Shakespeare in Tudor accents

[RichL]

The Globe theatre in London is to perform Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida using pronunciation as close to the original 16th century English as possible (according to a UK language expert).

Linky

The result sounds distinctly west-country-yokel.

Call me new-fashioned, but I'm not sure the St Crispin's Day speech in Henry V would have quite the same impact performed by Worzel Gummage.

[KvHagedorn]

Since travel was less then than now, it only reasons that dialects would have been even more splintered at the time, so I would imagine they are assuming this is an accent of London? And how are they really supposed to know?

[Brian Ellis]

As the article says, they can get a good idea from the metre and rhymes in poetry, as well as in puns. Over half of Shakespeare's puns simply don't work today or sound far-fetched and feeble. However, although the pronunciation can be traced back over the ages, almost like DNA, the intonation is more difficult. I'm not surprised at the general pronunciation of the sample given, but I expected more of a nasal drawl, practically �* l'américaine. I believe the clipped UK English of today has evolved more than what the Pilgrim Fathers took with them and is spoken in rural New England.

It would be interesting to hear Chaucer as he spoke it. I bet that would be very difficult to understand!

Edit: why can this BB reproduce Greek, an e acute but can't reproduce an a grave???

[KvHagedorn]

It's weird to hear Dutch spoken, because I almost feel like I should understand hat they are saying, but can't quite. My friend from there pointed out that a lot of the words are very similar, but pronounced a bit differently, with the tongue in a different part of the mouth.

[Brian Ellis]

The Dutch are not clever enough to speak with their tongue in the cheek, though!

[Sasq]

As the article says, they can get a good idea from the metre and rhymes in poetry, as well as in puns. Over half of Shakespeare's puns simply don't work today or sound far-fetched and feeble. However, although the pronunciation can be traced back over the ages, almost like DNA, the intonation is more difficult. I'm not surprised at the general pronunciation of the sample given, but I expected more of a nasal drawl, practically �* l'américaine. I believe the clipped UK English of today has evolved more than what the Pilgrim Fathers took with them and is spoken in rural New England.

It would be interesting to hear Chaucer as he spoke it. I bet that would be very difficult to understand!

Edit: why can this BB reproduce Greek, an e acute but can't reproduce an a grave???

encoding is set to utf-8, just double check your browser is picking that up, then it 'should' deal with all characters

[Brian Ellis]

*âçèéêôù

It is set for UTF8 but in the above string of French diacritical marks the a grave (the first one) does not reproduce correctly for me, the others do!