But if you were there, actually there, what would it have been like? What would it have sounded like? That’s right: you’re a groundling at Shakespeare’s Globe. Not the modern replica but the original one, half a millennium ago. What sounds do you hear?
Apparently, something that, to me, sounds a bit West Country, a bit Irish, and nothing like Laurence Olivier RP. I’m taking in the British Library’s new CD, Shakepeare’s Original Pronunciation: Speeches and scenes performed as Shakespeare would have heard them, which was released this week. It is, we’re told, the first release of its kind. Made under the guidance of Ben Crystal, actor and expert in original Shakespearian pronunciation, a company of players recite scenes from Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and many more as you’ve never heard them before.
But how do we know? No, there were no tape recorders back then, but there are three sources for “original pronunciation”, Crystal tells me.
No 1: rhymes. “Think of the couplet at the end of Sonnet 116: ‘If this be error and upon me proved,/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved.’ Well, maybe only Elvis elongated ‘love’ to ‘luuurve’, so you can get data from rhymes that, in modern pronunciation, don’t work.”
No 2: spelling. In the First Folio, he notes, when Mercutio speaks of Queen Mab’s lash of film, it is spelt “philom”, much as people in Ireland today will speak of seeing “a fillum”. “Elizabethan pronunciation is still hanging around there,” he says.
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Finally, contemporary linguists discussed issues of pronunciation at the time — it’s not a new obsession — “and so we think we’re 90 to 95 per cent right”.
What of the remaining 5 to 10 per cent? That comes, as it always has, from the actor who speaks the words. London, then as now, was a melting pot, and Shakespeare’s players brought their own accents into the mix. If you want to hear the actors on the CD in a live performance, head to the British Library on May 4. Full details are on the library’s website.
Does this brings us any closer to Shakespeare? It does, in one way. But in another way there is no need. Shakespeare is eternal. That is the greatest gift of his words, however they are spoken aloud.
Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation is published by the British Library, £10, bl.uk