Shakespeare on Toast
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2018–2025
2:32 · 770K views · Nov 25, 2014
Ben Crystal performs Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' in Original Pronunciation, the reconstructed accent of Shakespeare's time, on a London balcony.
HN uses it as the example of how different Shakespeare sounded in original pronunciation.
5 comments from Hacker News
I've seen Ben Crystal do some other Original Pronunciation Shakespeare videos. It's his specialty, and I would love to see one of his "original practice" productions live one day. Here's a couple more of his videos: [LINK] this video
The idea that American spelling and pronunciation have a better heritage than British English is a compelling one, especially as the idea that Southern and Appalachian accents are closer to those of the Founding Fathers and Shakespearean English is a nice balance to the perception that these accents sound unintelligent and uneducated, but it's simply not true that one dialect has diverged more than another - both have diverged and in many cases substantially. One of the common reasons given is that British accents like RP (there's a lot to criticise about RP but that's another topic), Cockney (featured elsewhere on the thread and the internet in general, oi m8 you got a loicence for that?), and general loss of rhoticity in BrE (and some AmE) accents that are most represented in American media have diverged substantially, but to me the examples of Shakespearean English in classic pronunciation sound closer to the West Country accents than they do any American accent. Note that there could be some bias here as the speakers are British, but you get features like H-dropping which simply don't exist in AmE. It also wouldn't be fair to say any modern accent sounds even remotely close to this. Shakespearean English: this video [LINK] Some good reddit threads on the matter: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Another weird one is spelling, given that etymology and spelling is pretty interesting in general, at least up until the advent of the printing press. Both BrE and AmE have made some questionable
Never. Latin is still spoken daily by over half a billion people. Spanish and Italian are less distinct from "Latin" than English is from its Anglo-Saxon roots. Either one could be named "Latin" if we so chose; it's only the accidents of history that we didn't happen to. There is a direct line from the Latin spoken in Imperial Rome to the language spoken in Rome today. They never stopped speaking it. It just suffered the same drift that makes it hard for you to understand natively spoken Shakespeare without training. this video Italian could easily claim to be Latin if it wanted to. So could Spanish; it was a Roman colony and in many ways more closely resembles Roman Latin than modern Italian does.
But how was it pronounced at the time Shakespeare actually wrote Macbeth? If you listen to a performance of Shakespeare that replicates the original pronunciation, it's wildly different. I'd wager the "thuh" pronunciation is a modern simplification and not something Shakespeare accounted for. [LINK] this video (though, having watched the second video, the actor clearly uses "thuh" and considers it Original Pronouniation, so perhaps I'm mistaken)
Hm. I don't really enjoy reading plays. Watching live performances (or films) I do enjoy. And he certainly had an impact on the English language as demonstrated by Kae (née Kate) Tempest: "My Shakespeare": [LINK] Ed: see also the "original pronunciation" movement - eg: this video Although if you've studied him at college level, hopefully you already know that Shakespeare can rhyme - despite modern pronunciation.