Think on my Words (Shakepeare)
David Crystal is Welsh! He’s rather good at accents.
Isn’t everything already known? Language has been neglected: peak of study in late C19th, a little more in 1960s/70s.
Language the gold-mine: stlll so much we don’t know about the way he uses language. A book I’ve already wanted to write, but conscious that one has to be ready because of the weight of scholarly tradition.
Been writing quarterly “Ground lingo” for “Around the Globe” since the theatre opened in 1997.
If you think of language as a series of chunks, then by 2003 grammar and vocabulary had been studied, but not pronunciation or orthography. The first gap was filled serendipitously in 2004 when The Globe decided to try to use original pronunciation. One of the last things they hadn’t done authentically. They hadn’t done it before because they thought that the audience wouldn’t understand it. But Tim Caroll[?] said “if you don’t do it, Stratford will”, the argument that always convinces! In 2004 they decided to do just a weekend of Romeo & Juliet in original pronunciation.
[Demonstration of Original Prounciation, which sounds quite West/North Country, though with more gutturals and pedantic enunciation of classically-derived words.]
Everybody said “we speak like that where we come from”. Everybody!
Three sources of evidence for pronunciation:
Rhymes & puns
Shakespearean orthography is a good guide to pronunciation because spelling had not yet been standardised and was more phonetic than now.
Contemporary orthoichists, authors on spelling reform who gave pronunciation guides. Ben Jonson wrote an English grammar, although his study burnt down in 1623, so it does not survive, except for the preface, which has a pronunciation guide for each letter of the alphabet.
Example of pun: Jacques on Touchstone in “As You Like It”:
And then he drew a dial from his poke
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye
Says very wisely “It is ten o’clock”
…
Punning “hour” with Elizabethan homophore “whore”.
And this pun has been realised in no modern production, in all probability.
Orthography has been almost an impossible area to study because of the slog involved. How many commas in first folio? This sort of work was only done once or twice. In Germany.
There are 350 exclamation marks in the first folio. That’s not actually very many in a corpus of 1,000,000 words of often emotive material. There are far more in a modern edition. May seem trivial, but as demonstrated with a fragment from R&J naturally directs the interpretation quite differently.
Historical perspective is what we always need with Shakespeare: we need to get rid of our modern conception of language. Roughly 10% (2,000) words in Shakespeare are faux amis or unrecognisable.
Malvoglio on getting Olivia’s letter: “If this fall into thy hands, revolve”. Actor turns on spot. But that is a modern meaning of “revolve”. But in Elizabethan English its meaning is only metaphorical: it means to ponder.
English write always ask “why?”. One of the things I most enjoyed was asking “why the iambic pentameter?”. The most popular verse form of the Elizabethan era, introduced then. Most interestingly, why PENTameter? Turns out to be the most easily remembered at one time. Seven is often the number quoted, but ±2. So it’s like staying one standard deviation below.
[Demonstration of repeating strings of numbers. I broke it by starting to repeat the numbers as he said them rather than waiting to the end of the line.]
Breaking it up with a caesura and using intonation aids retention.
Questions
One assumes he had a Warcs accent, but since nothing was written in that accent we don’t know what it sounds like. However, since he went to London very early. We know that his actors came from different parts of the country.
Chaucer? The Elizabethans themselves found him unintelligible only 200 years later, because of the great vowel shift. [Gives hard-to-understand quote].
Any similarities to RP? That came in about 1800, but nothing similar in Shakespeare’s day. How to convey the difference? Act! Not obvious that there were no accent differences in Elizabethan times, however.
Shift to more central vowels recently.
Idea of translating into modern English? I don’t go for it at all. It’s still not a big problem. “Islands of struggle.” Maybe only 1,000 now-hard words.
Did you look at intonation? Very hard to study: just a few hints from the way people wrote at the time. In Shakespeare you get an important clue: Hamlet’s speech to the players. “Trippingly” and indication of many commas shows that speech on stage was rather fast. We can’t tell much else.
Last updated 2008/05/31