Shakespeare as His Words Were Originally Pronounced

Save for a few words that sound almost fluffed rather than intentionally different, I hear very little difference from regular English. It’s just with a more rural British accent.

Of course, given that Americans seem to need subtitles whenever a foreigner with an accent speaks on tv (even when they make perfect sense), the fact that this is somehow ‘noteworthy’ doesn’t really surprise me.

Scottish to me ears.

It sounds like Americans trying to do Irish accents and failing miserably :-/ don’t think I could sit through the whole thing!

“Shakespeare as His Words Were Originally Pronounced”

And they KNOW this because they invented time travel? Or did they find some steampunk recording from the early 1600′s, or what?

If not, then they don’t KNOW, they’re guessing.

Vonskippy, of course they’re guessing, but generally base their guesses on analysis of rhyme pairs and plays on words. If a poet whose work demonstrates he doesn’t habitually half-rhyme suddenly pairs ‘sea’ with ‘play’, they assume that they DID rhyme at the time. If that’s so, when Falstaff says ‘If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries’ then ‘reasons’ must have been pronounced more like ‘raisins’ (or vice versa); the resulting pun reinforces the assumption.

this is terrible! its just a bad irish accent. Im sure in Shakespearean times there were actors from all over the UK. This is just different accents and nothing to do with pronounciation

VM: I don’t buy your raisining.

@vonskippy
This is not the first to stage a Shakespeare play in its original pronunciation. In 2005, the linguist David Crystal published a book about a similar experiment in the Globe Theatre in London: “Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment” (Cambridge University Press).
David Crystal’s book describes the research on the Early Modern English sound system, how the actors coped with the task of learning the pronunciation (which included the use of their own dialects!), how it affected their performances and how the audiences reacted.

Sounds very Irish to mine ears. =D

When Zoe Caldwell was on Charlie Rose’s show around the time of her performance in “Medea”, she said the same thing.

Shakespearean English would have sounded much more like average American than it would British.

I think she said that you get the sound of modern British because one of their kings (George, I think) was German and couldn’t pronounce English words properly, so instead of correcting him, they all tried to sound just like him.

-Same way the Spanish mispronounce their Bs, Ths and such because of one/more of their own kings; -Castillian lisp, I think.

Oh, and I think the current Queen of England is actually more German than she is English. Her real family name is Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, not Windsor.

Sounded like any other Shakespeare recital to me.