Q1609 in Original Pronunciation (OP)

is it R.I.P., R.P.? (Received Pronunciation) Are we finally freed from its stranglehold on the lips and throats of actors since the Terry’s? All too often RP creates an effeminate Sh, esthetically pleasing and soothing to the English ear; where Class rhymes with arse, har-har.
The lilt and melody of my mother reading ‘Oor Wullie’ and ‘The Broons’ with me, coloured my early linguistic years. The Scots accent sounds to me the most natural and alive because of it. She also taught me, ‘oh ye cannae shove your granny off a bus.’

But RP won’t die easily, at least not until we stop honouring it as the ONLY way to speak Sh. well, or the accents of Rome for that matter. Witness the Branagh films and BBC series since ‘I Claudius’.
Thin-lipped mumble-mumble and soul-searching, monochromatic seriousness typifies the worst of it. Maybe they just ‘painted Sh. grapes’ with the patina of respectability. Maybe they didn’t really get it.

Sh’s language isn’t easy and unlike a foreign tongue there is no pronunciation guide. except his own oft-repeated words in Hamlet: ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue…’

Sh’s own Warwickshire accent, plus the variations and modulations he found on his life’s path, would have been nothing like RP. The most obvious difference being the sounding of /r/ in words like hard etc.

But as theatre-lore would have it, he gave it to Burbage who passed the role to William Davenant and Thomas Betterton, and like chinese whispers, we end up at the Terry’s and on to Gielgud and Olivier.

‘Mellifluous and hony-tongued’ is how Francis Meres described Sh. writing style, which synonyms and principles one assumes governed his speaking voice too. Sh. lived and breathed as we do now, though as I live and breathe, he didn’t tell us much about his personal life.

Between 36-41 Plays are contended as his: this is his Stage earnings job. He penned, produced and acted in them, presumably for a wage in the beginning, and later as a sharer in the profits of the Globe and Blackfriars. This is the world of Commercial Elizabethan Theatre and Everyman.

His 2 Narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, plus Q1609 Sonnets must have earned him another income, his Writing-for-a-Patron job. If Sh. didn’t know his erotic potboiler narratives had re-print value and he didn’t arrange a deal with the printer. Then he is not his sheep-shearing, tod-selling, interest-charging papa’s son.

Now Shakespeare was a Writer of Plays, which had a whole other set of values than his Poems. The Poems had a whole other audience in mind when the writing was done. That Sh. put pen to paper he tells us himself.

‘which this (time’s pencil or my pupil pen) neither in inward worth nor outward fair can make you live yourself in eyes of men,’ Q15:10-12.

Two major conceits are constantly developed throughout Sh’s written work. The one of Immortality through Verse vs. Time and the other as being an Actor in a Play vs. Time.

‘Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
which eyes not yet created shall oer-read,
and tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
when all the breathers of this world are dead,
you still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)
where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.’
Q81:9-14.

Judging by the Festivals worldwide, Sh still has a Global appeal. So, vive les accents mondiale! OP is also on the rise. Witness the full-fledged productions at the reconstructed Globe in the 2005 season. So how did Sh sound?

there’s an essay by Andrew Gurr in the blogroll/links, dealing with the classical predecessors. But the scholar of the moment in speaking OP has to be David Crystal. His book ‘Pronouncing Shakespeare’ deals with the essential How can we know?

The other question is: Do we care? Well I do, and that’s enough for me.