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How did Shakespeare's English sound to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how do you know about things like the phonetic nature of a language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are explained in the video above that profiles a very popular experiment at the Globe Theatre in London, a 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare's theatricalist. As linguist David Crystal explains, the theater's purpose has always been to recapture the original look and feel of Shakespeare's production, music, movements, and so on as much as possible. The opposite proved true and people were even more fascinated. Crystal above and his son, actor Ben Crystal, show us how Shakespeare's particular passages sound to the first audience, and in doing so, eliciting the subtle wordplay lost in the modern tongue.

Shakespeare's English is called early modern English by scholars (not a completely different, and much older language, as many students say “old English.”) Crystal records dates from his Shakespeare's modern modern era around 1600 (in his excellent textbooks, linguist Charles Barber reserves a period between 1500 and 1700 years.) David Crystal cites three important evidence that guides us to restore early modern pronunciation (or “OP”).

1. Observations made by people writing about language at the time commented on how the words sounded, which words rhyme. Shakespeare's modern day Ben Johnson tells us, for example, that the English speaker of his time and place pronounced “R” (a feature known as “circumference”). As Crystal points out, the language is evolving rapidly, with not just one OP, but many modern commentaries on this evolution.

2. spell. Unlike today's highly frustrating tension between spelling and pronunciation, early modern English tended to be much more phonetic, with words pronounced as they were spelled out.

3. Rhymes and puns that only work in the OP. The crystals show an important pun between the “waist” and “like the genealogy) of the “sweat” Romeo and Julietlost completely in the so-called “received pronunciation” (or “appropriate” British English). Two-thirds of Shakespeare's sonnet, a father-son team, have rhymes that only work in the OP.

Not everyone agrees on how Shakespeare's manipulation sounded. Trevor Nun, the renowned Shakespeare director, argued that it may have sounded like American English today, suggesting that the language that traveled across the pond retains more Elizabethan characteristics than at home.

You can hear examples of this kind of OP on the recording Romeo and Juliet On top of that. Shakespeare scholar John Burton suggests that the OP sounds like a modern-day Ireland, Yorkshire and Western Country pronunciation. Macbeth Below (both audio examples are from CDs curated by Ben Crystal).

Whatever speculation, scholars tend to use the same criteria as David Crystal's overview. I recall my experiences with early modern English pronunciation in intensive graduate courses on the history of English. Hearing an amateur linguist class reads the familiar Shakespeare passages. We used phonological knowledge and David Crystal's criteria to recognize as the OP, and we considered the effect that Ben Crystal explained in an NPR interview.

If there's something about this accent, it's not that it's difficult or difficult for people to understand, but that there are spots of almost every English English accent in the UK, and actually Americans, and in fact Australians. It's the sound that makes people into people – it reminds people of the accent in their home – therefore they tend to listen more in their hearts than in their heads.

In other words, despite the weirdness of the accent, the language can feel more immediate, more universal, and even more instantaneously than the sometimes sturdy, overstated ways in which Shakespeare can be read with the accents of modern London stage actors and BBC News Anchors.

For more information on this subject, don't miss this related post: Listen to what Hamlet, Richard III, and Kinglea heard in Shakespeare's original pronunciation.

Note: An earlier version of this post was published on our site in 2013.

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