First of all, I apologize for this post being a bit late. I was JUST ABOUT to upload it when the internet at my house cut out. This should not have been a surprise, given all the various technical difficulties in the US yesterday…
Anyways… today’s comic deals with one of the more interesting topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Original Pronunciation!
O.P. and the amazing ways in which it has been reconstructed, deserve a lot more space than six stick-figure comic panels, but hey, barbarically reducing things of great literary and scholarly merit to their bare bones is kind of my “thing”. At the very least, now you know that when Hamlet tries to rhyme “move” and “love”, it’s not actually him pretending to be mad.
The super-linguist in question is David Crystal, whose praises I repeatedly sung. In his O.P. endeavors he has been ably assisted by his son, Ben Crystal, an actor who, armed with Shakespeare’s O.P., can make the prologue of Romeo and Juliet sound sexier and more piratical than you could have ever imagined. If you don’t believe, just take a listen:
Seriously. That’s gorgeous. Here’s a longer video, featuring Papa Crystal and Ben at the Globe:
It’s easy to get snobbish about Shakespeare and to believe it works only when performed in the elegantly trained received pronunciation of an Ian McKellen or a Benedict Cumberbatch. But, as the Crystals point out, received pronunciation is even further away from Shakespeare’s original accent than American are from it.
Shakespeare can be performed in any accent. English, Welsh, Scottish, American, Canadian, Singaporean, I don’t care. His words still have immense power. However, when you hear it spoken in O.P., you really get a sense of what it must have been like for those first groundlings at the first Globe Theatre.
So, this old post has picked up about 700 new notes in the past couple days, which makes me happy because the world needs (a) more appreciation of OP, and (b) more appreciation of the Magnificent Linguistic Crystals. Here, let me add on a couple more links:
Passion in Practice – Theatre company founded by Ben Crystal, does awesome OP productions. Or at least I assume they’re awesome, but they haven’t come on tour to Michigan yet. What’s up with that, Ben?
Original Pronunciation – Site run by the Crystals, including tons of great resources for people who want to learn OP.
I swear I hadn’t planned this, but this is the perfect post for Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Ha! I had this queued to reblog on the seventeenth and have just rescheduled it for the nineteenth. I hope you’ll watch the videos. They are amazing. Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day!
I’ve watched this before, but I just watched it all again bc it’s so cool
