I fell down in my obligation to link to yesterday’s stop on the Virtual Book Tour. But dry your tears—it’s right here, at Review From Here. (Can’t seem to find a permalink; if you’re reading this after time has passed, you may have to scroll down or search.)
Today’s stop is at The Story Behind the Book.
Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost links to a story, and posts a couple video clips, concerning the first American attempt to produce a Shakespeare play in the original accents of Shakespeare’s time. The point of the exercise seems to be, mainly, to demonstrate how much better the poetry rhymed back when it was written.
To me, this is fascinating stuff. I was, frankly, surprised at how comprehensible the old pronunciation is. If you or I took a time machine back to Shakespeare’s London, we could (apparently) communicate pretty well with the locals. I’d assumed the differences would be greater. If you’ve taken a Chaucer course, you probably know how foreign Middle English sounds to the modern ear. But of course Shakespeare was several centuries closer to us than Chaucer. Languages change constantly, and none more than English. Despite what you’ve seen in any number of time travel movies, if you went back to medieval England (for instance), you wouldn’t be able to communicate with a knight (particularly since a knight would have spoken French).
Some people seem to think this reconstructed Elizabethan English sounds Irish. I can understand that, but I’d compare it more to some of the English regional dialects, like that of Yorkshire.
It surprises many people (but not those who’ve studied language) that Shakespeare’s dialect sounds closer to American, than contemporary English. Colonial accents tend to be much more resistant to change than speech patterns in the Old Country. I’ve heard many stories about Norwegian-Americans who learned the language from their parents or grandparents, and then went to visit the old country and were told they spoke an outdated Norwegian regional dialect, very well. Language scholars make use of this fact all the time.
Which brings up the obvious question of methodology. How certain are the scholars that this is precisely the way Shakespeare spoke? In the absence of actual recordings, I have to assume a certain amount of guesswork is involved.
But an even greater mystery is, how did the Irish and Yorkshiremen sound in Shakespeare’s time?
Have you seen the wonderful PBS documentary, The Story of English? It goes into how the language developed, and really does tell it as a story. They end up tracing the influences of each people group/language through England and into America, showing where many of our more common accents come from. Absolutely fascinating!
I saw bits of it, and did enjoy it.
I like that OP clip very much, and I believe I’ve seen a few shows of The Story of English. It was great fun.
No doubt the Irish and Yorkshiremen then sounded much like today’s Chattanoogans.
Doubt that the sun doth move, but never doubt that, Michael.