatense dialect is the most familiar to me,” she said.

The poets had been previously unfamiliar with the translators with whom they were coupled, but have been corresponding and conversing throughout the year. The Woodberry Poetry Room selected the translators while Sergio Delgado, the event co-organizer and assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, chose the poets.

“Transversal” is the brainchild of Marcela Ramos, an arts coordinator at the David Rockefeller Center, who contacted the Woodberry and Delgado about promoting innovative poetry from Latin America.

“ ‘Transversal’ is the same word in both Spanish and English,” said Chloe Garcia Roberts, a library assistant at Woodberry and one of the event’s coordinators, “and it denotes the act of cutting across or intersection. Professor Delgado stated from the beginning that the poetry he wanted to highlight from Latin America was cross-genre and cross-disciplinary, and this aesthetic — combined with the translation component — we felt was nicely encompassed by the title.”

Gander, Deeny, and Healy discussed the pleasures and pains of translations, from struggling to understand the works to finding the right tone and grappling with syntax, meaning, and word choice, which Gander summed up by stating, “Translation is like putting on someone else’s pants. You walk differently.”

“I’m interested in translation mostly as a creative exercise,” Healy said. “It’s a puzzle to play with, a code to be cracked. The process of translating is also a very intimate way to interact with a text. It forces you to slow down your reading and spend time really understanding and interpreting it.”

The Harvard Review plans to publish an online supplement of the poets’ original works and their translations.

“Transversal” continues through Thursday, with Peruvian poet Róger Santiváñez joining the discussions.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/11/poets-meet-translators/