The real sound of Shakespeare?

[Dave Monroe]

The real sound of Shakespeare?
By Joe Boyle
BBC News

Ever been baffled by the bard? Vexed by his verse? Or
perplexed by his puns? London's Globe theatre thinks
it has the answer: perform Shakespeare's plays in
Shakespeare's dialect.

In August the theatre will stage an "original
production" of Troilus and Cressida - with the actors
performing the lines as close to the 16th century
pronunciations as possible.

By opening night, they will have rehearsed using
phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will
render the play just as its author intended. They say
their accents are somewhere between Australian,
Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire
- yet bizarrely, completely intelligible if you happen
to come from North Carolina.

For example, the word "voice" is pronounced the same
as "vice", "reason" as "raisin", "room" as "Rome",
"one" as "own" - breathing new life into Shakespeare's
rhyming and punning.

'Visceral' text

Giles Block, the play's director, believes the idea
could catch on. He first tried the technique for three
performances of Romeo and Juliet last year.

"I think it helps the audiences enter more into the
visceral nature of the text. It brings out the
qualities of the text, the richness of sound which is
closer to our emotions than the way we speak today,"
he says.
	
"Apart from the delight of feeling 'I'm getting closer
to how this play was done 400 years ago', some of the
jokes, some of the rhymes and some of the puns also
work again."

The actors have been coached by David Crystal, one of
the world's most prominent language experts. He
prepared the phonetic script by meticulously
researching the rhymes, meter and spellings within
Shakespeare's plays - as well as contemporary accounts
of how the language was pronounced.

"We can deduce the value of a vowel from the way words
rhyme. We can deduce whether a consonant was sounded
from the way puns work," he said in an earlier
interview.

For example, in Romeo and Juliet the word "mine" is
used to rhyme with "Rosaline" - showing clearly that
"Rosaline" rhymed with "fine" rather than "fin", he
said.

Toilet humour

Philip Bird, who plays the Trojan king Hector
(pronounced 'Ecter), admits the he felt "apprehensive"
at first, but he says within a matter of minutes the
material becomes "totally understandable". He says the
"earthy, gutsy, grounded" accent forces the actors to
find different ways of portraying power and seniority.

"When you're asked to play someone who is powerful or
of high status, you act class, you act posh - but with
this production it is not available because everyone
spoke the same way 400 years ago."

But the accent also resurrects some classic
Shakespearean puns. Ajax, who is the butt of many
jokes in the play, is pronounced "a-jakes" - which,
conveniently, is an Elizabethan word meaning toilet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4694993.stm

Thanks, Tim S.  Stalling on GR, but reread Lot 49 ...


		
____________________________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page 
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs