Landing the Big One

Landing the Big One

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

The real sound of Shakespeare?

What if you could hear Shakespeare in the language spoken by him at the time of his writing? The BBC offers the chance, here.
In August the theatre will stage an "original production" of Troilus and Cressida - with the actors performing the lines as close to the 16th century pronunciations as possible.

By opening night, they will have rehearsed using phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will render the play just as its author intended. They say their accents are somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire - yet bizarrely, completely intelligible if you happen to come from North Carolina.
Sure, most of North Carolina, but probably not Cary (known locally as an acronym for "Containment Area for Relocated Yankees"). They may require a translator.

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