Professor’s research allows audience to hear Shakespeare’s words in his own accent:
“American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,” Meier said. “The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.”
Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that “haven’t worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.”
“The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.”
Here’s what it sounds like:
And here’s an explanation by Paul Meier:
(Via: Kottke)
October 25th, 2010 | 1:15 pm
I couldn’t be more pleased. I don’t mind the English claiming Will as more theirs than ours culturally, as Elizabethan culture was changed here by its thrust into a new set of circumstances in the colonies, and they can rightfully claim the simpler descent. But for language, one natural child is as good as another, and the numerous dialects of 1600, as descended to America, Canada, Australia, have an equal claim to be “real.”
October 25th, 2010 | 1:53 pm
Sounds bloody Irish if you ask me.
;)
Seriously, one can detect the closeness to the English of Chaucer’s time here; a great example.
Thanks for posting, Joe.
October 25th, 2010 | 10:57 pm
[...] (Hat-tip: Joe Carter) [...]
October 26th, 2010 | 12:07 am
That is really amazing. I’m jazzed to get to hear it. Does make me wonder what the language will sound like four more hundred years from now. :)
October 26th, 2010 | 1:35 pm
Fanciful methinks. Why on earth would it sound so Irish? The bard certainly wouldn’t have sounded like Olivier but like this? Think there’s more than a bit of creative licence and optimistic guesswork in this!
October 26th, 2010 | 3:03 pm
It sounds “Irish” (really more like a blend of Scotch and what we think of as the Australian dialect) because of the influence of the Celtic cultures that were pushed into Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Remember Shakespeare was entertainment for the poorer, common people and those were more likely to be the leftover Celts than the Anglo-Saxons who were more likely to make up the upperclass :)
October 26th, 2010 | 4:01 pm
Thanks Joe for posting this! Love it and wouldn’t have wanted to have missed it.
October 26th, 2010 | 4:08 pm
Not that surprising that it sounds closer to Irish or American accents. Colonial dialects (in any language) generally hew more closely to the accent at the time of colonization/adoption than those in the colonizing country, which evolve more quickly. Quebecois French, Venezuelan Spanish, etc. Thus American English can be thought of as an 17th-century English, while Australian and South African Englishes can be thought of as 19th-century Englishes (where the rhoticity has already been lost).
October 27th, 2010 | 2:52 am
Will wrote in a Warwickshire dialect and that certainly wasn’t Irish.
October 27th, 2010 | 3:11 am
Fascinating stuff. I first saw this kind of thing mooted in historian Daniel Boorstin’s book The Americans: The Colonial Experience, which he wrote in 1958. He suggested the Elizabethan English accent was close to some 1950s American accents but that the English accents had evolved away. I always got a chuckle out of thinking what the English would make of that (I am a naturalised Australian, formerly English).
October 27th, 2010 | 3:24 am
“Fanciful methinks. Why on earth would it sound so Irish?…Think there’s more than a bit of creative licence and optimistic guesswork in this”
Actually, it’s based on good research. Between the 15th and 18th centuries there was a great vowel shift in English, and the language took on a different sound. As mentioned in the article, there are certain rhymes in literature that don’t work in modern “proper” English, which gives us a clue to how the author expected the words would be pronounced. This is true in the works of poets throughout the time period, so it wasn’t just Shakespeare playing games with pronunciation. There’s an interesting article at wikipedia that illustrates it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
October 27th, 2010 | 7:05 am
Leave aside that this is old news…. that people didn’t speak with a modern theatrical accent in Shakespeare’s time.
Check out Northern Broadsides http://www.northern-broadsides.co.uk/ for a theatre company who use accent to great effect.
I must say I am greatly enjoying the history lesson of the comments section.
Before reading this please keep in mind there was no mention of Celtic culture prior to the French Revolution, and that it was taken up later in the 19th century by Walter Scott among others to Romanticise Scotlands past… a similar process occured in Ireland and Wales.
“It sounds “Irish” (really more like a blend of Scotch and what we think of as the Australian dialect) because of the influence of the Celtic cultures that were pushed into Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Remember Shakespeare was entertainment for the poorer, common people and those were more likely to be the leftover Celts than the Anglo-Saxons who were more likely to make up the upperclass :)”
Not only does this person believe the Celtic phallacy of the 19th century romantics – which elsewhere in Europe would take on the sinister overtones of the Nordic past – but we are expected to believe that when 12th Night was performed before Queen Elizabeth that he was doing this in his capacity of playwright to the common people… really?
As for the Anglo-Saxons -another piece of 19th century romanticism – being the upperclass this only confirms their complete historical ignorance. By the time Shakespeare was born there hadn’t been an Anglo-Saxon king for 500 years and English had only recently been revived having almost become an extinct language – the revival getting underway in the 14th century.
I also enjoyed this comment.
“Not that surprising that it sounds closer to Irish or American accents. Colonial dialects (in any language) generally hew more closely to the accent at the time of colonization/adoption than those in the colonizing country, which evolve more quickly.”
Is this really true? Linguistically it is incorrect as anyone with a passing knowledge of the 18th century grammatical debates will know… but… might it be that a group of American student actors have been asked to speak in a dialect that makes the rhymes work as literal rhymes and not puns. And, their default frame of reference from non-standard English is Irish?
After all why should a group of students from Kansas have any ability in the dialects of the West Midlands? Accents they have probably never heard.
October 27th, 2010 | 7:20 pm
ooops! Methinks the poster nameth “eeore” doth protest too much !! ;-)
October 28th, 2010 | 4:32 am
shakespears rhymes work with a birmingham accent, in brummie you hang on to the last vowel or constanent, love becomes lovee right becomes roightt, you becomes youu etc, it is even stronger when you listen to black country accents wallsal and wolverhampton bilston etc. regards.
October 28th, 2010 | 5:53 am
An American linguist? Now there is a contradiction in terms!
October 28th, 2010 | 10:10 am
But, but… the Earl of Oxford, who actually penned the works of “Shake-speare”, certainly had a different accent!
October 28th, 2010 | 10:14 am
This is fascinating stuff!
It seems like some of the commenters have been disappointed by this new information, so they are trying to fight it. This wasn’t the work of one person out of the blue coming up with what he thinks Shakespeare must have sounded like. That’s not how research works. This is the result of a bunch of studies that have led them to this point. I’m sure most people nowadays would have been immensely disappointed if they went back in time to watch a play (and not just an English one). It was a totally different experience than plays are now. So, it’s okay for us to want to like the style that we have come to know Shakespeare in. But this is helpful for us to understand what people were actually seeing and why these plays were deemed worthy to stand the test of time, as well as for understanding the development of the English language.
October 30th, 2010 | 7:15 am
Shakespeare sounded Irish? I’z naer erd such nanzanze inall me loife, n I beez fram de West Country n’all.
Perhaps these “experts” need to spend less time at their desks and come to England to hear the language spoken by the Bard in the rural areas of today.
Irish indeed! Iz laffed n laffed.
October 31st, 2010 | 7:08 am
I’m not very surprised at the results of the Professor’s research. I believe that historians have, since the 19th century, completely misunderstood the origins of the English language due to their lack of written material in early English.
I believe the real origins of the English language (and indeed Flemish, Dutch and German) date back to Neolithic times. The English language has probably evolved from a “proto-Saxon” language spoken by the first farmers to settle England (and Flanders, Holland and Nother Germany and, maybe, Scandanavia) having migrated up the Danube and Rhine valleys from Asia Minor over several thousand years (and influenced by the hunter-gathers they intermarried with along the way).
This proto-Saxon was probably spoken by all the neolithic farmers who settled in England, the eastern half of Ireland and lowland Scotland since c.4500BCE. Subsequent “aristocratic” invasions by the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans had little impact on the language of the majority of the peasant farmer population.
The presence of the English language in Ireland probably retreated to being spoken by small pockets of arable farming peasantry along the east coast of Ireland after the Gaelic invasions from France/Spain c.1500BCE.
Pockets of English speaking arable farmers may have still existed up to the time of the Anglo-Norman invasions around Dublin and in Wexford (the “Forth and Bargy” dialect) though pockets may also have existed as far west as Tipperary, Killkenny, Waterford and Carlow which have extensive arable farming areas.
I suspect that early English may have been spoken with an ascent similar to that still heard in the West Country in England.
October 31st, 2010 | 11:34 am
[...] Shakespeare really sounded like . . . a Scotsman? [...]
November 1st, 2010 | 4:12 am
What a load of old tosh, based on gross ignorance of English language devopment. Even in today’s neutralised English, there are clear diffferences around the UK, even within 10 miles, that reflect the main tribal influences on the developing language. These include influence of the Angles, Danes, Jutes, Saxons, Frisians, Norwegians et al. All of these peoples’ languages impacted on the Brythonic languages (early Welsh) and Irish Gaelic.
I cannot in any sense or form envisage how a West Midlands accent of the 1600s could ever sound Irish. The added complication is the impact of developing “Standard English” of the Aristocracy or “Royal English” by those wishing to sound Posh and educated, a problem still bedeviling the UK even now!
Shakespere could never have spoken or written in the real West Midlands of the time because he would never have been understood in London.
“Posh” ministers once ridiculed George Stephenson, the great railway engineer in Parliament because of his Geordie accent, yet he was speaking in a language nearer to original Anglo English (Old English) than they were. They had the ‘affected’ accent.
It’s a complicated subject English Language development, something this university has got nowhere near understanding.
November 1st, 2010 | 6:42 am
The actors are speaking in a ridiculous affected Southern Irish dialect. The professor is hopelessly wrong if he thinks that people in Warwickshire ever spoke remotely like that.
November 1st, 2010 | 8:17 am
Perchance the lady Helena doth troll too much ;-)
November 1st, 2010 | 11:26 am
What a load of rubbish. Why is it people on the other side of the pond seem to think that apart from Cockney, all English accents are the same? In the UK there are hundreds of different accents, within a very small geographical area. Listen to a Cornish accent, a Bristol accent, a West Midlands accent, a Liverpool accent, a Manchester accent, a Lancastrian accent, a Yorkshire accent, an East Midlands accent, a Norfolk accent, an Essex accent and an Isle of Wight accent and you’ll hear how incredibly different they all are from each other. The idea of a standardised and received pronounciation (Queens English) accent in the UK is only a thing of the last 150 years or so. Regional accents are lessening in the UK thanks to ease of tavel, living ‘out’ of one’s home community and the media exposing us to other accents, but they are still very much with us. Until very recently they had changed little over the centuries: they had few engines of change. People didn’t travel, they stayed in their communities and so their accents fossilised. William Shakespeare would have spoken with a Warwickshire accent. there’s nothing ‘Irish’ about that accent at all.
November 1st, 2010 | 1:42 pm
Very interesting research. This literary evidence backs up what other linguists have long called the “Great English vowel shift” which happend at about the Bard’s time. For classicists, this is what caused major confusion, for English speakers, when speaking Greek. Just when scholars had finally tied the Greek vowels to an English orthography, the English of the educated classes underwent a major vowel shift. The mess has only been sorted out in the last hundred years and we are still left with things such as “nous” to rhyme with “house”, etc.
November 1st, 2010 | 3:32 pm
@ eeore:
As night follows day, as indeed as I followeth the ancestors who begot me, ’tis I who trolleth not , sir.
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