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The History of English Podcast
Episode 171: Shakespeare’s English (featuring Ben Crystal)
01:06:55
In this episode, we turn our attention to the wordcraft of William Shakespeare. Today, many people have mixed opinions about his plays and poems. They know that he is widely regarded as the greatest English writer of all time, but … Continue reading →
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- [00:11]
Kevin Stroud
Welcome to the History of English podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language. This is episode 171, Shakespeare's English. In this episode, we're going to turn our attention to the word craft of William Shakespeare. Today, many people have mixed opinions about his plays and poems. They know that he's widely regarded as the greatest English writer of all time, but they struggle with his language. They read or listen to passages from the plays, and they have no idea what's going on. So why is that? Why is it so difficult for many modern English speakers to relate to the words of the man who's widely regarded as a master of the language? Well, there are many answers to that question. And in this episode, we're going to explore what makes Shakespeare's use of the English language so unique and why it's so challenging for modern speakers. But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes@patreon.com history of English. Now, this time, we're finally going to focus on the language of William Shakespeare. As we move forward with the story of English, we'll continue to explore historical developments, and we'll continue to see how those developments impacted English. But for the next couple of decades of our story, Shakespeare will be a constant, looming presence. His most well known plays were composed during this upcoming period. But before we go any further in the story, I thought it would be a good idea to dedicate an episode to the way he used English. He was a language innovator and creator of new words and phrases. And to understand how he used the English language, we need to consider the state of the language at the time. And we need to consider why his language was so different from the language we use today. In this episode, I am going to explain why the nature of Elizabethan English allowed writers like Shakespeare to to play around with the language. I think we sometimes revere his language a bit too much. We see it as something that is so elevated that it's almost beyond reproach. But if we look a little closer at the state of English during the Elizabethan period, and if we look at the nature of the theater at the time, his use of language starts to make a little more sense. We have to think of Shakespeare not just as a playwright, but but as a playful writer. He lived at a time when there were very few formal rules that regulated the use of the language, so he revelled in its looseness and Flexibility. He wrote lines that bounced along in a lively manner, where the rhythm and feel was just as important as the literal meaning of the words themselves. In fact, he even gives us a glimpse behind the curtain in Hamlet. The drama features a play within a play, and Hamlet acts as the director, informing his actors to speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. In other words, pronounce the lines in a rapid, lively and bouncy way, chippingly on the tongue. Don't pronounce the lines in a formal, overwrought way, like many actors do. If you do that, he says, the lines should just as well be pronounced by the town crier. That word trippingly is a good example of the way Shakespeare played around with words. It's a term that he almost certainly coined. It appears in a couple of his plays, but there's no evidence that anyone else used the word during that time, and very few people use it today unless they're quoting his plays. But despite making up the word, it's easy to get a sense of what he meant. He took the existing words trip and tripping and converted them into an adverb by adding that ly ending. Though the precise definition is a matter of some debate, the word trippingly conveys the idea of tripping or staggering or bending, bouncing around. It can mean a lot of different things, but it certainly doesn't refer to a pronunciation that's overly formal, dull and stiff. In other words, the way Shakespeare's plays are often performed today. That's why we need to consider the state of English at the time and the nature of the language as it was used on the stages of London. And to give us some insight into that, I've invited a guest to join me in the second half of this episode. I recently had a chance to speak with Ben Crystal. I've mentioned Ben before in the podcast because he's one of the leading proponents of what is known as Shakespeare's original pronunciation, or OP for short. Ben is an actor himself, having performed in many of Shakespeare's plays. And his father is the well known linguist David Crystal. And David was instrumental in recreating the Elizabethan accent for actors to use in a production of Romeo and Juliet back in 2004. He was able to phonetically transcribe the entire play for the actors so that they could turn back the clock and recreate the original experience. The production was a smashing success, and since then, Ben has taken that concept around the world, teaching theater troops how to perform the plays using that original pronunciation. Over the years, Ben and David have written several books together about Shakespeare and his use of language, and in fact, they have a new book out called Everyday Lines for Life. In the second half of this episode, you'll hear part of my conversation with Ben where he discusses how Shakespeare's language was crafted for the stage and how the use of that older pronunciation changes the way audiences relate to the plays. But in the first part of this episode, I want to explore how Shakespeare was a product of his time and how his use of language was aided by the flexibility of English in the late 1500s. In fact, the Elizabethan period was a unique time in the overall history of English. The language was arguably at its most flexible during that period. Shakespeare wrote during a brief window when the language was bursting at the seams with new words, while at the same time it had very few hard and fast rules to govern how those words could be used. With respect to the vocabulary of English, it had been expanding for centuries, initially with Norse words and then French words. But with the advent of the Renaissance, a new wave of words poured in from Latin and Greek. Those tended to be longer, multisyllable words, and the influx of those words sparked the so called inkhorn debate, which I talked about in earlier episodes. Some people flaunted their education and learning by using a lot of those types of words called inkhorn terms at the time, but many common people weren't familiar with those words, and they found it difficult to understand what was being said when they were used. For that reason, some scholars rejected those words and they wanted speakers to use plain, ordinary speech. And the fact that there was such a debate at the time shows how much the lexicon had expanded. At the same time, the pronunciation of those words was highly variable. As we've seen, accents varied by region and by social class. And of course the Great Vowel Shift was still underway, so that also contributed to differing pronunciations. Meanwhile, spellings also continued to be loose and flexible. There were some early attempts to encourage a more standard spelling system, but no one would have said that any particular spelling was wrong at the time, and even the grammar of English was loose and flexible. Back in episode 164, I discussed how older grammatical forms often existed alongside newer grammatical forms. In that earlier episode, I referred to Elizabethan grammar as a halfway house, because those older and newer sentence patterns often existed side by side. In addition to that word Order or syntax was much looser than today. So a poet like Shakespeare could move words around in a sentence to make sure the line had the required rhythm. But while English was a language with very few formal rules, that was starting to change. One of the themes that's emerged over the last few episodes is that some scholars were increasingly uncomfortable with the overall state of the language in the late 1500s, and they wanted to impose some rules on it. For example, the so called Inkhorn debate was really an effort by some scholars to encourage a more fixed and understandable vocabulary. We've seen that some early scholars, like John Hart and Richard Mulcaster, didn't like the state of English spellings, so they recommended a more fixed spelling system, though they disagreed about how to do that. Printers were also moving in the direction of standard spellings. William Balakar wrote the first English grammar book during this period. Though it was little more than an attempt to describe the grammar using Latin terms. It didn't really impose any rules on the language, but others would soon take up the cause and those rules would be laid out for everyone to follow. And last time we saw that, George Puttenham recommended the use of educated London speech as the standard dialect for poetry, which was a way of saying that one particular dialect should be the model for English speech going forward. But those were merely the early steps in the move towards standardization. It would take a few more decades for those efforts to take root and more than a century for them to be completed to the extent that such things are ever really completed. So Shakespeare lived at a time when those efforts to standardize the language were just beginning, when English was still a bit wild and unruly. He had the advantage of both an expansive vocabulary and the freedom to use it largely as he pleased. Now, this may seem like a strange analogy, but we can think of English during the Elizabethan period as a ball of play. D'oh. Fresh out of the container at that early stage. It's loose and pliable. You can do almost anything with it. But if you leave it out for a while, it starts to harden and crumble. It becomes more difficult to work with and a little less fun to play with. Well, that's what happened to English in the years after Shakespeare lived. The language started to harden a bit as it was standardized. And as rules were adopted to define what was correct and incorrect along the way, it became stiffer and a little harder to work with and maybe a little less fun to play with. But Shakespeare's English was more like that brand new ball of Plato, soft and pliable, loose and flexible. There were so many different ways of saying the same thing. And again, he took full advantage of that flexibility. One aspect of his language that reflects that looseness is his vocabulary. It's one of the things that frustrates some readers today because he sometimes used strange words and he sometimes used common words in unusual ways. I should note that he accessed every register of English. He had no problem with those so called inkhorn terms, those fancy multi syllable words from Latin and Greek. Some of those terms have become fully ingrained in the language over the centuries, so they might not seem all that fancy today. But words like demonstrate, initiate and mediate were new and exotic at the time. Others still seem a bit exotic, like multitudinous. Some of them soon fell out of use and never really found a place in the language, like fastidity and quaestrist. But Shakespeare wasn't just attracted to fancy loan words. He also used local dialect terms. Those were words that were restricted to certain parts of the country, like bumbailey, meaning a bailiff or sheriff's officer, and gallo meaning to frighten, pash meaning head or brain, and GEK meaning a fool. Those types of words pose a problem for many modern readers, but they're certainly not the only ones to do that. Shakespeare sometimes used words that were common at the time but have largely disappeared since then. For example, he used the word haply to mean perhaps, or by chance he used the word aneth to mean scarcely or with difficulty. Willum meant formerly, anon meant immediately, other gates meant otherwise and all gates meant always. Again, those types of words simply reflect an older form of English. Another challenge faced by modern readers is that the meaning of some words has changed over the centuries. In the Elizabethan era, the word invest, meant to clothe or cover something, sometimes meant somewhat abroad could simply mean at large or outdoors, as in a line from Hamlet that reads, no spirit can walk abroad. Of course, the word humor was still used in the medical sense, as the fluids that had to be balanced in the body. Ecstasy meant fear or astonishment. And of course, one of the classic examples is the word wherefore, which originally meant why, as we'll see in an upcoming episode, there's a famous line from Romeo and Juliet that doesn't mean what most people think it means. It's Juliet's line, O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Most people today think she's asking where Romeo is, but she's actually asking why he is. Again, we'll take a closer look at that passage in the future. But it's a good example of how Shakespeare's language can be confusing and misleading, because words sometimes had different meanings than today. Then, of course, there are all of the words that Shakespeare coined. According to the experts, Shakespeare was one of the most prolific creators of new words in the English language. Now, while that is certainly true, it's a claim that's often exaggerated. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly how many words he coined, but some scholars have suggested numbers that are not realistic. In the early 1900s, a researcher named Harold Bailey tried to calculate the number. He used the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains the earliest known citation for each word. And based in large part on those citations, he claimed that Shakespeare had coined about 10,000 words, which is an incredibly large number. That's roughly the total number of words borrowed from French during the entire Middle English period. That's also about how many words were borrowed from Latin and Greek in the 1400s and 1500s. And it's unlikely that Shakespeare's innovations matched those entire languages. Part of the problem with Bailly's calculation is that he often confused first known use with creation. Just because one of Shakespeare's plays contains the first known use of a word doesn't mean that he actually coined the word. It just means that there's no surviving evidence of the word. Prior to that point. The word could have been around for a while. In fact, it could have been quite common in the language. It just might not have been written down before that. Or it might have been written down in an earlier document that was subsequently lost or destroyed. Also, at the time of Bailly's research, In the early 1900s, the OED was still in its earliest editions. Researchers had pored over Shakespeare's works because they were so popular, and the words in those plays and poems had been fully integrated into the dictionary. But other, lesser known works had not been included yet, especially those from earlier periods of English. So that also tended to exaggerate the total number of words first documented by Shakespeare. Over the centuries, those entries in the OED have been updated and revised as more and more documents have been examined and cataloged. And that has included a lot of documents from earlier periods of English. As it turns out, a lot of the words initially attributed to Shakespeare have been found in those earlier documents. In fact, computers and digital technology have really aided that research in recent years. So today, the actual number of words first recorded by Shakespeare is much smaller than it was a century ago. But having said all of that, I should point out that there are still a lot of Words found for the first time in Shakespeare's works and the revised numbers are still quite impressive. Modern scholars think he may have coined over a thousand new words during his lifetime. That's much less than the 10,000 suggested by Bailey, but it's still an incredibly large number. I should also note that most of the words attributed to Shakespeare weren't created from scratch. They were often variations of existing words. For example, he would occasionally add a prefix or suffix to an existing word. We saw an example of that earlier with the word chippingly, where he added the ly suffix to the word chipping. He also took the word comfortable and added the negative prefix un to the front of it, thereby producing the word uncomfortable. That word is still used today, but others never really caught on. For example, he took the noun hair and added the same prefix un to the front of it, thereby creating the verb to unhair, meaning to shave one's head to describe a dead person being brought back to life. He converted the verb live into the new verb to relive. Suffixes were also added. One who seems S e e m s became a seamer to acquire the characteristics of royalty, became to royalize or monarchize. Blinding winds were described as viewless winds by adding the suffix less to the word view. Sometimes, instead of adding a prefix or suffix, he would drop a prefix or suffix to create a new word. Linguists call that a back formation. When English speakers borrowed words from Latin or French, they sometimes came in with prefixes and suffixes already attached. So, for example, English had taken the word castigation from Latin. But Shakespeare is the first known writer to drop the suffix to create a new verb to castigate. That same type of process also produced the word grovel, though the development of that word was more complicated. Prior to Shakespeare, English only had the word groveling, meaning to face downward. That word came from the Norse word grooth, which meant the same thing, to face downward. Well, at some point, English speakers took that word grooth, and they added the Old English suffix ling to it, thereby producing the word groofling. And the pronunciation of groofling evolved into groveling in early Modern English. Well, Shakespeare apparently thought that groveling was a combination of grovel and ing, even though it was really a combination of groof and ling. And when he decided to drop the ing part at the end, he gave us the new word grovel, which didn't exist prior to that point. But that's just another quick example of how Shakespeare played around with prefixes and suffixes. Sometimes he even made Little mistakes that produced new words. Now, I say that he played around with those prefixes and suffixes, but very often he was actually doing something very intentional. He was trying to make sure that the words fit the rhythm and meter of the line. Remember that the plays were written for performance. The lines were to be recited on the stage, and Shakespeare wanted them to bounce along with the appropriate rhythm, trippingly on the tongue, as he said. So if the line was in iambic pentameter, he wanted it to have that heartbeat rhythm. Da dum da dum da dum da dum da dum. Well, if a certain word sequence didn't have that rhythm, he might need to add a beat to a word or remove a beat. And he could do that by adding or removing a prefix or suffix that would give the line the rhythm he wanted. And it's a reminder that the rhythm of the line was sometimes the most important thing. It was okay to make up a new word or to create a new variation of an existing word to make that happen. And again, the language was flexible enough at the time to allow him to play around with words in that way. Sometimes Shakespeare created new words by combining two or more existing words, thereby creating a new compound term. For example, he's the first known person to use the term watchdog and was one of the first to use the term cold blooded, though the term appeared in other documents around the same time. But many of his compounds were poetic and largely limited to his plays. He described a person acting in an unreasonable manner as brain sickly. He referred to sluggish prophets as snail slow prophets. He gave us flower, soft hands, war worn coats, tear falling pity, and famously, star crossed lovers. Sometimes he changed the way a word was used. Verbs became nouns, nouns became verbs, and both became adjectives and adverbs. For example, he used the word safe as a verb, meaning to provide safety and protection. He wrote, best use safed the bringer. Bringer meant messenger, of course. The normal verb related to safe is save. But save conveys a sense of rescuing someone from peril to safe. Someone conveyed a slightly different sense of keeping watch over someone and safeguarding them. Shakespeare was one of the first writers to convert the noun rival into a verb to rival someone. Again, thanks to the popularity of the plays, some of that playful language survived into the modern era. As I noted earlier, Shakespeare also played around with the grammar and syntax of the language. Again, those rules hadn't been formalized yet, so that allowed poets to arrange words in different ways, which was another way of making sure the words satisfied the rhythm of the line. So, for example, if Shakespeare wanted to make a negative statement, he could do it in the traditional way by putting the word not after the verb, like fear not or worry not about tomorrow. Or he could choose a more modern approach and use a verb phrase beginning with do not, like do not fear or do not worry about tomorrow. Similarly, if he wanted to ask a question, he could do it in the traditional way by reversing the subject and the verb from you see to see you, as in what see you? But again, he could also use a more modern approach with the word do, as in what do you see? Having said that, he preferred the older pattern what see you? He could also use what I've called the meaningless do in prior episodes, where do didn't really serve any function at all. So, for example, instead of writing I saw you, he could write I did see you. In fact, verb phrases were still developing during the Elizabethan period. People increasingly added some form of the verb to be or to have to a sentence to express some slight variation in meaning. So they could add a form of to be to create a progressive tense from I eat to I am eating. Or they could add a form of to have to create what's called a perfect tense from I eat to I have eaten. They could even put those two together to create what's called a perfect progressive or perfect continuous tense. So from I eat to I have been eating. But those patterns were not as fully developed as today. For example, today we can add even more of those variations together, like in the sentence I had been being eaten. You couldn't really say that in the Elizabethan period, but the language was moving in that direction. And those new sentence patterns gave poets even more flexibility. Again, there was no sourcebook that laid out the rules for putting words together, so poets could play around with word order in a sentence. A poet could use double and triple negatives, and no one gave it a second thought. He or she could split infinitives and end sentences with a preposition. Again, that was no big deal. Shakespeare could say more better or most quickest without a grammarian criticizing him. In fact, one of his most famous lines from Julius Caesar does just that. After Brutus stabbed Caesar, Shakespeare describes it as the most unkindest cut of all. Most unkindest. Again, that was perfectly acceptable at the time. People tended to end an adverb with ly like we do today, as in quickly or sadly or chippingly. But that wasn't a hard and fast rule. So that suffix was sometimes left out. And words or phrases used as adverbs, what are sometimes called adverbial modifiers, could be placed in positions that seem unusual today. Again, this is another source of confusion for modern readers. So, for example, today we would say something like, they have come together again. But Shakespeare could write, they have again come together. The word again seems out of place in that position today, but it didn't at the time. And today we might say, they granted permission to him, Whereas Shakespeare might write, they to him granted permission. The phrase to him seems out of place in front of permission. But again, you could say it that way in early Modern English. Another modern source of confusion is the way prepositions were used. At the time in Old English, most words had specific inflectional endings that conveyed grammatical information, including the relationship between one word and another. Well, as most of those endings disappeared, people had to find other ways of conveying that information. And one way to do that was with a preposition like over, under, to, in, around, and so on. But many of those prepositions had much more flexible meanings, even as late as the Elizabethan period, and that can make Shakespeare's plays difficult to follow. For example, the word upon sometimes meant over, as when Shakespeare wrote, I have no power upon you, what he was really saying is, I have no power over you. And the word of could have a lot of different meanings, like from. So when he wrote, we were dead of sleep, what he was really saying is, we were dead from sleep. Again, these types of uses are common in Shakespeare's works, and they confuse many modern readers. The old distinction between strong and weak verbs had also broken down a bit, with verbs sometimes switching from one group to the other. So at the time, you would have heard people say, catched and caught, digged and dug, meted and met and so on. When speaking to an individual, the and thou existed alongside you. Though social context still encouraged the use of one or the other, verbs could still end with the older th ending, like he runneth and she walketh, or with the newer s ending, like he runs and she walks. Now, those are just a few examples of how grammar and syntax were different from today. The rules were much less rigid and regulated, and again, poets took full advantage of that. And then there's the issue of pronunciation. The way words were pronounced at the time would have also affected the way actors delivered their lines and the way audiences heard what was being said. Of course, pronunciations would have varied in the Elizabethan era, just as they do today. They would have varied by region and class. But there were also a couple of other factors to consider. There had been a significant amount of migration into London from various parts of the country. So within the capital city you would have heard a variety of regional accents. Another factor was the great vowel shift, which was still underway. The pronunciation of long vowel sounds was still changing. Some of those distinct vowel sounds were merging together, becoming identical or virtually identical. Meanwhile, other vowel sounds were drifting apart. It's possible that older, more conservative speakers would have used some of the older pronunciations, while younger speakers would have used some of the newer pronunciations. Again, that would have created more variety and would have given actors and playwrights even more flexibility in the way lines were crafted and presented. Scholars who have studied Elizabethan pronunciation believe that the language was pronounced a bit quicker because than modern Shakespearean plays might suggest, words were often clipped by dropping certain consonant sounds instead of saying and with a distinct D sound at the end. It appears that people often did what we do today and just said in like this and that and rock and roll, the word the often blended in with the word that followed it if that word began with a vowel. So instead of the entrance, people would say the entrance. Instead of saying my lady with a very distinct my, it was usually pronounced as milady. Initial Hs were often dropped, so people said enri instead of Henry and alse instead of house. It was also common to drop final GS, so it was common for people to say singin and dancin rather than singing and dancing. Of course, we still hear some of those pronunciations today in various accents and dialects, but those features were apparently much more widespread during the Elizabethan era. This is also confirmed by many of the spellings in Shakespeare's plays, where the initial H's and final G's are occasionally omitted. It also appears that the dialect was rhotic, so the R sound was pronounced after vowels, though the nature of that R sound probably varied. So people would have said carpenter with distinct R sounds like American or Irish English, rather than carpenter, like modern received pronunciation. Again, vowel sounds were also a bit different. Words like see and say would have been pronounced the same way, both probably pronounced as sa. Words like tie and toy would have also sounded the same, probably pronounced as T. Words like love and prove rhymed with each other, probably pronounced as louvre and prove wars rhymed with stars, probably pronounced as wars and stars. Rehearse would have been pronounced more like rehearse. Similar to Scottish English, the T would have been pronounced in a word like nature, probably pronounced more like natur. The t would have also been pronounced in a word like nation. Probably pronounced more like net ian. Again, these are generalizations. Not everyone would have spoken the same way, and I've only pointed out a few selected examples of Elizabethan pronunciation. Obviously, we'll explore some of those features in more detail as we move forward with the podcast. But the net effect of that older style is a pronunciation that zipped along a bit faster than the normal delivery used by modern actors in general. When modern versions of the plays were performed, in the original pronunciation, the running time was about 10 minutes shorter on average. So let me give you a quick example of that original pronunciation. This is a passage from Act 5 of Shakespeare's history play Richard II. It's read by Ben Crystal, who I mentioned earlier in the episode. He provides a good example of the sound and rhythm used by the typical Elizabethan actor.
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Ben Crystal
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world and for because the world is popular and here is not a creator but myself, I cannot do it yet I'll hammer it out my brain I'll prove the female to my soul, my soul the father and these two beget a generation of still breeding thoughts. And these same thoughts people this little world in humours like the people of this world, for no thought is contented.
- [36:26]
Kevin Stroud
Now, as I noted earlier, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ben about the Elizabethan theatre and the performance of plays using that original pronunciation. He has traveled around the world teaching actors and actresses how to perform the plays in that accent. And he's also observed how that pronunciation has impacted performances and the way audiences relate to the productions when they hear that older style of speech. I began our discussion by asking him to describe the experience of going to an Elizabethan theater and to explain how it was different from a modern theater.
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Ben Crystal
Well, if you went to see a play today, the chances are that you would walk into the auditorium and settle down in your chair and when the show begins, the lights on the auditorium would go down and you'd, you'd be sitting in the darkness and the lights would go up on the stage and you would watch a performance that had probably been prepared and planned over the previous. It really depends on the, on the budget and the level of experience and expertise, but anything from a few weeks to quite possibly a couple of months, and indeed for a big musical, even, even much longer, if you went to into the TARDIS and, or the DeLorean and traveled back to Shakespeare's time, then around midday you would cross the river somehow either over the bridge or get a boat across the River Thames to Southwark and walk along the straw filled streets that would be soaking up the mud if it had rained. And you'd walk into a theater very much like the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe. That's on the south bank of the River Thames today and that's a roundish building with no roof. They would perform their show at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the best light of the day because of course they didn't have electricity. They did have some indoor theaters lit by candles. But for much of Shakespeare's London career they were, they were performing in outdoor theaters. And a lot of the audience would stand around the stage, there were some seated galleries as well, but, but this audience would watch a performance that had probably had as much as two or three days worth of preparation, very, very little rehearsal time. And I suppose those are the, the biggest differences in experience, the, the nature of, of how you are as a, as an audience member nowadays. Sitting in the darkness back then, standing in light, the same light as as the actors, what we call shared light environment. And rather than watching something that's very well rehearsed and polished, you would instead be watching a group of craftsmen because at the time women weren't legally allowed in England to act on the stage. A group of craftsmen that had spent all of their working life playing together, at least from, from the age of 11, 12 or 13 when they would have apprenticed to an older actor and they would improvise their play, they would learn their lines or prepare their parts and they would prepare the dances and the fights, the complicated bits that you can't improvise because they're too pretty or too dangerous to improvise. And, and all the movement, what each act is going to do in each specific moment, that would all happen in the moment unplanned, but very prepared. So you're watching a very sort of alive and a performance piece that's got a very different dynamic, both as an observer of it and indeed as a performer of it.
- [41:03]
Kevin Stroud
Those types of venues like the Globe and the Swan were open air and they were relatively small by modern standards. So people crowded into them and there were no modern audio systems or microphones. So what kind of effect did that have on the performance?
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Ben Crystal
Well, you know, we just don't know the answer to that. There are very, very few records describing the sort of performance styles. You know, were the performances incredibly large and histrionic and exaggerated or were they very minimalist and realistic? You know, is it. Were the actors performing with Shakespeare in the habit of more what we might call, you know, pantomime, pantomimic acting or more kitchen sink and realist. We've got some anecdotes in the plays. We've got the mechanicals rehearsals in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is evidently a pastiche of rehearsal, of amateurs rehearsing as well. But still, there's probably some. Some truth in some of the tools that they use. And we've got Hamlet's advice to the players where he talks about, you know, speaking their speech trippingly on the tongue, which means quite, you know, fast. Do not mouth it. So don't take your time over it. Don't exaggerate it, and hold the mirror up to life. So from my explorations and. And gauging, I think what we've pro. What probably was experienced was what we might call. Well, there's two sort of mainstream types of acting method, right? There's the Stanislavski method, where, you know, you live the part and you believe the part and you draw on your own life's experiences to make the part real. And then there's the Brechtian model, where no one ever forgets that they're in the theater, that this is a theatrical experience. And I think the Shakespearean equivalent was. Was somewhere halfway between those two things where you've got actors performing to the best of their abilities to. To fully inhabit and. And portray the roles as realistically and humanistically as possible. Although, obviously, you know, they're in a heightened state and a heightened environment. But because of that shared line, because they're not acting into a black void of darkness, they can make eye contact with the audience. The audience can make eye contact with those actors. No one ever really forgets that they're in a theater. I think that the experience was probably a wonderful balance and indeed friction of realism and immersion. And, of course, the Shakespeare's Globe was built by his actors. And I can't imagine but that they constructed an acoustically sound space that it would have worked very, very well for the voice. And of course, had the added benefit of not having to deal with helicopters flying overhead like today's Globe does.
- [44:17]
Kevin Stroud
Well, you're right. I mean, there's so much we don't know about Elizabethan theater. But I guess there's one thing we do know a little bit about, and that's the accent or the way people spoke at the time. So I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit about original pronunciation, what it is and how You've been able to determine what it sounded like?
- [44:35]
Ben Crystal
Sure. Well, it's was my father's work. David Crystal, the linguist who was invited to the Shakespeare's Globe in 2004, 2005 to find out what this sound might have been. And reconstructing old accents is relatively straightforward fare for a, a linguist. The data that dad used is very much based around the First Folio, which is the first printed collection of Shakespeare's works. In fact, it's the 400th anniversary of that book in November 2023. Using that book, he reconstructed an accent that's about 80% right, which isn't bad. But of course, rather than it being an accent of Elizabethan London or indeed, you know, Elizabethan England, I, I suppose this is a sound, or at least the sound that we've been exploring is the sound of the theater, because. So if you're using the Folio as your main source, how do you find out what the sounds must have been like? Well, you start with the rhymes. Take Shakespeare's sonnets, which actually aren't printed in the folio, but take the quarto of Shakespeare's sonnets from 1609. Two thirds of the sonnets have rhymes that don't work in them. And there's only two logical reasons for that. Either Shakespeare wasn't a very good poet, but we know that he was. And the other reason for rhymes not working is that the way that they're, the words are pronounced has changed. So in the final sonnet, final couplet of Sonnet 116, if this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor know my never loved, we know thereby that proved and loved had to have rhymed once. And so you go through all of the works because of course a lot of the plays are written in rhyme as well. They'll have rhyming couplets in them. And there you get one chunk of data then. And this just of course isn't restricted to the First Folio or the quartos of the sonnets, but Elizabethans English was in a period where people would spell a lot more like they used to speak. So you can look at the spellings in the Folio and see a word like filum or philome and that spell P H I L O M E. And that might have turned to a word like film F I L m nowadays. But as I say back then, P H I L O M E is clearly a two syllable and possibly a three syllable word. So the spellings are another chunk of data. And then Beyond Shakespeare's works, there were people like Johnson, Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's colleague, who wrote dictionaries of how accents sounded. And Johnson wrote a dictionary of what the sounds of the language were sounded like to him. And of course, you know, he has his own filter and preferences and choices in making that, but still he goes through the letters of the Alphabet in a dictionary that's now lost and describes each sound. And when he gets to the letter R, he says, we pronounce this sound, we call it the doggy sound, which implies a sort of R. Now it's not clear whether it's a uvular or an alveolar trill or just a stronger sound that's more familiar in, in North America today. But either way that's another source of data. And so all of those sources combined took, took Dad's work to that 80%. And since he first established that work in the mid noughties, I've been exploring it both at Shakespeare's Globe and around the world with lots of different cultures and peoples and accents from New Zealand to India to America to Canada and all around. And the beautiful thing is that everybody that comes to original pronunciation fills in that last 20% with their own accent. So if you and I were to both learn original pronunciation, we would sound 80% the same and the last 20% of me would be filled in with my natural speaking accent, which is modified received pronunciation with bits of Irish and Welsh and Lancastrian and Cockney and Transatlantica because of my life experiences. And your original pronunciation would be 80 the same as me, but 20 you and, and so on and so forth. And, and that's had a really interesting effect on, on people and audiences in Shakespeare because a lot of people I think have grown up with the idea that there should be a particular sound for Shakespeare and that should, that sound should be received pronunciation, you know, the posh English accent. And of course that, that accent is really quite far away from the accent that Shakespeare and his actors spoke in. And it's interesting to have worked with companies and to see that rather performing Shakespeare where everyone learns the same accent and their natural regional accents are flattened out or removed entirely. The explorations in original pronunciation have, have allowed for people to retain their accent, to allow their, their own accent and sound to blend in with original pronunciation. And of course, after all accent is, is identity, so they're allowing more of themselves into the parts and, and it's paid. It's been a really interesting exploration mainly I think because it's paved the way back towards A place where there is no longer one right quote, unquote sound for Shakespeare. The right sound for Shakespeare is your sound because you want to speak it. So I think it's, it's, it's really. Dad's work has really given a lot of agency and permission for ownership over Shakespeare all the way around the world and to stop people feeling like they can't do it right because they don't have that posh English sound.
- [51:07]
Kevin Stroud
Yeah, I love the idea that the original pronunciation makes the plays more relatable to modern audiences and makes them feel more real in a lot of ways. I think most English speakers can hear some part of their own accent in it somewhere because it, it represents a type of speech that existed shortly before English spread around the world. So it has features that have survived in many different regional accents today. But what happens when we combine that accent with the specific meter and rhythm that Shakespeare used? I mean, how does that impact the modern performance of a Shakespearean play when it's performed in original pronunciation? For example, the speed, the rhythm and the timing of the play?
- [51:47]
Ben Crystal
Well, if you build in the approach that my theater company uses, which is to rehearse in the same time frame as Shakespeare. So we usually make our professional productions of Shakespeare in two or three days and indeed perform in a original practice esque space. Now, it doesn't have to be a theatre like the Globe, but you know, recreating that shared light environment, all of those elements combined and including original pronunciation, the effect seems to be one. Well, first of all, the experience happens in under two hours. Second of all, the characters, the actors seem more grounded and emotionally engaged. And that's partly to do with the, the ripple effect of the placing of the, the vowels in the mouth and the way that the, the center, the physical center of gravity shifts from somewhere in your chest or your throat down to down to your gut. That has a knock on effect in all genders of a lowering of the, the pitch of the voice, which is going back to what you're asking earlier about acoustics. A lower pitched voice is much, is very, very useful in an outdoor space. And audiences say that their experience is much more visceral, I think much more emotionally engaged. And I think that's because of the nature of watching an improvised and playful dynamic rather than a carefully rehearsed one feels much more unique. But also the, the number of consonants that have changed since Shakespeare's time in spoken English are not that many, but the number of vowel sounds have changed quite a bit. And a director once said to me, you know, the meaning of a word is, is carried by its consonant. So if I were to say I love you, I can sharpen the meaning or the effect of, you know, the meaningfulness, I suppose, in the listener's ear by sharpening the vowel, the constant sound so I love you versus I love you. The meaningfulness is much more sharper there. If I want to sharpen the emotional quality of it, then I need to play with the vowel sound. So consider I love you against I love you. So. The emotional sounds have changed an awful lot since Shakespeare's time. The meaning sounds have changed a lot less. And I think that that's certainly evinced in, in the performances of, of Shakespearean original pronunciation that I've, I've seen, as I say, with performers from all around the world coming with all at their own different cultures and sounds and accents. The feedback generally is, is one of, of connecting and engaging with the audience in a more sort of grounded and visceral emotional level than, than people generally tend to experience in, in modern accents. And then on the other side of things, there are some, some practical changes. When Richard in Richard III says that he's been cheated of feature by dissembling nature in his opening speech, that becomes cheer to the theater by dissembling nature. And you can hear that the rhythm in modern versus original pronunciation changes quite a bit there. So cheated of feature by dissembling nature becomes cetera to theater by dissembling nature. So you can hear that Shakespeare is also playing with the rhythm through this sound as well. So, and we're really only, I think about a third of Shakespeare's plays have been explored so far in original pronunciation. Maybe we're teetering towards a half now, but there's still an awful lot more to be found out, more of these, these things that Shakespeare wrote and wove into the, the sounds and the words that haven't been revealed yet.
- [56:11]
Kevin Stroud
You've done so much work with original pronunciation over the years and I'm curious if you find that it affects your own personal accent. Do you ever catch yourself pronouncing vowels like they were pronounced four centuries ago?
- [56:24]
Ben Crystal
I, well, certainly I struggle not to say in sooth rather than in truth these days. And that's, that's 20 odd years of working with Shakespeare and lots of, lots of different ways. I, someone just said to me yesterday, you know, the day before, where's your accent from? And, and I think that, you know, all, each and all of our life experiences affect our, our accents. And my transatlantic Irish esque twang has certainly been in magnified because of those sounds in that are that are evident in original pronunciation. And spending so much time working on op. It wasn't until, because of course I went to drama school in, in England and so I was told that my regional Welsh accent wasn't appropriate for Shakespeare and that I would have to speak received pronunciation. So first of all I started doing Shakespeare in RP. Then I started exploring it in Opie. And it wasn't until 2017 that I was invited to, to play Leontes in New Hampshire and speak English, speak Shakespeare in my natural speaking voice. And that really dumbfounded me. It took me a moment to work out what that might sound like without slipping into quote unquote, you know, Shakespeare voice. But, but, but having done so, it was of course incredibly liberating.
- [57:46]
Kevin Stroud
So you and your dad have written a lot of books about Shakespeare and original pronunciation and the two of you have put together a new book and coincidentally it has to do with Shakespeare. It's a collection of Shakespeare's quotes, but it's also more than that. It's an analysis of each quote and an application of the quote to modern life. So can you tell me a little bit about the book? I think it's an interesting concept. It's called Everyday Shakespeare Lines for Life.
- [58:13]
Ben Crystal
That's it. It's our fifth book together. It is indeed called Everyday Shakespeare Lines for Life. There's a different page for every day of the year and a different quote for every page. But rather than the quotes that people might expect, you know, to be or not to be a horse or horse, my kingdom for a horse is this a dagger I see before me? We have picked lines from that you might not even have noticed, and from the corners of the canon, from plays that you may not have or poems you may not have engaged with before, that hopefully offer both the thought that this could have been written yesterday and the thought that it would be relatively easy to drop it into everyday conversation. So we have lines like better 3 hours too soon than a minute too late. And make not your thoughts, your prisons grief makes 1 hour 10. And I have heard it said unbidden guests are often welcomest when they are gone and that sort of thing. You know, lines that hopefully invite a moment of reflection, potentially a moment of resonance, and that are short enough and bite sized enough and accessible enough to both make it clear that Shakespeare doesn't need that much work to gain access to the things that he wrote. And also that that there isn't a hurdle that's not achievable to dare to say it out loud yourself and maybe even memorize it and maybe even drop it into your everyday conversation. And I think that's a testament both to the work that dad and I do and to the work that I'm increasingly interested in, especially after the last few years. You know, the oracy and eloquence aren't things that are by and large taught in mainstream education. The places that we can go to to hear great speakers that speak in such a way that make our hearts thrill are rare and few and far between. There's something of a mental health crisis ongoing since the pandemic. And certainly I witnessed this in schools. You know, the amount of pastoral care that teachers are being asked to do as we, as we help our younger generations, and indeed the older generations help each other recover from all of that grief and isolation. And, and yet we haven't really provided an environment in our lives to work out, to give each other space and a safe space to practice saying how we feel. We always say to children, you know, tell me how you feel. But we, we don't, we don't teach them how to do that. And I think that seeing as Shakespeare was so wonderful at wrapping feeling into word and creating these very human characters and making those characters say and explore so such a vast panoply of, of humanity, all the good and the bad, no matter where we might hail from, that these works can be a really wonderful, safe sandbox to, to try out saying things that hopefully we never have to say, but thereby getting used to the idea of trying to cram our emotional language, which is of course the language of the body, into, into our. Our word verbal cerebral language. And then, yeah, the other half of, of the work with, with dad, indeed, the work that I carried on, aside from dad has been about building bridges. I hated Shakespeare when I was in school because it was taught to me on the page and it, and it took acting it on the stage for me to, to learn to understand just, just what riches there are there. And so our first book was a dictionary. And we learned from making that dictionary that of the million or so words that Shakespeare uses, only 5% actually might cause someone difficulty to understand them. Then we wrote a book of trivia, all the fun and fascinating facts about Shakespeare. Then we did an illustrated dictionary of Shakespeare together. Then we did a book about accents. You say potato. And now this Everyday Shakespeare and you can find out more about it@everydayshakespeare.com is a real celebration, I hope, of, of all the work we've done together, but most of all of Shakespeare and, and, and actually not of the man at all, but of the really quite wonderful and profound, humanistic, pragmatic, capital S Stoic things that he had to say and offer us to, to not just celebrate the loves that we feel as a species and, and the wonders that we can achieve, but also to recognize that the, the griefs that we experience and the difficult points and the hates and the jealousies and the parts of ourselves as a species that we're, we're less happy to look at. And of course we can. Some, some of his characters say very hateful things and there has been some movement in the last few years to, to suggest that those things are Shakespeare's opinions. But if there's something that dad and I learned from, and of course we are two white men from the uk, so it is filtered through our experience. But, but we've, we found very little evidence of that human Shakespeare and his own personal thoughts and beliefs beyond, as I say, the pragmatic and the stoic and the humanistic of love and be kind and life is brief, take it whilst you've got it, or take advantage of it once you've got it, but be compassionate and be aware that it's natural to feel all sorts of hateful things and, and that's. And that we can do, do better as a species. So it's, it's been a real. To inhale the cannon again for the, for essentially the fifth time with dad, but with this filter of trying to mine for. Well, yeah, for lines, for life. It has been an incredibly nourishing and rewarding venture.
- [65:02]
Kevin Stroud
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I really do appreciate it and I know the podcast listeners are going to be fascinated with what to say.
- [65:10]
Ben Crystal
It's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me, Kevin, all the best.
- [65:38]
Kevin Stroud
A quick thanks again to Ben Crystal for joining me. I should note that we also talked specifically about some of the passages in Romeo and Juliet. We looked at what those passages tell us about the way words were pronounced at the time and the way Shakespeare's pronunciation reveals some hidden puns in the play. So I'll include that part of the discussion in an upcoming episode where we'll look at that play in a little more detail. Next time, we're going to pick up our overall narrative in the mid-1590s and we'll look at some notable developments that took place in England and France. As we move the story forward, we'll continue to explore the works of Shakespeare, as well as other writers of the period. And we'll focus on what those works have to tell us about the nature of English during those last few years of the Elizabethan period. So until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.