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Did Shakespeare
speak with a
regional accent?
Andrew Hook
I was pleased to read in the Guardian a short piece by Michael Billington, the paper’s senior drama critic, expressing a degree of scepticism about a newly-released British Library CD which gives us what claims to be Shakespeare in his original pronunciation.
I was pleased because a few nights earlier I had listened to an item on Radio Four’s ‘Front Row’ which gave what amounted to a puffing advertisement for this project. Mark Lawson interviewed a Shakespearean actor called Ben Crystal, one of the authors of the CD in question. His name rang a bell, and a quick check revealed that he is indeed the son of Professor David Crystal, one of our leading experts on the English language and certainly the guru the BBC calls upon whenever some issue about the present state of English becomes a news item. (He can be relied upon to remind us that all languages evolve and change over time so that new words or developments in English usage are nothing to get worried about.)
Unsurprisingly it turns out that it is Crystal senior who is the author of the Shakespeare’s original pronunciation theory. Having been less than convinced by Ben Crystal’s radio account of what is involved, I listened to the video in which Crystal father and son explain in detail the reasoning behind the new CD.
Professor Crystal does try to give a scholarly gloss to the enterprise and offers some justification for the idea that we can recapture how English was pronounced in Shakespeare’s day. But the case he makes is far from conclusive. Also while it may well be true that Elizabethan and Jacobean English did not sound like the ‘received pronunciation’ of English today, I remained unclear over whether all English speakers are supposed to have used what the Crystals call Shakespeare’s ‘original pronunciation’ – which comes across more or less as a west-country regional accent.
In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare rhymes ‘proved’ with ‘loved’. Received pronunciation does not make this a true rhyme, while original
pronunciation does.
In the interview with Ben, Mark Lawson failed to question the degree of certainty we can have about how exactly Shakespeare spoke, but did manage to ask when it became normal for our actors to deliver Shakespeare’s lines without any regional accent. Ben suggested only in the last 100 years. So in the 18th and 19th centuries Shakespearean actors all spoke as though they were auditioning for minor roles in ‘The Archers’? Is this credible?
In the interview Lawson weakened the case by making the intellectually lazy suggestion that it was only snobbery that made generations of Shakespearean actors speak in something other than a regional accent. Rather than an upper-class establishment plot, could that decision not have much to do with a range of considerations both inside and outside the plays themselves?
Surely Shakespeare’s original pronunciation is at best a question of supposition – however well-informed and scholarly. The regional accents of members of London’s Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies are bound to have been diverse. Is it likely that Shakespeare would have expected them to sound like him?
Ben Crystal made two points in support of the original pronunciation case. In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare rhymes ‘proved’ with ‘loved’. Received pronunciation does not make this a true rhyme, while original pronunciation does. Well perhaps so, but Shakespeare’s sonnets were meant to be read and the two words do make an eye rhyme. Then Crystal suggests that a speech by Jacques in Act 2, scene 7, of ‘As You Like It’ contains a pun on the word ‘hour’ – when it is pronounced to rhyme with ‘whore’. (Similarly in the video we’re told that in the prologue to ‘Romeo and Juliet’, original pronunciation reveals a pun on ‘loins/lines’.) Such readings are plausible – but far from certain.
If the Globe and other theatres want to give a try to Shakespeare in what the Crystals assure us is original pronunciation, that’s entirely up to them. But, like Michael Billington, I think it would be ‘perverse’ if what is only a scholarly experiment became standard practice in the delivery of the language of Shakespeare.
