Opening of Romeo and Juliet Recited in the Accent of Shakespeare’s Time [video]
laughingsquid.com
laughingsquid.com
Here's another video of the same bloke that I've seen in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
I do like that he mentioned being asked to perform using his native Welsh accent in the OP's video. Shakespeare was after all the playright for people of every standing, and it feels a bit daft to posh it all up.
Things like this, among others, continue to convince me that reading Shakespeare plays in high school is largely a waste of time. Unless you have an excellent teacher, who explains the puns, the historical context, and other things, it's about as useful as looking at storyboards of a movie instead of watching the movie itself.
My teacher drew the analogy to Scary Movie (which was relatively new at the time) and how we could all enjoy it just fine without footnotes explaining "this is a humourous reference to contemporaneous horror film Scream..." etc. It suddenly struck me the difference between studying culture historically and actually experiencing it "live". This analogy has only gotten better with time because I probably would need footnotes to get half the jokes in Scary Movie nowadays.
In the course of getting ready for a test I read over the Cliff Notes on the play as well. Much to my surprise it it described several humorous scenes which were completely gone in the version we read. It turns out they were cut from the middle school version because they were considered too bawdy for us.
He'd prefer that Shakespeare be introduced first by the drama department in early secondary school so that kids as young as 13 or 15 could perform Romeo and Juliet at their intended character ages - thus bringing the work to life.
And that only once they've experienced the energy of performance that later in final years of 16-17 should they study it formally in English Literature classes.
This reminds me of reading I needed to learn C++ to make games back in the early 2000s, because that was what all games were made with. I probably missed 3-4yrs of programming exposure because I found C++ so impenetrable from the local library books I got on the subject.
Working from appreciation of the subject matter, to a light introduction to the inner workings, to the hairy details of how it was all put together seems to be the ideal approach.
Although this analogy may be a bit more niche and involved, the idea of being forced to read Shakespeare at a young age before being able to really appreciate the plays in production, with all of it's subtleties, seems comparable to attempting to pushing their heads into C++ before they appreciate the basic mechanics of game construction.
It really is torture to listen to some people read.
Someone can read a play and not understand it. That happens. But to understand a work you first have to at least read it. Watching can be a poor substitute, but good luck finding any modern production that performs an entire Shakespeare piece. Most everything on modern stages is heavily edited for time.
I have also been told that the reason Macbeth is so short is that it was probably transcribed from the working (cut) copy of the play rather than the original draft.
I'm also curious as to what else y'all read, given that Shakespeare wrote 30+ plays, and at a rate of one every week or two, that's just about an entire school year spent on nothing else.
I strongly disagree. A solid base in mathematics, critical thinking, and the ability to say "I'm not getting anything out of this, I should switch to something else" are far more important.
is virtually useless if you don't actually know anything. One of the best ways to learn new things is by reading.
Critical thinking comes from problem solving, something a book certainly lacks.
Yes, one can read without doing any critical thinking. But scientific and technical literature invite it. And indeed, require it for real comprehension. Good fiction, too.
If that were true, you would believe anything and everything you read. I doubt that, barring Trump tweets, I will read a more ignorant statement all week.
I'm genuinely confused as to the worldview that says that the earlier doesn't come with the later as a necessary cause, unless we're talking absolutely trivial levels of math/critical thinking...
I mean, it's right there in what I wrote. How you jump to an insane, uncharitable interpretation that I'm advocating not reading is beyond me.
(Naturally, this didn't do any favors for anyone, except when someone got to exclaim "BRING ME MY LONG SWORD, HOE!" in class.)
Without at least a year of practice (and even then...), the results will be atrocious, humiliating even, and the students will be even less convinced.
You should not study Shakespeare in school, it needs a lot of things to be appreciated, and hence it's a terrible material given the school constraints.
When you read it, most people follow the lexical rhythm. It makes not sense. You are supposed to speak naturally, with the emotion and speed matching the context.
But again, I never had any teachers remotely good enough to realize that and do anything about it.
On key problem is that you need to be really good to be a decent teacher, and after sampling 11 schools because of my father's work, probably encountered 2 teachers that had the skills and cared enough.
I do agree it is better acted than read, because that is how it was meant to be presented. But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.
And maybe that's okay, too, but high school isn't the only place that many students will get to experience Shakespeare and if it can't be done right there might be more damage than good done.
There is a difference between not exposing a student to something that they cannot understand at first glance and not having a teacher who doesn't understand the matter themselves try to muddle their way through a presentation the material. Making it part of standard curriculum means that we will have a heavy dosage of the latter, whereas making it optional means that only those teachers who truly have a passion for the thing will present it (theoretically, of course).
Then again, I'm in America so our teachers don't have time to teach anything that isn't showing up on a standardized test, and for me this debate is purely academic :)
But in general, yes - if I were thrown into a classroom as a substitute teacher for a month, I certainly wouldn't teach Shakespeare, because I'm not anywhere near qualified to do so. My wife probably would be - she's the one who enlightened me about a few things in Romeo & Juliet that were completely opaque to me when I read it. But I'd probably focus on the things I felt qualified to teach without reading from a Teacher's Guide To Keeping Students Awake During Hamlet, or whatnot.
It's not sad at all. You don't regret what you don't know you missed. Let them discover it on their own, from a better source, at a later date.
Shakespeare study was one of the worst periods in my education. It's boring, irrelevant, and to this day I don't understand the obsession. I'd rather that any child read the full works of Steinbeck than anything by Shakespeare.
It reminds me of the way we learned geometric proofs in 8th grade. When I finally got into proper algebraic proofs in college it was an indescribable joy.
I don't watch plays, and I doubt I'm missing many Shakespeare references in modern books. Even if I am, I don't lament what I don't know I'm missing.
But why keep others away from it because you didn't like it?
Because it's an enormous time sink that could be better used on other things. Why turn so many kids off of plays, poetry, and appreciation of literature because of an obsession with one playwright?
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as that extreme. You don't have to understand all of it, but I - and I suspect, so did many of my peers - understood so little of it that the time was effectively wasted. There is other literature available that would likely have served us much better.
> But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.
Exactly - and without some explanation, it's very much like reading something in a foreign language.
Regarding explanation, I have never seen a Shakespeare book without a lot of annotation.
I would argue that a bad teacher teaching a good language can do a lot more harm to a novice programmer than not learning it at all.
My band conductor was fond of saying that practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. It can be harder to replace bad habits with good habits than to instill good habits from the start.
At best. I knew people at public school whose major projects were coloring maps with colored pencils. They didn't have to draw the borders, they just had to color the countries correctly. It was literally a complicated color by numbers.
Not all educations are the same.
Interestingly, the prologue for R+J announces that the play "is now the two hours' traffic of our stage". It's rare for an uncut modern production to clock in much below 3.
[1] https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-130566946/romeo-...
I can't imagine the original productions clocked in much under four, what with vendors selling pasties between each act and the occasional dancing bear. It points to a different concept of time: a modern Brit wouldn't dare describe a four hour affair as "two hours" but someone from Southern Europe might...
Which isn't to say that nobody was selling pasties, of course. Theatres were very much public spaces back then (and the Globe's yard still feels like one).
Although the later plays were written for the Blackfriars Theatre which was definitely exclusive.
Moreover, I'm curious how one finds evidence to support what historic accents were like. It's not like it shows up in writing, after all. Is it by studying all the accents of the neighbors and trying to extrapolate? Maybe someone stumbled across a 17th century pronunciation guide? robotmay on here commented that some of the puns and rhymes only work in this sort of accent, which is a particularly clever way of gathering evidence.
Apart from a few dropped h's, which could be attributed to London, where Shakespeare spent much of his life, it's not unlikely that colonists in North America sounded pretty much like this. It's been more than 400 years since then and languages change over time, sometimes drastically so.
One way to research accents is by examining language in poems, (if these exist for the time and language), rhymes in particular. Another is by analogy and extrapolation. Writing systems and their development over time can help, too, if there's some sort of phoneme-grapheme mapping in the language at hand.
We still speak an offshoot of 18th century French. [1]
[1] In fact contemporary commenters in the 18th century used to say how indistinguishable Canadian French was compared to the French spoken in France.
Do you have have a source for [1]? I want to know from were the commenters where from.
There are some expressions (locutions) that differ in France and in Québec, but I don't believe this makes the two mutually incomprehensible.
It's not as if France has one single pure accent that everyone can understand. How about the St Denis accent for example? To say nothing of all these accents.[0]
For one particular production, the volunteer lighting designer was also a professional lighting designer for Francophone theater, and was with the touring version of the French Language "Lion King" production. He explained to me that he was volunteering with our group because he wanted an opportunity to practice his English.
I got drafted in to be his assistant [0], and we talked a bit about what the world is like for professional theater company members in the French-language world.
One striking thing he told me was that there was a rule that regardless of how different places in the world might speak French on the street or elsewhere in their lives, when it came to how French was spoken on the stage, they insisted that it must be the official Parisian style as regulated by Le Académie française.
So, here was a Belgian, who spoke French in the Bruxellois style, but he was also able to speak it in the Parisian style, and he knew and understood the difference and why there was a difference. And he could explain it to me, a "dumb American in Brussels".
[0] Turned out that he was due to travel to Canada shortly for the opening of the "Lion King" there, and wouldn't be in town for the actual production. So, I got to learn how to operate a simple analog lighting board.
I'm sure part of it was that I was a classic "dumb American" in Paris, but Belgian natives also explained to me that they speak French much more quickly down there, and anyone who speaks it more slowly (as is done in Brussels and virtually all other Francophone places in the world, including most of the rest of France), likewise get treated like they are morons.
So, the Belgians certainly noticed that French has changed over time and it has changed more quickly in Paris over the other parts of the world, and they were helpful enough to share this information with me.
Obviously, but so do the people in France.
First in 1759 the French lost the war against the English in North America.[0] Canada, then known as 'New France,' came under English rule, and all the French elites that had the means to leave went back to France.[1]
The connection to France was severed. Thirty years later in France society would be upended by the revolution.
Now in the 18th century Paris there were two 'usages' or accents in current use. The 'bel usage' and the 'grand usage.'
The 'bel usage' was spoken by the monarchy down to the common people. The 'grand usage' was used for public speeches and by priests and politicians etc.
The bel usage was more familiar, more a relaxed pronunciation, with many elisions («leux valets», «sus la table») while the 'grand usage' was more 'pointu', that is to say more precisely pronounced, picking out each syllable more individually, with fewer elision and dipthongs.
The linguist Jean-Denis Gendron, in his book 'D’où vient l’accent des Québécois? Et celui des Parisiens ?'[2][3] argues that after the third estate won the revolution, they purposefully adopted the 'grand usage,' perhaps as a means to distinguish themselves from the old order.
Ironically, people in Québec now speak a derivative of the 'bel usage', which has evolved over time, but more slowly because Québec culture was very conservative even up to the 1950s.
It is said that when the king famously said: 'la loi c'est moi', it probably came out like: 'la loé, c'est moé' sounding like a Québecois.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Plains_of_Abraha...
[1] This is the so called 'social decapitation' of New France. Only the priests and local school teachers were left to educate the people.
[2] https://www.pulaval.com/produit/d-ou-vient-l-accent-des-queb...
[3] https://www.immigrer.com/faq-dou-vient-laccent-quebecois/
I do not believe any such evidence or metric exists. A language is a point in a space with many dimensions; while on any particular dimension it is easy to evaluate whether more or less change has occurred, this is not possible overall.
Kind of like the Mid-Atlantic accent you hear in old movies.
It is kind of weird, there are several accents basically created to give the illusion of class.
Some years ago, I read Ben's father David Crystal's book "Pronouncing Shakespeare" and it has a whole chapter on how they reconstructed the original pronunciation. In Shakespeare's time, they did, in fact, write about elocution quite a bit, and some clues come from there. And, as others have noted, you see rhymes and puns show up when you revert to the old pronunciations. As I recall, Crystal claimed that he thinks they got it at least 80% right.
How can you tell the difference between a strange archaic accent and a strange innovative accent?
In fact, that's one of the ways Shakespeare's English was reconstructed: by finding rhymes or probable puns in his and contemporary texts that would make sense with one pronunciation but not another.
It's about isolation. Colonies tend to be far away and difficult to travel to and from. So the american colonies only had what they brought with them, and a relatively thin trickle of trans-atlantic traffic, while England remained knee deep in European culture and the linguistic influences that come with it. A few hundred years of that leaves a deep mark.
Not necessarily. An innovative center and conservative periphery is commonly observed even in language families where the center is far from trade routes, while on the periphery the languages are spoken in territories along major trade routes.
Also, of course, you then have to ask what American accents anyhow - Georgia vs Texas vs Vermont vs.. etc.
To my (admittedly English) ear the linked speech sounds like broad English but with the rhotic/non-rhotic change reversed.
What an excellent presentation.
You can also get clues from forks of the population, such as the Boston accent that forked from mainly British emigrants around Shakespeare's time, and have evolved somewhat independently since. The distinctive things modern British and Bostonian have in common could date back from the time of the fork, for example.
Also we have a rough changelog of incoming pronunciation changes as communication with e.g. France increased. Back out those changes and the accent sounds more like the rural/remote parts of the UK still does, but they would have been mixed up in a metropolis like London.
Also a healthy dose of imagination and artistic license :)
I'd never considered his point about how accent also impacts the flow of speech and potential speed so noticeably. Speed of speaking always drove me crazy when trying to learn Spanish, and I never got nearly as profecient at understanding spoken spanish as I did with French. Maybe if I had studied Spanish with a different accent from a different era I would have stood a chance! But it's crazy to think that plays which are 3 hours today were 2 hours in the past (though speech is likely not the only factor there). I don't have the patience for 3 hour plays, and Shakespeare never stuck with me from school, but after this I'm curious to watch a full production in the original accent.
Here's a couple more of his videos:
I wonder how it was determined that would have been the accent.
EDIT: Someone said it in the video haha