Comments

Dear David,

I’ve been working on recording music from the Ainsworth and Allison Psalters from around 1600 and have been attempting to use OP by working from your Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation and videos of you and Ben I’ve found online. I’m currently working on Psalm 84 from Ainsworth’s Psalter, but don’t know how to pronounce words like Messiah, Jehovah, Selah, and Jah. Do you know how they might have been pronounced, and could you recommend a resource for working with these names and words particular to biblical texts?

Many Thanks!
Bianca

Dear David,

I hope you are keeping well in this peculiar time. I am a trainee English teacher with a background in Linguistics. I am currently completing a research piece for my PGCE, and I am exploring how OP could be used in the classroom, as an integral part of the curriculum, to enhance pupil engagement in learning Shakespeare.

I wondered if you had any thoughts on this, whether you were aware of any initiatives to bring OP into schools, or if other education professionals have discussed or trialled teaching Shakespeare and using OP either to add to student’s knowledge of the texts or be able to reinterpret them through the new meanings that OP brings to light.

Thank you for bringing such an interesting linguistic and historical discovery to the forefront. As a Linguist and a lover of Literature, the findings around OP research interests me endlessly.

Best wishes,

Edward Perrins

Hello David!

I’m curious about your thoughts in the occasional employment of OP in a production that would otherwise be performed in a contemporary dialect. For example, if a certain pun or rhyme scheme was understood only in OP, do you think it would be grievously distracting to utilize the sounds of OP in only those words? In other words, is it necessary to perform entirely in one dialect if it means sacrificing understanding of certain rhymes, wordplay. etc.?

Thank you!
Jane Emma

Hi David,

Now that I am cast as a character in an OP production (Kent in “Lear” at the BSF), I finally got around to starting your “Pronouncing Shakespeare” book, which I’ve had since 2008. I quickly found your comments on annotation, about having considered and rejected modern-letter spellings in favor of the IPA.

I had already experimented with such re-spellings for my own use. I believe that, while the result is certainly imperfect, it provides a fairly helpful version I can read aloud quickly, and correct for the phonic parallax. I’m getting better at sight-unseen pronouncing text in OP, but do a whole lot better when reading my spelled-out text because it at least reminds me of all the little things I often botch.

Here is one of my attempts, the famous Hamlet passage:

Ta beh, uhr not ta beh, that is the Questeeun :  
Hwether ’tis Nohbler in the muhynd ta suhffer
Th’ Slings an’ Aaras of ohtrageeus Fortun,
Uhr ta tehk Aarmes agehnst a Seh a trohbbels,
An’ bai opposin’, end ‘um : ta dai, ta slehp
Na mahr ; an’ bai a slehp, to seh weh end
The Haart-ehk, an’ dha t’ohsan’ Natch’rall shocks
Thet Flesh is eyre ta ? ‘Tis a cahnsuhmehseeun
Devohtlai ta beh wish’d. Ta dai, ta slehp,
Ta slehp, parchaunce ta Drehm ; Ai, dhehre’s the ruhb,
Fuhr in dhat slehp a’ dehth, hwut drehmes meh cohm,  
Hwen weh have shufflel’d ahf this mahrtall cuhyl,
Muhst give ‘s pahz.

I only need to bear in mind a couple rules to read it, like: if the terminal “-y” is spelled “ai” (bai, mai) the “a” takes the schwa sound as in “about.” (This is, after all, the sound in ‘ta’ in unaccented syllables throughout.) And the “i” is the European i, as in “vino.”

I used “uhi” or “uhee” at first, before trying “ai.”

I welcome your comments. It is quite a pickle. But since many folks don’t have the time* to learn the IPA symbols, and can’t readily type them, and since we use early-spelling texts cut for production, even the fully-IPA-transcribed texts available (thank you!) won’t be usable in practicum, for us anyway. So I may keep at it.

Be well.

*maybe “can’t be bothered” is more often accurate, but in my case I run a custom woodworking business with five employees, live in an 1860’s house in constant need of work, and pursue the Plays in my “spare time.” Oy.

Dear Professor,
I’m interested to know whether Shakespeare employed various rhyme patterns in his plays and sonnets, such as: slant rhyme, lazy rhyme, identical rhyme etc. or did he just use “perfect rhyme”? It seems that there were many examples of slant rhymes in his works, but I’m not familiar what the pronunciation of that time. Can you enlighten me?

Thank you.

Hi David,

I was wondering if you had any advice on how to best improve the ability to intuitively guess the pronunciation of individual words and reduce the amount of words looked up in OP dictionaries.

I’ve been listening and re-listening to the OP recordings I have from you and others, after that would it make sense to start reading long poems in their original spelling, and using the rhymes and meter to start building an intuitive sense of where the stress probably was and what words they rhymed with?

Are there specific texts or sources that were most helpful for the linguists who did the work of getting down pronunciations of specific words?

Would listening to different modern English dialects possibly help as well, or do you think that would be more likely to cause interference?

Hello Professor Crystal,

I am currently in a rehearsals for a production of Coriolanus and I have a question about the pronunciation of the word ‘excuse’. On line 101 of the Arden Shakespeare edition Virgilia says, “Give me excuse, good madam, I will obey you in everything hereafter. ”
Would “excuse” be pronounced with a z sound (as in accuse) or with a soft -ess sound (access)?

Thanks muchly,
Anthony

Replacement of /wh/ by /w/ is referred to by several writers over a long period of time. It was going on in Middle English in some dialects, but doesn’t attract real attention until the 18th century. It seems clear that at the beginning of the century the merger was taking place, e.g. John Jones in his Practical Phonography (1701) says that ‘what, when etc [are] sounded wat, wen, etc by some’. By the time of George Johnston (in his Pronouncing and Spelling Dictionary 1764), ‘the h is very little heard’. Not everyone liked it. John Walker in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) says that ‘not sounding h after w‘ is a fault of Londoners. He is thinking mainly of Cockneys. But slowly the vulgar associations disappeared. The merger begins in the south among educated people and moves north (but not as far as Scotland). I grew up in North Wales and never had it. So whether you recognize it in the early 18th century will depend on your interpretation of the social setting.

The ‘see-an’ pronunciation of -tion etc had long gone. This was already ‘shee-an’ in the 17th century. It is routinely recorded as ‘shun’ in 18th century dictionaries

As for your timbre question… No idea. I doubt it.

I had only focused on individual words pronunciation, and so I hadn’t noticed the syllable timing/stress-timing difference.

The more I’ve been looking into it these past days, the less I found the resemblance to be strong.

Thank you very much for your rapid answer!

Hi David!

In my own experience, I’ve found that, when it comes to Standard Englishes, the one resembling OP the most is Jamaican. Is that really so? Or is there another standard accent that holds a closer similarity?

Thank you for your great work!

The central quality of the first element of the diphthong is based on an estimate of how far the shift to modern /ai/ would have travelled from its Middle English value as /i:/. The essential difference with immediately is that the final syllable is unstressed. John Hart is one who writes such endings as a diphthong in the mid 16th-century, and this was surely still present in Shakespeare’s day, otherwise the rhymes (in e.g. Oberon’s ‘purple dye’ speech) are lost, and the mystical atmosphere evaporates. But there are also some cases where that unstressed ending rhymes with /i/, as today, suggesting that the diphthongal ending was on its way out.

The rhymes also show that there were many cases where words had two pronunciations, just as many do today (think scone rhyming with both on and own). Fear is a case in point (and also several other words with an ea spelling). It sometimes rhymes with (e.g.) cheer and deer and sometimes with there and swear.

You’ll find a complete listing of rhymes in the dictionary you mention. This is the Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, published by Oxford University Press, with an accompanying audio file of all the entries (accessed through a personalized code that you get with the book).

Dear David,

In the play “Guy, Earl of Warwick”, there is a character named Philip Sparrow who some scholars, such as Katharine Duncan Jones, believe might be a caricature of Shakespeare. I read on a forum that ‘Sparrow’ may have been pronounced ‘Spear-O’ In some parts of England at the time, is this likely to be true?

Thanks

One more thing. Last one I promise:

Have you considered the following?

For VERDICT: a form without /k/ pronounced
For SATIRE: a form with the vowel of NATURE
For FIERCE: a form with the same vowel as in PIERCE
For SERVILE: a form with a non-tense BIT vowel in the second syllable
For INVEIGLE: a form with the SEA vowel
For PHLEGMATIC: a form without the /g/ pronounced

Also, the following accentuations: retínue, súccessor

You say in the dictionary of OP that the open e of “tale”

“….is also used in several words that would later become /i: /, such as reason and season…puns provide useful reinforcement here, as wordplay between reason and raisin, for example, would not have worked without some degree of homophony.”

With “raisin” I am pretty sure you have it backwards. It is “raisin” that was pronounced as a homophone for “reason.” Both would be /re:zn/ (or /ri:zn/ with the see/sea merger.) The pronunciation /ri:zn/ for “raisin” is attested well into the modern period in 18th century pronunciation dictionaries by Walker, Flint, Sheridan and others. The pronunciation with the SAY vowel rather than the SEA/SEE vowel is the result of a modern spelling pronunciation.

Yes, the sea/see distinction is one of the trickiest aspects of EME OP. It was a clear distinction in Chaucer’s day, and the question is how long it remained. Some think it was on the wane during the 16th century, others that it lasted until the early 17th. My view is that the distinction was extremely unstable by Shakepeare’s time. Probably older conservative speakers would have retained it, but ‘new tuners of accent’ would not. The evidence is mixed. The spelling of ea for the more open variant vs ee for the closer is not a perfect guide, as the OED quotation notes. Rhymes sometimes point in different directions. The contrast is further obscured by the phonetic realisations, with the /i:/ phoneme having an articulation closer to cardinal 2 than (as in present-day RP) cardinal 1. Length isn’t the issue here. There are words where ea is long (as in seat) and those where it is short (as in feast).

When I work with a company, I find it impossible to introduce an easy principle to ensure that the actors make the distinction consistently. (If anyone out there has one I’d love to know what it is!) So I simplify, and give both see and sea (etc) the same /i:/ phoneme, but articulating it more openly than in present-day RP. However, I think it’s important to be flexible, given the uncertainties, so that, for example, when we seen fear rhyming both with cheer and with wear, we allow the rhymes to motivate alternative pronunciations. This can upset some philological purists, but in an applied linguistic setting one often has to make pragmatic decisions of this kind.

Hope this helps. But you don’t need to apologise for feeling confused. This is an area where everyone is, some of the time!

Important to distinguish between accent (pronunciation) and dialect (grammar and vocabulary). RP is an accent, not a dialect.

It didn’t exist in the 16th century. RP develops in England in the last decades of the 18th century, and became the accent of the educated elite – but spoken by less than 5 per cent of the population of England. You could get to the top of the kingdom in S’s day with any regional accent – witness Raleigh and Drake’s Devonshire. And of course in 1603 the elite accent became Scots.

Yes, S must have begun life with a West Mids accent, but this would have been modified as a result of life in London. Mixed accents would have been very common, just as they are today. But we know very little about the exact phonetic qualities of the vowels used in different parts of the country. Writers like Jonson give only very general clues – such as saying that the vowel in words like ‘prove’ is short. But that’s nonetheless invaluable info, as it helps us see why proved and loved (for example, in Sonnet 116) are exact rhymes.

OP is a sound system, not an individual accent. Just as today we speak Modern English (i.e. use a modern English sound system) in a variety of accents, so people speaking Early Modern English would also have used a variety of accents. For example, everyone would have said invention as ‘in-ven-see-on’ rather than Modern ‘in-ven-shun’, but it would have come out differently when spoken by northerners, southerners, Irish, Scots, and so on. When we did the OP Romeo at the Globe in 2004 all the actors kept their original accents, superimposing them onto the OP. And that’s how it’s been ever since.

Hello David,

I’m reading a biography of James I and began wondering about Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham and Queen Elizabeth’s cousin. He was born in 1536 and died in 1624 but was still active as late as 1620.

Would his pronunciation in 1620 have been what it was decades earlier ? Or would he have unconsciously modified it as the sound system slowly shifted during his lifetime ? Is it likely that any person of his generation circa 1620 was still sounding the K in words like ‘knave’ , ‘knock’ etc, and the W in words like ‘sword’ ?

Many thanks,

John Toyne

Thank you for your very kind reply. Chicago has this version of Shakespeare online — https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/OTA-SHK/restricted/search.form.html

As a strategy, it would have weaknesses, but perhaps if this text were married with the original pronunciations, by rubbing these resources together, something might begin to warm up in publishing and on stage?

Wonderful things you are doing!!! I learned about your work through my good friend John N. Wall here in Raleigh NC; your brilliant son read the sermons for John’s creation of the preaching of Donne’s sermons. I have long been interested in language history and variations. I once knew an English teacher at the University of Kentucky who supposedly could pin a student accent to a county level.
Anyway, two items possibly of interest. j
I have read a lot of 18th and early 19th century building documents as part of my research as an architectural historians. Some odd spellings gained meaning only when I read them out loud. One of my favorites was “for building the peasor,” 10 shillings. I decided it meant Piazza, which is an interesting indication of 18th c. pronunciation iin northeastern North Carolina.

I expect you have noticed the many similarities with the “Hoi Toide” accent on NC’s Outer Banks, which survives best among older folks. If you haven’t already done so, you might enjoy getting some of the old timers out there, at Ocracoke or elsewhere, to read some Shakespearean English in their traditional accent. Alton Ballance out there is a good connection. The rhyming of “room” and “come” struck me. Also, in Virginia, they famously say “abooot the hoose” for about the house and similar. Great work. I love it. My own accent I have discerned is a mix of midwestern and appalachian and southern…………I am from Kentucky. .

Evening, Mr. Crystal.
According to Sonnet 116, the word “doom” rhymes with “come”.
In Sonnet 59, the word “room” supposedly rhymes with “doom”. That means the vowel isn’t long, /u:/, in room, correct?

In Julius Caesar, Cassius makes a pun on the word Rome and room thus,

“Now is it Rome indeed, and Rome enough,/ When there is in it but one only man”.

If we were to consider the word “room” rhyming with “doom” and can have a pun with “Rome” then Rome is enunciated with a short round vowel, correct?

But the note in my version says that Rome was pronounced as “Room” (modern pronunciation). Which means that “room” is as in op as in modern English. So the question is, is it Rome with a long or short vowel? Thank you for your courtesies.

Hello, Mr. Crystal. Firstly I wanted to congratulate you for the amazing job you have done regarding OP and Shakespeare. Secondly, I wanted to ask something about Sonnet 145 (which I have to recite in my University). There are a couple of rhymes which do not work out when using RP; however they do in OP. The first one is ‘come’ and ‘doom’ (dome). The second one, I think, is ‘end’ and ‘fiend’. Even though I know there must be a rhyme in there, I have not been able to find how to pronounce those words in OP.

I would be very thankful if you could answer this little doubt to me.

Regards from Colombia and keep up the good work Mr. Crystal.

I would love to buy the book, but I am concerned that I won’t be able to learn OP via written explanation. Lol, my fault I know, but I think I learn differently. Is there anything like what you do in America?

Thanks for reading my message 🙂

There was nothing like Received Pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time – that accent evolved in English around 1800. So there was no ‘posh accent’ as such. Upper-class people would speak in their regional accents (as did Drake and Raleigh, both Devonshire men), including that of London, and in 1603 most of the court spoke in a Scottish accent when James I arrived – people remarked about it (respectfully!). The only significant difference I can think of would be if you wanted to show you were educated, i.e. literate. That means you would know how to spell, and your pronunciation could be inflouenced by that – much as today people who pronounce the /t/ in often say ‘because it’s there in the spelling’. Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost is the classic example of someone who wants to pronounce everything exactly as it is spelled. It’s a satirical portrait, of course, but there must have been a social reality to make it recognizable.

Your second message reminds me of when we were doing Romeo at the Globe, and the actor playing the Prince asked Tim Carroll the director how it was possible for him to play a prince if he didn’t have a posh accent, but had to speak in the same way as the lower-class characters. Tim had a one-word answer: ‘Act’.

Dear David,

When I spoke to you some time ago, you said that the word “one” had three different pronunciations in Shakespeare’s day:
1) the one rhyming with words like “alone” –> [o:n]
2) another rhyming with “on” [on]
and
3) an unstressed ‘un’ (as in modern ‘good ‘un’)
I am curious about the second pronunciation in the context of Comedy of Errors 4.2.52-53, where Dromio of Syracuse says “‘Tis time that I were gone./ It was two ere I left him, and now the clock strikes one”. Some commentators (e.g. Kokeritz) noted that the word “one” was pronounced as “on” in this passage, which explained that Dromio meant that ‘the clock struck on’ . Yet, you included this fragment neither in the entry “one”, nor “on” in your OP dictionary (Oxford, 2016). Why so? Do you disagree that “one” was pronounced like “on” in this passage? Thank you very much for your answer in advance.

Hi David,
Thanks for the prompt and helpful reply.

I have heard people pronounce ‘Grave’ and ‘Have’ in a ways that sound to me almost like ‘Grev’ and ‘Hev’ or ‘Grairv’ and ‘Hairv’, but as I haven’t learned to follow the phonetic symbols, and am no great actor, I find it difficult to share what that really sounds like to me.
So, once again – thank you for the work you have produced on this subject, including recordings and explanations.

Mike.

Hi David,

Firstly, I like to thank you for, and congratulate you on your great work.

I have been reading Richard ii, and can see many rhymes which sound best in OP (‘Tongue’/ Wrong; Boot/ Foot etc). I cannot, however, find a way of rhyming ‘Grave’ and ‘Have’. Can you help?

Thanks,

Mike.

Another few recordings I just did

“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/bjehxixjq0hv1qg/IsThisADagger.mp3

“Tomorrow and tomorrow”

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/u8xor3x5pm2k8hz/Tomorrow.mp3

Sonnet 15

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/m81ua65pmezlt26/Sonnet15.mp3

By the by

The Great Vowel Shift always sounded so epic to me. Like a summer blockbuster for nerds. I imagine Don LaFontaine saying in his booming preview voice: “This summer, a few intrepid vowels will make their way across the feature grid. But can they survive in their new homes?”

I can certainly get that. I didn’t really consider that what actors could do, and what audiences ought to be made to hear, might depend on other considerations than the strictest (approximation of) accuracy possible. And after all, there is a whole range of things that presumably must have differed from Modern English(es) that I imagine will never be knowable or even surmisable. What can be known of suprasegmental features, for instance, apart from the fact that secondary stress must have been strong enough not to result in as much vowel reduction? (It’s only with the most painstaking of work that anything about Ancient Greek sentence prosody — beyond the contours of pitch accents — has become recently knowable with Stephens and Devine’s “Prosody of Greek Speech.”)

With things like increasing and blessing, one thing that occurs to me is that the height for “short” vowels may be much less restricted or more centralized than that of long ones. Because /ɛ/ and /e/ do not contrast as /ɛ:/ and /e:/ do, perhaps the vowel of “blessing” may be something that would best be represented as [e̞] or [ɛ̝].

“As for points of consistency, I would have made day/way less diphthongal – the same as in bravery”

I take these vowels to have been /ɛ:ɪ/. My take on Elizabethan English in the City of London is that for some speakers there must have been a distinction between the vowel from Middle English /aɪ/ and that from Middle English /a:/. Thus “tale” /tɛ:l/ and “tail” /tɛ:ɪl/ at least for a while. Or maybe /tɛ:l/ and /tɛɪl/. The latter might be something like [tʰɛi̯ł] with a diphthong similar to that of Standard Dutch “ij”, which also has a monophthongal dialectal pronunciation. (Ditto for days/daze, bait/bate, hail/hale, raise/raze and waive/wave.) The purely monophthongal pronunciation of such words existed to be sure at least from the mid 16th c. onward. We also know other writers, including some in London, took exception to it. Alexander Gil criticizes the monophthongal pronunciation and associates it with upper class effeminacy and women’s speech. Given that almost anything one wishes to stigmatize may be (and has been) demeaned in such terms, this probably says little about who actually spoke this way. But other writers describe the monophthong for Middle English /aɪ/ as being the result of French influence and an affectation. Which does at least suggest that some sort of perception of regional snootiness was involved.

” So, given your detailed awareness of the historical trends, it would be really interesting to see your own reconstruction, and to try it out in performance. I very much hope that such comparative phonological dramaturgy will develop, as time goes by.”

Alright. Here are two sonnets read by me. The first because it is rich in varied near-front and mid vowels, and the other because I like it

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/pydamo72t3y30ya/TwosonnetsforCrystal.mp3

(I just got out my phone and recorded this sitting at my desk without prep. So the delivery is unpolished and the sound somewhat short of studio quality. And I think I may have screwed up the height of the vowel in one instance of the word “not”)

“but to throw in the towel, and say that we’ll never know anything about OP, just because there are difficulties, is not in my mindset, as – judging by your capitalisation of ANYTHING – it seems to be in yours.”

I can see why you’d think that. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On my own site, which is more about translation than reconstruction, I include links to my reading specimens of reconstructions in a few languages, including

Late Middle French

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.in/2015/08/francois-villon-ballad-of-ladies-of.html

5th century Athenian Greek

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2011/05/homer-opening-of-odyssey-from-freek.html

1st Century BC Latin

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2009/06/horace-ode-47-from-latin.html

12th century Old Occitan

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2016/01/jaufre-rudel-love-afar-from-occitan.html

16th century Spanish

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2014/07/garcilaso-de-la-vega-while-there-is-yet.html

Late Tang Court Chinese

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2016/11/li-bai-airs-of-ancientry-no14-lament-of.html

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2016/04/li-bai-pouring-myself-drinks-alone-by.html

Mid Qing Court Chinese

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/12/xi-peilan-crossing-yangtze-from-chinese.html

Alright this is becoming linkspam. But you take my meaning. I’m by no means opposed or pessimistic about the possibilities. Truly.

And I did see the /e:/ and think you meant something it turns out you did not. I have not read all of your books. I’ve ordered a few that have yet to arrive in the mail. I was just reading “Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment” and saw your description of the vowels in words like “Eve” as being more like the vowel of contemporary “Way.” This combined with your grapheme choices in the pieces downloadable online, and some of the performances I’ve heard (most not by you, I hasten to add) led me to make unfounded assumptions as to your intent.

Apart fromt he fact that it makes no typological sense for sea/sea to be leveled into /e:/ (especially if /e:/ really is [e:]), it’s also worth noting that though these sets do rhyme, they do not do so consistently. These sets are both used quite extensively in the Sonnets, yet not routinely cross-rhymed there. It does happen of course. But also the “see” lexical set in the sonnets is far more likely than the “sea” to rhyme with the secondarily stressed /ǝɪ/ of “prosperity” and “legacy” whereas the the “sea” lexical set more readily rhymes with /ɛ/ and /ɛ:/. On the other hand there are cases where “see” words rhyme with /ɛ/ as well, as in “feed/shed” but it seems rarer (I don’t actually have a corpus analysis of the rhymes of the Sonnets to hand. They’re just the body of Shakespeare’s work I know best.) This all suggests to me that rhyming per se cannot be a sure guide to the vowel grid of any one version of English at play.

But then, why would one expect it to be? This has been long known to scholars of the historical phonology of Chinese, where the writing system makes even getting on the ground floor of analysis far more difficult (and therefore makes rhyme practice, as well as medieval Chinese rhyme-dictionaries, all the more precious as evidence.)

Creators may use rhymes that appear in other dialects than one’s own, and other dialects than the one used for spoken or sung delivery. Or they may avoid rhymes that exist in their dialect. A southern American poet writing a sonnet in, say, 1950, would probably not use men/thin as a rhyme however deeply the phonological pin had pricked their pen. An American writing 50 years earlier than that might have avoided rhyming “fatter” with “madder” for similar reasons. As with much else in poetic language, the features which come into play to decide what is an acceptable rhyme in a poetic or lyric tradition (even an oral one with illiterate practitioners) are not reducible to, or abstractable from, the facts of any one dialect. As like as not they depend on genre, on circumstance of delivery as much as anything else. Note 20th century American poets who observe fairly strict rhyme rules, may rhyme “again” with both “pain” and “pen”, or “been” with both “seen” and “sin.”

The rhymes in modern pop music and rap are worth considering. Take “gonna” and “stunner.” For some Americans, when the word is stressed, “gonna” is actually /gɔnǝ/ or even /gɔwnǝ/. In “Dani California” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, these words are rhymed even though the pronunciations used on the recording (in keeping with the vaguely Memphis-flavored, optionally non-rhotic norm of modern American pop singing that has been with us since Elvis) are /stʌnǝ/ and /gɔwnǝ/. Or take the “Julius Caesar vs. Shaka Zulu Rap Battle” written by Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD. There “sh*t-talker” is rhymed with “boom shakalaka” /ʃɪttɒkɚ ~ bu:mʃakalakǝ/.

I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, of course, Prof. Crystal. But it occurred to me now to wonder: to what degree can the occasional cross-rhyming of the “see” and “sea” lexical sets be used to ascertain ANYTHING about the pronunciations a performer might or might not use on the stage apart from the fact that the vowels probably had something vague in common? I don’t know if this is true of Elizabethan theater —of which I know little— but stage accents themselves, are often not identical with any one vernacular either. C.f. 19th century Buhnendeutsch in Germany, the vowels of the form of Chinese traditionally used for Peking Opera, traditional Yiddish theater pronunciation in late 19th and early 20th century Eastern Europe, and even Mid-Atlantic English in earlier generations.

Blast it. I forgot to not insert angle brackets again.

For “Pope and Dryden (for whom and could rhyme with but not with any of the words) ”

Read “Pope and Dryden (for whom sea and tea could rhyme with obey but not with any of the -ee words)

For “that words like and retained an /e:/ vowel ”

Read “that words like thee and see retained an /e:/ vowel “

David,
How many syllables are there in “Christian”? I seem to recall learning that there are three big, fat round syllables (“Chris-Tee-An”) – apologies for getting all technical!
Looking through some of the plays, it know seems less rigid – that is, it seems like the actor could stretch the word out (see Merchant example below) or ellide. The sonnets, alas, don’t contain the word. I tried with “condition,” but that might not be the best replacement or test-word. (I am Canadian, so in my parlance, there are only two syllables.)

Many a time hath banish’d Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,

[Aside] How like a fawning publican he looks!
I hate him for he is a Christian,

I had rather be a country servant-maid
Than a great queen, with this condition,

David, I recently read an interpretation of Hamlet III.ii.130-135 that contends that “show” is a sexual pun for “shoe” a slang term from Shakespeare’s time. Would “show” here have to be pronounced closer to “shoo” for this pun to work? How would one pronounce “show” in OP?

Thank you!

They’re two different words, with different etymologies and pronunciations. Rascal always had its /s/ and a short vowel. Rakehell derives from rake, not the other way round.

I can’t see any OP-motivated puns in TN 3.3, unless you force one into Sebastian’s leavetaking of Antonio – ‘I’ll… leave you for /An hour’ /o:r/.

There are eleven rhymes of grave with have (see the Dictionary under grave for a listing); but there are also ten rhymes with words like gave and slave. So I give two pronunciations for grave, and would recommend ‘grav’ in the Cymbeline example. There’s no evidence that have was ever pronounced ‘heiv’. Grave definitely had a short vowel in Old English, and that pronunciation stayed in some regional accents, such as Scottish (where the spelling graff can be seen) until at least the 18th century. Another short ‘a’ vowel occurs in gravy – cf. the pun with gravity in Henry IV.

One can never rule out the possibility that vowels near to each other in articulation were heard by the Elizabethans as rhyming, and I imagine that in the context of a song this would be more likely. So I suppose all pronunciation options are available!

I’ll post news about forthcoming productions as I hear about it. The next one I think is going to be at the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory next year – Antony and Cleopatra. No details yet.

As for the understandability of OP… I used to go around the audiences during the intervals of productions and ask them. Nobody had any difficulty, and by the end of the first scene or two many said they were responding to the play as they would if it were presented in any other accent. People who have learned English as a second language tell me they find OP more intelligible than RP – the pronunciation of /r/ after vowels, for example, makes the accent clearer than in RP, where /r/ is not pronounced.

Many thanks again! So it seems to me that Wither’s poetry has just a relatively high half-rhyme frequency. However, as for the Dowland’s ‘Come again’ lyrics, I think I’ll go for a closer pronunciation of ‘alas’ – as it is suggested by the rhymes used by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Bolton (eg alas / embrace), both Cambridge-educated and apparently unrelated to Scotland.

Besides that, I would like to thank you for your dictionary, it must have been a tremendous amount of work to produce such an invaluable resource!

With best regards,
Jacek Tlaga

While trying to transcribe ‘Come again, sweet love doth now invite’ to OP, I discovered yet another example: alas / grace. Having checked alternative spellings in the online OED, I found out that several authors with Scottish background (such as king James I or Alexander Craige) used this rhyme and spelled ‘alace’ or ‘allace’ – so I guess it could be pronounced /əˈlɛːs/.

However, by the way I found many more instances suggesting /ɛː/ in place of /a/. Especially George Wither in his Hymns and Songs of the Church used plenty of such rhymes, most notably ‘was’ frequently rhymed with words like ‘grace’ and ‘place’. Other examples are: had / shade, glad / made, that / gate, thereat / relate. Is it plausible that words such as ‘was’, ‘had’, ‘that’ were also pronounced /wɛːs/, /hɛːd/, /ðɛːt/? I couldn’t find any spellings that would back it up.

Dear Professor David Crystal,

Thank you very much for your reply to my one-king question I asked you last year. In your book “Pronouncing Shakespeare” (2005), you wrote that “The end result was that the OP performances, coming in at around two and a quarter hours, were about 10 minutes shorter than those using modern pronounciation” (p. 65). Of course, the OP performances was staged faster than Modern Pronounciation ones, but exactly how short were they? Do you have information on the exact time allotted for the OP Romeo and Juliet performances in 2004? I am interested both in the amount of lines of the play text as well as how long those performances exactly lasted. Do you know what was the average speed of delivering lines in those performances? Do you have such information on other OP performances from around the world? Thank you very much for your reply in advance.

Yours,
DK

Many thanks for these very interesting examples.
forlorn: This is the clearest case: the many rhymes show it was clearly a back vowel in the mid-close or mid-open region. I recommend mid-open in the dictionary.

mourn: I went for the close vowel /u:/ because of the preponderance of spellings (eg in the OED), but there were also some ow spellings at the time (though not in the FF), which could easily be taken to show a mid-close variant – in which case there would be an overlap with a mid-close version of forlorn.

return: occasional spellings can be found in o and ou, and a mid-open/close variant is still heard today in some regional accents (eg in Ireland)

So, in a text where the writer is clearly intending the three words to rhyme, I would say the common factor would be a pronunciation somewhere between /o:/ and /ɔ:/. If singing, I imagine the more open variant would be likely.

weak – there was a variant in /ɛ:/, especially in Scotland and the north, so I suppose it might have been heard elsewhere. No reason to recommend this on the basis of the FF, but no grounds for disallowing it in other contexts.

deceiving/bereaving – you say ‘high’, and phonologically it was; but I argue that phonetically the quality was nearer cardinal 2 rather than the very high quality heard in RP today.

virginity: there are examples like this in the FF (eg she / extremity) which suggests that a monophthongal pronunciation was around.

Your examples show the need for a more comprehensive account of the phonology of the period, in which a much wider range of texts is taken into account. This is already being undertaken for other areas of language, and I hope phonology will get the same treatment in due course.

The distinctive feature argument is always available as a fall-back, but I try not to use it unless I run out of other ideas!

Dear David,

we changed in the past some emails on Shakespeare and pronunciation. Now I would like to know if you have a grounded view how they at the Elizabethan age pronounced the name Edward.

Thank you very much in advance.
Best regards,
Sándor Szabó
Hungary

Is there any chance you might come to the NAC in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?
I’d, love to see an OP production performed live, but I can’t really afford to travel.

Thank you for your time,
Kalem

Hi David,

For starter, sorry for my English; I’m a French speaker and I’m not that good in writting.

I’ve discover your work by doing some research on iambic pentameter for an audition. I work the Helena’s monologue in act 1, scene 1 of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and a rhyme (or no-rhyme) bugging me alot.

”And as he errs doting on Hermia’s eyes
So I, admiring of his qualities”

By listening a video of you, my boyfriend (englishspeaker) notice that one of the IES word pronounced have a different sound in OP… actually, it sound pretty close from French ”Qualité”! But still ”eyes” and ”qualités” still not rhyme.

Can you inlighted me? Do ”eyes” also had a different prononciation in OP?

Thank you for you wonderful work!

Hi David – I’ve always wondered about Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia, read by Polonius.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”

Do move and love rhyme in O.P.? I’m kind of hoping not, because a)in the next line Hamet admits to being a bad poet, b)elsewhere, Polonius judges lines as good or bad, and if it doesn’t rhyme, it can create a nice comic moment as Polonius is forced to read out the non-rhyme… maybe altering love to “loove” to get it to rhyme and making a face… or maybe it was a class difference that the royals might say “muv” and the lower levels – that I count Polonius among – might say “moove.” But this is all idle speculation… what have you discovered about this? Thank you!

David,

Had the velar fricative disappeared from words like night or daughter by Shakespeare’s time? I seem to recall you pronounced it in your recording of Tyndale’s Bible: Saint Matthew’s Gospel, thought, Tyndale obviously was writing in the early 1500s.

Thank you.

Hello David,

In the “Forthcoming Events” section, there is not a thing. Are there not going to be any more OP productions? Or if there are, where and when might they be?
I’d love to see Hamlet or Macbeth in some OP.

Thank you for your time,
Kalem

At that time a would be I guess ɛ:
Er and ir is in spelling so would be ɛr and ir.

I also note my local pronunciation of daughter is dowter which must be from doughter as ought and aught are kept separate in my dialect. I have found dofter though in 17th century a Warwickshire register. I note that OP has da:tər as the pronunciation.

Thank you so much for your speedy reply.
One more quick thing, was Scone then normally pronounced as to rhyme with gone? I merely ask because my Arden edition says it is pronounced ‘Skoon’ but I wasn’t sure whether that would be a purely contemporary pronunciation.

Thank you

Dr Crystal,

I am writing my dissertation on Macbeth and the interplay of order and caos in the play. I’ve read that many critics consider the last scene a dissatisfying conclusion, and that this is in itself indicative of the precarious re-institution of providential order. I was wondering if this is reflected on a phonetical level as well? The play ends with the couple:

‘So, thanks to all at once and to each one,
Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone.’

In Modern English my thesis remains true as you would have to really bend over backwards to make one rhyme with Scone. I was wondering if this holds true in OP, or whether the rhyme actually works? Could you perhaps shed some light on this issue?

Sincerely,
Ian I.

Dr. Crystal,

Apologies if you’ve answered this question already, but I wondered if you could point me to some recorded full-length performances in OP (video or even audio only) that I might enjoy. I especially have been looking for a proper rendition of Macbeth–one in which they bother to pronounce “heath” so that the lines actually make sense to the ear.

PS What did you think of the accents in the 2015 film version?

There’s usually a couple of months delay before a US edn of a British book appears. I think it;s June 1, though doubtless it’ll be in some stores earlier.

There was some spelling overlap between ‘suit’ and ‘sweet’ in the 15th and 16th century – see the range shown in the online OED. So there might be a case for a visual pun, but I don’t think it’s a strong one. I can’t see any pronunciation overlap at all.

‘Not’ etc – same as today (short vowels have changed very little in the past 400 years), but with the vowel quality a bit more open than in RP, and closer to the GA quality. ‘Rub’ etc – see my previous reply; they are all like ‘suffer’. ‘Pause’ like today, but again, with the vowel more like GA than RP. The ‘l’ of ‘all’ keeps the vowel open and unrounded, so that it sounds like ‘ahl’ – likewise ‘call’, ‘small’, and many more. The rounding started to appear during the 17th century, and some ‘new tuners of accent’ probably used it in S’s day (as the occasional rhyme, e.g. with ‘brawl’, suggests), but I go for the more conservative form in my transcription. All these values are illustrated in transcription and audio in my Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, out on 24 March.

I’ve been listening to Ben Crystal’s OP recording of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, and I don’t have the best ears. What are the intended OP pronunciations of the following words?

not, shock, bodkin
rub, come, love, but, puzzle
pause, all

Dear David,

My voice and lute duo, BEDLAM, is beginning a tour of 16th century Scottish and English lute songs this month. We released an album earlier this year of mostly 16th century Scottish songs, and took a stab at the Scottish English OP. We are using OP for our upcoming program as well (mostly songs of Thomas Campion), and I am wondering if you might have any thoughts on singing OP. Would the letter r still be hard, or would it be flipped or rolled?

We have very much enjoyed reading this website. Thank you for the wonderful work that you do!

All the best,
Kayleen

Dear David,

Have you a view on ‘solid’/’sullied’ (or indeed ‘sallied’) in Hamlet (I.ii.129) from pronunciation specifically? I am wondering whether, given the view that Q1 was likely to have been gathered from the memory of an actor and Q2 in part (Act 1 at least) seemingly referred to Q1, OP may throw up a hypothesis on the original word. Which did Ben choose for his OP Hamlet, or was the decision made on a sense rather than a sound basis? (I’ve had a look but can’t find that particular speech recorded online.)

With thanks and very best wishes,
Sarah

Jennifer Geizhals writes: Here are the details regarding our small OP event, which will take place in New York City in late July. Our project is part of the NYU Grad Acting Alumni Summer Festival for works in development. We will be presenting an hour-long presentation of a selection of scenes from “As You Like It,” all to be performed in the OP. We will begin the evening with a quick introduction to the OP movement and its history, and each scene will be prefaced with a few OP tidbits (e.g. words to listen for, old puns and rhymes that arise). I will be narrating the event as well as playing Rosalind. The rest of the cast is be composed of NYU alumni and faculty. Louis Scheeder, , Associate Dean of Faculty at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Daniel Spector, Associate Director at Tisch Classical Studio, will be co-directing this project. Shane Ann Younts, Associate Arts Professor at NYU Tisch Grad Acting, will be our vocal consultant. We will be performing on Wed, 7/29, and Thurs, 7/30, at 7PM in the Circus Room on the 5th Floor at 721 Broadway.

If you know of anyone that might be interested in attending this event, please have them email me at jen2kam@gmail.com so that I can include them on our guest list.

David, I was wondering if you had ever heard reference to the programme broadcast in the BBC National Programme at 10 pm on 6 December 1937 and billed as follows in the Radio Times:

EXPERIMENTAL HOUR — TAKE YOUR CHOICE
A Scene from ‘ Twelfth Night ‘ in modem and in Elizabethan speech
Shakespearean pronunciation by F. G. Blandford
Act 1, Scene 5
When London Calling A.D. 1600, broadcast in April, 1936, was discussed between the producer, M. H. Allen , and the author, Herbert Farjeon , the latter happened to mention that he had seen F. G. Blandford ‘s production of Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 5, in Elizabethan English at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge. It was decided to ask Mr. Blandford to do a scene for this broadcast, and he came up from Cambridge and took the rehearsals. It was one of the most effective things in London Calling, which conjectured what listeners might have heard had broadcasting been invented in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Now Miss [M.H.] Allen and Miss [Barbara] Burnham are going to produce part of Act 1, Scene 5, first in modem English pronunciation and then in Elizabethan pronunciation, the scene which Mr. Blandford gave at Cambridge. The producers believe that, spoken in this way, Shakespeare has a music and rhythm which Edith Evans, almost alone among actresses, gives it today. In the Elizabethan version the girls’ parts will be played by boys as they were played in Shakespeare’s day.

I’d never realized that an interest in producing Shakespeare using the OP went back so far. It would be fascinating to know what the “1936-7 version” sounded like!

Dear David,

I’ve been a student of Old and Middle English and fascinated with Shakespeare and the work on OP.

I decided when mounting a production of Hamlet for the Butterfly Creek Theatre Troupe here in Eastbourne, New Zealand (Wellington region), that I would play Polonius using OP, for several reasons — the colour of OP would lend this character, often done a misjustice by simplification, greater resonance, and to set him a bit apart as well. He is, after all, qutie a powerful figure at the court of Denmark, a man capable of perfidy, snooping — and also paternal and national love. In short, a complex Shakespearean personage.

Having read your work, listened to the Shakespeare OP CD, and having sent you a recording of my attempts at OP and received your feedback, I feel I am reasonably approximating it. The reaction of my cast has been very positive, and now that we have opened, the response from the audience excellent. They have no greater problem understanding Polonius and possibly the best reaction has been from an audience member who said she simply didn’t think it anything exceptional she was so caught up in the drama of the play, of Polonius’ character, etc.

As you note there is a great deal of variety within OP, and I have attempted to take advantage of this.

My very personal feeling is that it takes me into the soul of Polonius as neither the Received Pronunciation of modern Britain or what would be my natural American pronunciation would achieve, and I am most grateful for your help.

A member of the crew filming our production for youtube is an OP enthusiast, coincidentally, and an audience member expressed the desire to hear the entirety of Hamlet and other Shakespearean works in OP after last night’s show.

Manny

In September 2014, the university of Marburg hosted the 2nd congress of the German Association for Applied Linguistics. We were fortunate to have David Crystal as one of our invited plenary speakers. In his talk entitled “Tales of the linguistically unexpected: applying historical phonology – or, Shakespeare as you’ve never heard him before”, he reported to a mixed audience of (applied) linguists, students and school children about his exciting work on Shakespeare productions in OP.

Visitors to this website will surely be interested to know that we recorded the full talk, which you are invited to watch on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=X7G34hCxKdU
(Please excuse the less-than-ideal sound quality)

We hope that you enjoy the talk as much as we did, and welcome your comments and feedback.