David Crystal at Cheltenham Literature Festival 2013

I was incredibly lucky to get tickets to see Mr Crystal at both of his talks at this year’s literature festival – firstly on pronouncing Shakespeare and secondly about his new book ‘Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist's Guide to Britain’.

The first talk was given by David and Ben Crystal. Ben, his son, is a leading actor at the Globe Theatre, most famous for encouraging people to use ‘original pronunciation (OP)’ when acting Shakespeare.

OP is the way in which we expect actors to have spoken in the theatres when Shakespeare was being performed. But how do we know what they would have sounded like?

1)      Rhyming

When many Shakespearean texts are spoken in modern Received Pronunciation, many of the rhymes do not work. This reduces the effect and therefore makes some people question his talent, but at the time, the vast majority of them would have worked. This allows linguists to compare a range of different words which were known to rhyme and find the most likely sound. For example, in sonnet 116:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Although nowadays, ‘proved’ and ‘loved’ is a very tenuous half rhyme, when the sonnet was written, they would have rhymed perfectly. We can work out which pronunciation has changed, since  Ben Johnson wrote a grammar reference book at around the same time. In this, he stated that ‘o’ is pronounced short and he made a list of words for which this rule applied, including the words proved and loved. Therefore proved would have sounded like modern day ‘loved’.

This is Ben Crystal acting the sonnet in both Received Pronunciation and OP:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt7OynPUIY8

 

2)      Spelling

In Romeo and Juliet when Mercutio observes that Queen Mab’s whip has a ‘lash of film’. But the word ‘film’ is spelt ‘philome’ in the first folio and many other written documents. This allows us to conclude that the word must have had two-syllables, rather like in the modern Irish ‘filum’.

3)      Puns

David crystal used the example, ‘From forth the fatal lines of these two foes'. This takes on a whole new meaning when you understand that ‘lines’ and ‘loins’ were pronounced identically. Therefore, in many cases working out the two meanings of puns gives us a better idea of how the words were pronounced in order to make the joke work.

Using OP does not only affect the spectators, but also the actors. After they have finished the laborious task off learning the accent, their acting style is said to change completely. They are able to act as their characters would have, more earthy and fighty. In fact, the language difference made many actors, such as Bette Bourne change completely as she 'became a totally different woman'.

But there are more benefits, since our language derived from OP, all of the listeners are able to pick out their accent from it, making the theatre seem more intimate. An example was when David Crystal went up to a group of teenage boys and asked what they thought. They said ‘wicked’, and after asking why, a boy with a strong Cockney accent said ‘well, they’re talking like us’. Although clearly they weren’t talking in the London accent, the boys either picked out phonetic similarities or found it more accessible that the actors weren’t speaking ‘posh’ Received Pronunciation.

Therefore, using OP in Shakespeare’s productions not only is a great way to transport us back to how it may have been like, it allows us to understand and appreciate his work more and make Shakespeare more accessible.