{"id":33155,"date":"2015-10-12T03:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T07:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33155"},"modified":"2015-10-11T22:28:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-12T02:28:00","slug":"pronouncing-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/12\/pronouncing-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Pronouncing Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know about you, but the first embedded video here at Open Culture<\/em><\/a> sounds much more “Irish” than modern “English” to me:<\/p>\n

As we highlighted a few days ago, recent findings by South African scientists suggest that William Shakespeare may have smoked pot, possibly composing some of his celebrated plays while under the influence. Their research is sure to spark controversy among Shakespeare scholars and historians alike, but it\u2019s certainly a more interesting controversy than the tired debate about whether Shakespeare wrote his plays at all. Perhaps even more interesting than Shakespeare\u2019s drug of choice for lovers of his language are debates about what Shakespeare\u2019s plays might have sounded like to his original audiences. In other words, high or not, what might Shakespeare, his actors, and his audience have sounded like when they spoke the language we call English.<\/p>\n

Of course they called the language English as well, but we might not recognize some words as such when hearing Shakespeare\u2019s accent aloud. On the other hand, it might be surprising just how much the Bard\u2019s original pronunciation sounds like so many other kinds of English we know today. In a post two years ago, we quoted Shakespearean actor, director, and writer Ben Crystal on Shakespeare\u2019s original pronunciation, which, he says, \u201chas flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too.\u201d Hearing Shakespeare\u2019s English spoken aloud, Crystal remarks, is hearing a sound that \u201creminds people of the accent of their home.\u201d You can test this theory, and hear for yourself the sound of Shakespeare\u2019s English with the video and audio highlighted here, showcasing Crystal\u2019s performance of the plays in original pronunciation (OP).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know about you, but the first embedded video here at Open Culture sounds much more “Irish” than modern “English” to me: As we highlighted a few days ago, recent findings by South African scientists suggest that William Shakespeare may have smoked pot, possibly composing some of his celebrated plays while under the influence. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[400,532,381],"class_list":["post-33155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","tag-language","tag-shakespeare","tag-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8CL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33156,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33155\/revisions\/33156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}