Special Guest: Professor David Crystal – Original Pronunciation (OP)
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In this special episode, Professor David Crystal OBE, one of the world's leading linguists with over 100 books to his name and a global reputation as a writer and lecturer on Early Modern English, talks to Sebastian Michael about Original Pronunciation (OP) – the way William Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have pronounced English at the time and how this changes our understanding of Shakespeare's plays and the sonnets.
SEBASTIAN MICHAEL
Today we are going to continue, in a sense, the theme we embarked on with our last guest, Professor Abigail Rokison-Woodall, when we talked about Speaking Shakespeare, to have a look at, and also listen to some, Original Pronunciation. And for this, I have the enormous pleasure and very great privilege indeed to welcome Professor David Crystal OBE, who joins me from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, where he works as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. His biography reads like a journey through the English language, and so this is a very much abridged version. Professor Crystal read English at University College London, where he specialised in English language studies and did some research at the Survey of English Usage under Randolph Quirk. He then joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor and then at Reading. He published the first of over a hundred books in 1964, and became known chiefly for his research work in English language studies in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational, and clinical contexts, notably in the development of a range of linguistic profiling techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. He held a chair at the University of Reading for ten years, and is now Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor. His authored works are mainly in the field of language, but he is perhaps best known for his two encyclopaedias for Cambridge University Press, the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, and the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, specifically the Third Edition, which came out in 2018. Recent books include A Date with Language; Let's Talk: How English Conversation Works; and A Life Made of Words – The Poetry and Thought of John Bradburn. Co-authored works include Words on Words – A Dictionary of Language Quotations, compiled with his wife and business partner Hillary, which received the Wheatley Medal from what today is known as the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) to recognise and encourage excellence in indexing in 2001. Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English Language Tourist's Guide to Britain, also with Hillary; and Shakespeare's Words; The Shakespeare Miscellany; The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary; and Everyday Shakespeare – Lines for Life; all of which in collaboration with his son Ben Crystal. A new version of the glossary went live online in 2008, and the 3.0 version launched on the 23rd of April 2018 at shakespeareswords.com. Professor Crystal was Master of Original Pronunciation at Shakespeare's Globe during 2004/5 working with the companies on OP productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida, and since then he has advised on many OP productions around the world. He has written many books on English phonetics and phonology, clinical works, and works for schools, and his creative writing includes volumes of devotional poetry, biographies of the convent and of the Ucheldre Centre in Holyhead; a play, Living On, on the endangered language theme; a novella, The Encyclopaedia Codes; and he has edited the poetry of the British missionary in Zimbabwe, John Bradburn. He has also worked extensively as editor on several journals and books on linguistics, and he has done groundbreaking work on digital knowledge management. Professor Crystal has been a consultant, contributor, or presenter on several radio and television programmes and series for, among others, the BBC, InfoNation and Discovery Channel, and Open University Television. He is patron of the Association for Language Learning (ALL), president of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, the UK National Literacy Association, and the Johnson Society of London, and an honorary vice president of the Institute of Linguists and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. He is a past honorary president of the National Association for Professionals Concerned with Language Impaired Children, the International Association of Forensic Phonetics, and the Society of Indexers. He was Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare's Globe in 2003 to 2004, and honorary president of the Johnson Society for 2005-2006. He has also been a member of the board of the British Council and of the English Speaking Union, and he received an OBE, which is an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, for services to the English language in 1995, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy, FBA, in 2000. Thank you very much, David, for joining me here on Sonnetcast. DAVID CRYSTAL: Well, it's a delight, Sebastian. Thanks for the invitation. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: My great, great pleasure. So perhaps to start with, and bearing in mind that our listenership are people who live around the world – there really are listeners in over eighty countries who are interested in Shakespeare, of course, and particularly in the sonnets – but perhaps as an overview, what do we mean by Original Pronunciation or OP? And can you perhaps give us a couple of introductory examples so we get a feel for this? DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes. Well, let's call it OP, which has got two syllables instead of o-ri-gi-nal pro-nu-nci-a-tion, which has got heaven knows how many syllables. So OP, yes, it's an application of a branch of linguistics called historical phonology. Now phonology means the sound system of a language. And when you go back in time, of course, we all know that there are written texts going right back to Anglo-Saxon times. But the interesting question is how were they pronounced? And so OP is an attempt to reconstruct the pronunciation that would have been around in Old English in Anglo-Saxon times, in Middle English when Chaucer was around, for instance, in Shakespeare, of course, as we're talking today; and then later too, into the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, you know, pronunciation changes all the time. And so the interesting thing is, can we reconstruct it at an earlier period? And how do we do that? Well, the answer is yes you can. It's never going to be a hundred percent perfect. If only there were tape recorders and digital phones in olden times, that would have been wonderful. But no, we make the best guess we can. And these guesses are pretty accurate because research in this area has been going on for, oh, well over a hundred years now. The earliest attempts to reconstruct Shakespeare's pronunciation are back in the 1860s and 1870s. Well, of course, since then there's been a huge amount of research done into the whole area, and as a result, one can produce with reasonable confidence the sort of sound that it would have been. So to take an example from Shakespeare, if you open the play Romeo and Juliet, you get a prologue from a chorus, and in Modern English, it’s: Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil [blood] make civil hands unclean. In OP it would be: Two ‘ouse’olds, both aloyke in dignity In fairr Verona, where we lay our scene From ayncee-ent groodge brehk to new mutiny, Where civil [blood] make civil… I've forgotten that fourth line. Anyway, the point is, that's the general feel of it: ‘Two ‘ouse’olds’ – notice the dropping of the ‘h’ in ‘households’. ‘’ouseholds both aloyke’, ‘loyke’, not ‘alike’. ‘In fairr Verona’, ‘fairr’, not ‘fair’. ‘Where we lay our scene’. ‘Ayncee-ent’ for ‘ancient’: ‘ayncee-ent’, ‘groodge’ for ‘grudge’. And so on, you know. ‘Brehk’ for ‘break’. ‘Brehk’. And when people hear OP for the first time, native speakers of English, they generally recognise echoes of some of the accents that are in there. I mean, today, for instance, if you hear somebody in Britain saying, ‘brehk’ for ‘break’, ‘brehk', you think, oh, he's from Yorkshire or somewhere like that, you know. And people will identify the accents, echoes of these accents in Shakespeare's time that are still with us today; but not everything. Nobody today says ‘ayncee-ent’ for ‘ancient’. So some of the pronunciations are definitely restricted to Shakespeare's day and haven't travelled into modern times. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: It's totally fascinating. And also, of course, the echo of the regional accents, the regional dialects almost, are very strongly there. Now, you mentioned that we have no recordings, which seems like stating the obvious, but I do this every now and then during my podcast, remind ourselves just how different the era was, that there was no digital technology. There was not even electricity. So could you perhaps elaborate a bit on the methods that are available to us to reconstruct or determine the accent or pronunciation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? And you said they are very reliable. You said that with one hundred years or so, or more, of research into this, we can be quite certain that we know how this sounded. Could you perhaps also elaborate a bit on why we can be so certain about this? DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes. This is the question that comes into everybody's minds when they hear OP for the first time. How do you know? And the answer is that there are different kinds of evidence that you rely on. The first kind of evidence is the most important one of all: the spellings of the words that were written down. Now, spelling today is no guide to pronunciation in English, but in olden times it was. People wrote down words and spelt them as they sounded, and that period of certainty lasted until well into the eighteenth century, really. And then since then, English spelling has become increasingly difficult, as everybody knows who's tried to learn it as a native or a foreign language. But in Shakespeare's time and earlier, you could rely a great deal on the spellings of words as a guide to the pronunciation that was there. So that's one kind of evidence. The second kind of evidence is perhaps the most obvious one, especially from a sonnets point of view: anybody who reads the sonnets in Modern English immediately comes up against the problem that there are certain couplets that don't rhyme. And we know that rhyming was so important in Shakespeare's day: people were very scrupulous at getting their audio rhymes right, and there's lots of evidence for that. And so when you come across a pair of lines in Shakespeare that don't rhyme, you have to think, hey, hang on a minute, Shakespeare, were you sleeping here? Did you not get that right? Or rather more likely, that the pronunciation has changed. So, to take an example, the end of Sonnet 116, “If this be error [and] upon me proved, | I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” – What? I mean, come on, it has to be one or the other. It has to be ‘proved’ or ‘looved’ or ‘prohved’ or ‘loved’. And so the rhymes are very important. And there are lots and lots of cases like that in the sonnets. Now: question now of course, is, well, which one was it then, was it ‘proved’ and ‘looved’, or was it ‘prohved’ and ‘loved’? And now you go to a third kind of evidence. You go to the people who wrote about pronunciation in Shakespeare's day, and there are many of them. You see, the sixteenth century was a century where people were interested in spelling reform. They already noticed that English spelling was getting into a bit of a mess, and a number of people were trying to sort it out. And what they did, if you're trying to do spelling reform, is you have to work out the relationship between sounds and spellings, and so they talk about the pronunciation as well. And so there are some famous cases where they give a clear clue as to how a particular sound was pronounced. And the example I've just given you from Sonnet 116 is an example of that. If you go to Ben Jonson's English Grammar – now, we all know who Ben Jonson was, he was a playwright known for his plays, but what people don't know so much is he wrote an English Grammar, and at the beginning of that Grammar, he actually goes through every vowel and every consonant in the language and tells us how it is pronounced. And listen, now, this is what he says about the letter O when it's short. He says: “The O is sounded in the short time, more flat,” and like a U, really, he says, short time, more flat. And here's the example, listen: “cousin, dozen, mother, brother, love, prove.” Thank you Ben. That's exactly what I wanted to know: ‘love’ and ‘prove’ rhymed. And so, “If this be error and upon me prohved | I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” And the same thing now can be applied to all the other examples in the canon. And so that's the third kind of evidence, the evidence of people who actually wrote about the language at the time. And then the fourth kind of evidence – not quite so important, but it does help every now and again – is that there are lots of puns in Shakespeare, as we know: he's always playing with words and trying to tease out as many associations phonetically between words as you can get. And there are very often puns in Shakespeare which don't work at all in Modern English, but must have worked at the time, otherwise nobody would have got the joke. And, oh, famous examples of that. My favourite one is in As You Like It, where Jaques, the melancholy character, has been listening to Touchstone down by the river, and he comes back and tells the Duke what he heard; and it was so funny, he says, he met a Fool in the forest, and this Fool sits him down and reflects on life and everything. And the Fool says, in Modern English: “[Tis but] an hour ago [since] it was nine, And after one hour more ’twill be eleven. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot, And thereby hangs a tale.” Well, when I heard the Fool, Jaques says, he laughed for an hour on his watch. After hearing that, he laughed for an hour. But hang on a minute: what's funny about that? An hour ago, and it was nine. And after another hour it'll be eleven. And so, from hour to hour, we… – you know, what is funny about that? And the answer is: nothing in Modern English. But once you know that the word ‘hour’ was pronounced ‘orr’ and that the word for a ‘whore’, a prostitute, was also pronounced ‘orr’, then: An orr ago and it was nine, And after an orr more it will be eleven. And so from orr to orr we ripe and ripe, And then from orr to orr we rot and rot, And thereby 'angs a tale. And it's a dirty joke, in a sense, really. And of course, people will laugh at that, but in Modern English it doesn't work at all. And so, you know, there are lots of examples where puns can give us another clue about pronunciation. So four kinds of evidence then, Sebastian, there's the spellings, the rhymes, the writings of the time, and the puns. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I knew about the spellings, and I very much knew about the rhymes, because, as you suggest, I come across the rhymes… – every second or third sonnet, there will be a rhyme that doesn't work in Modern English. But I did not know that we have such clear evidence, like the one you mention from Ben Jonson, that he actually wrote lists of words that are pronounced in the same way, which is proof positive, I mean, we can't really argue with that, can we? DAVID CRYSTAL: There is a rider here, and that is: many people wrote about this sort of thing: they don't always agree. They come from different parts of the country. And so, you know, they're basically saying, you know, down here in Cornwall, we say it like this. And so you have to make a judgment also about the regional background of the writers. Johnson being London, and so on is pretty certain, I think. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Which perfectly leads on to the next question that I actually wanted to ask you about, but I need to detour via the bawdiness of Shakespeare and his gags and his puns, because as I go through the sonnets, I come across instances every so often where I believe he's layering meaning upon meaning, and he's being saucier or bawdier or more suggestive than first meets the eye. The last one I've discussed in this series is such a case where at first glance it sounds like a very lovely, almost slightly, almost indeed slightly sugary poem. And then you start to listen and you think, why would he be using language that could be read as being quite suggestive? So I'm very intrigued by this as well. But let's get on to the regional accents and the regional dialects. How then does OP deal with these regional variants? DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes. Now we're talking about accents. We're not talking about dialects. You mentioned both those earlier on: the difference is accents are to do with pronunciation, dialects are to do with grammar and vocabulary. And we're not talking about that today. So yes. Now the first point to realise: remember I said at the very beginning that OP was phonology based. That is a sound system, a sound system. Now, to illustrate that point, you and I, Sebastian, are talking now in Modern English, but our accents are different. Slightly different. But we understand each other. Why do we understand each other? Because we're using the same basic system. So that system of Modern English, which all your listeners will have in some shape or form, and yet no two of those listeners are going to be exactly the same in the accent that they have. So it was exactly the same in Shakespeare's day. What OP does is it reconstructs the sound system, and that allows people in Shakespeare's day, like today, to use those sounds in all sorts of various ways. So, you know, I mentioned the example of ‘hour’ being pronounced ‘orr’. Well, some people might have said ‘orr’, some might have said ‘orr-r’ with a ‘r’ at the end. Some people might have said, ‘owr’ with a little glide in the middle, there could have been all sorts of variations. We will never know the exact accent that Shakespeare himself used, for instance: we can make a guess, some sort of mixture of Warwickshire and London, probably, but we'll never know. But we don't need to know those subtle differences of accent in order to solve the problem of the rhymes in the sonnets that we mentioned earlier on. It doesn't matter which accent you come from, you've got to say ‘love’ and ‘prove’ in some sort of similar way, otherwise it won't work. And so when I was working at Shakespeare's Globe, this was one of the first questions that the actors gave me. They said, do we lose our modern accent, now, if we're doing OP? To which the answer was, no, of course not: keep your modern accent. That's the beauty of it. Superimpose that modern accent onto the OP, which is what they did. So in the Romeo production in 2004, we had a Scottish Juliet, we had a Northern Ireland Peter, we had a Cockney nurse, and so on. And all these slight variations of accent lifted the OP off the page, as it were, and made it more real. And this must have been the same in Shakespeare's day, because we know who the actors were, who were at The Globe, and they came from all over the country. So there will already have been various accents at that time. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And do we think that Shakespeare wrote with these actors’ voices in mind? In other words, if he has a favourite for his lead role, that he will tune his writing to this actor's own accent. DAVID CRYSTAL: Well, I wouldn't be at all surprised, but this is moving away from my comfort zone now. I'm not a specialist in, you know, theatrical practices of the day, but it's the sort of thing that people do. My son Ben, who is very much into that world, tells me that one of the most important things is the way Shakespeare, Shakespeare's company, they’d been around together for, what, fifteen years or more? Twenty years. They knew each other intimately. Shakespeare knew his actors so well, he's bound to have had echoes of their voices in his head while he was writing the lines for individuals. But we don't know. And so I don't really have anything to say about that other than to think that it's very likely. SEBSTIAN MICHAEL: And what about class? Is that something we need to bear in mind on two levels, perhaps. On the one hand, would Shakespeare… – I mean, of course he would build a difference into how his nobility, how his aristocrats, how his royalty sounds to how his common people sound, but would he also – but again, maybe this is then again out of your field of expertise – would he play to the audiences? Would he adjust the level of his writing to whom the play is intended for, whether it's going to be performed at Court, most likely, or whether it's going to be for the masses in the pit. DAVID CRYSTAL: Well, the wonderful thing about Shakespeare, which is what I think is one of his most endearing characteristics, is his ability to represent all shades of life from, you know, the gutter commentaries of the pub, the tavern, to the highest level of interaction in courts. No other dramatist has that range, and the pronunciations, insofar as the spellings of the Folio and elsewhere give us indication, show that he had a very sharp ear for pronunciation variation. So in Henry V, for example, we have an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman, and a Welshman before the battle. And as you analyse the spellings that he gives to those lines, you see a very clear ear for Welsh accent, Scottish accent, and so on and so forth. And it's not just there, but you also get many examples where characters actually comment on the appropriateness or otherwise of the way they speak or the way somebody else speaks. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Quickly comments caustically on the French pronunciation of Doctor Caius or ‘Quis’, and says he makes fritters of the King's English, you know. And then when Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost tries to write a letter to his hoped-for girlfriend, and tries to rhyme it, and he says, I can't find a good rhyme for this word or that word, you know, I'm doing my best, but I'm no rhymer, he says; best rhyme I can find for ‘lady’, he says, is ‘baby’, you know. And so people were obviously very aware of the power of rhymes, the need to get them right. And if they're not right, then Berowne says, it's a poor rhyme. And so when we transfer all this kind of background to the sonnets, I suppose the basic question is what were the sonnets intended… – how were the sonnets intended to be read? Do you imagine the sonnets as being the chap standing outside his lady's house, Romeo and Juliet like, and sounding out a sonnet in the best and most perfect articulation that you could imagine, in order to impress her with his literacy and his dramatic skills and so on. Or do you imagine a sonnet as being a kind of nudge, nudge? Hey, hey, hey, Meg, listen to this. And is it a colloquial variation? And there are lines in the sonnets where you just don't know which way to go: “Yeah, take them all…” or “Yea, take them all,” you know. Which is it. ‘Yeah’ or ‘yea’? If you go colloquially it’s, 'Yeah, take them all…' If you go, as it were, in a formal way it’s, 'Yea, take them all...' And there are lots of cases like that where you have a colloquial versus a formal way. Now is this related to class? Well, yes and no. Anybody who is literate in Elizabethan times would have the option of the two variants. People who weren't literate, of course, would not. They wouldn't know how to spell, and remember only something like four percent – the figures are difficult to be accurate about, but something like four percent – of the people in Shakespeare's day were literate. And so the vast majority of people, the only way they'd encounter a sonnet would be auditorily. They wouldn't have read them. They would only have heard them, if at all. And so class is a very poor indicator, really, of how to approach the sonnets. You'd have to think more about rhetorical style, and which is the most appropriate style for giving a rendition of the sonnets on a particular occasion. And then when they were published, of course, then that would be a different scenario again: people would now have them there, available to read out loud, and that would in turn influence the pronunciation of what they saw. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: The 1609 Quarto Edition is completely inconsistent in its spellings, and what you mentioned earlier, that English is still used as a near-phonetic spelling, in other words, people just spell words how they think somebody might then pronounce them if they read this, but the same word is spelt many different ways, capitals are introduced and left out, italics are used. And so I think in an attempt at an answer to the question you posed generally earlier, I imagine that these sonnets cover such a vast range of emotions and themes and concerns that some of them may very well have been intended, directly or indirectly, as a way of serenading a lover or a loved one. Others, like Tired With All These for Restful Death, I Cry are purely a rant where you think, well, this is clearly not – many of them are clearly not love poems in that sense. But what fascinates me, again, in what you said earlier, in the context of what you said just a moment ago, is that you have a society that has extremely low literacy levels, but an extremely high level of being able to appreciate language. And if you think how many people in a city like London went to the theatre, how big this theatre was, The Globe and The Theatre, how big these auditoria are and how many people must be going to the theatre every week, many times, to be able to keep them going. So we have a very vivid, very rich and very sophisticated culture of language, it seems. DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes, it's an auditory culture for the most part. One went to hear a play, one didn't go to see a play. And that ability to listen. It's something that Ben has taught me greatly. Ben is interested in original practices and has put on plays, what he calls ‘quick raises’, in other words, you put on a play within two or three days. No rehearsal over six months, nothing like that. Which is what Shakespeare's company would have been like. And when you're doing a quick raise like that, you can only do it if your company is so well integrated and people know each other well, and they know how each other is going to react and all that sort of thing, it's only going to be successful if you can rely on that company to do what you want. And so Ben's ensemble, where he did OP productions of, oh, all sorts of plays, he did some in the Sam Wanamaker, he did Macbeth and Henry V. Now, here's the interesting point. In Henry V, I was involved not just as an advisor on OP, but he was actually looking for an older actor to come in and do a part. So, you know, he landed me in it. And I played Fluellen in Henry V, partly because I'm from Wales and I got the Welsh accent here, if I want to put it on; I'm not using it now for the most part, but it's there in the background. And here's the thing: all right, we all knew the play, of course, but the rehearsal started only a couple of days before the first live production, and all that was rehearsed were the difficult bits, like the battle scene and the, you know, any ensemble work. The individual lines were there only with cue scripts. Now a cue script: you see, how many copies of the play were available? You're in Shakespeare's company in 1600, and Shakespeare has written a play. How do you get to see it? I mean, it's only in his manuscript. Has somebody copied it out. Well, maybe once. But you're not going to copy it out twenty times for all your actors, especially if you're only in one scene in the middle or two or three scenes here and there. Why do you need to know the rest of the play? If you're doing Romeo and Juliet and you're playing Mercutio? You're going to be dead halfway through the play, so you don't need to know the rest of the play: you're dead. So what the practice was, was people were given what are called cue scripts. Now, a cue script is writing out your part only with the last two or three words of the previous speaker’s line to cue you in to the speech that you're going to have to say. So whatever those last two or three words were, they're written down. Then underneath there's your part, and then there's the next two or three words and then your part and so on. So you only have to learn your part. The thing is, you've not rehearsed it that way. You've been given your part two or three days ago. You learn it. And they were good at learning, those guys in those days, and still are, incidentally: Ben's actors can do this in two or three days. They can learn quite a long part in quite a short time. And so when I was playing Fluellen, I'd learnt my part, but I'd no idea how the people I was going to talk to were going to react to when I said the lines. So you come onto the stage and it's an electrical performance. It's not like when you've been rehearsing it for six months and you know exactly what your fellow actors are going to do, and you're getting a bit bored with it, really. So, you know, it's all going to happen. One of the biggest things I remember Greg Doran saying, one of the biggest things is to try and make your audience feel, this is the first time you've ever said those lines. And with this kind of quick raise performance, you feel that. I went up on stage at one point just after the Battle of Agincourt, and everybody's buzzing because they've won the battle, and Fluellen comes along and starts to regale Henry with this long speech about ‘your grandfather’. And he starts to tell Henry all about the history of England, you know. I was just expecting Henry to go, to be impressed by this. Not at all. When I started those lines, Ben's reaction was to be totally dismissive. 'Oh, come on, Fluellen', his face and his body said, ‘we don't want that’. You know, ‘forget it. I don't want to listen to this’. Well, I wasn't expecting that at all. And so I suddenly had to rethink the way in which I said those lines to try and retain the interest of the King, who didn't want to hear me. And that's the kind of the novelty, I had never anticipated that at all. And so when you're listening to a play in OP and even more the sonnets, because, you know, how you say that sonnet is going to affect very much the way in which your listener is going to react to it: you’re going to say it in a formal way? A flippant kind of way? And all the other ways you were mentioning earlier. Well, that's what gives original pronunciation its zing, really, and the general approach to original practices, it's zing. It gives you a freshness, a sense of novelty: never heard it said quite like that before. And the next time I hear it, it's going to be different again, probably. And so it opens up a kind of infinite number of possibilities of rhetorical expression. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, many, many years ago, when I was at drama school, we had a tutor there called Patrick Tuck… DAVID CRYSTAL: Patrick Tucker, who was Ben’s tutor. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Tucker, yes, exactly. DAVID CRYSTAL: You went to Drama Studio London, did you? SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Drama Studio London, yes. DAVID CRYSTAL: So did Ben go. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, and we, as an exercise there, did what he practised with his Original Shakespeare Company. And that's how we learned that when the line comes, ‘Ah, but here comes Mercutio!’ that's the cue for me to actually come on stage. And so we practiced this a bit, of course. Chaotic and wonderful. I mean, especially for comedy, the amount of inherent comedy in this immediacy was extraordinary. And one does wonder, do we lose something by rehearsing and psychologically analysing and studying… DAVID CRYSTAL: That’s fascinating. I must tell Ben that you have that background, because he is often referring to Patrick Tucker as one of the influences on his whole approach to things. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Maybe moving on a little bit – this fits wonderfully – in the context of the largest parts of Shakespeare's work, the plays, there are, of course, many priorities that need to be balanced that can at times be at odds with each other. So what's your personal view then, on this? How important is it that we make audiences aware that the way we pronounce Shakespeare today may not actually fully do him justice: we may lose humour, we may lose meaning, we may even lose important character information. But how do we balance this with the need for keeping Shakespeare, if you like, accessible, if that's the correct term, to younger generations who may actually find this language even when it's pronounced as we pronounce it today, quite challenging. DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes. Well, you use the word ‘aware’. I don't think that's the point. If an audience goes to an OP production and as they leave, they're saying to each other, ‘wasn't the OP wonderful?’ that production has failed. They should come away from a play just so enthused, as Ben sometimes says, like they've been through a marathon of experience here. And ‘oh, I did enjoy that play’. And ‘I got some of the jokes for the first time’ and ‘I got some of those effects for the first time without even knowing that it's original pronunciation. That's the point. OP is a tool in the directors’ and actors’ toolkit. It's not an end in itself. If people notice the OP, then well, something's gone wrong, really. Of course, at the very beginning of the play, they'll sense that something's different, and probably in the programme they'll have been told anyway. But our experience at The Globe was that after the first scene or two, the audience forgot about the OP, as it were, and just listened to the play. And then in the talkback sessions that we had after those performances, they would make comments about the bits, some bits of the play that they felt were fresher, felt had more impact, where they got a joke that wasn't there before, and so on and so forth. And I think so long as one bears in mind that the OP is a means to an end, not an end in itself, then I think that's really more than half the battle. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: So is it a case then perhaps, maybe, of not so much having contemporary pronunciation productions and OP productions? Is it a case of bringing them together as and how, for example, a director and a cast and how a production team see fit? And is it a case, maybe, of borrowing what we know about OP and fusing the two? DAVID CRYSTAL: Some people have done that. They've had a modern production with OP here and there in it. A famous example like that: I was advising Ralph Fiennes at one point on his Richard III production in London, and the whole production was in Modern English. But he felt that when the chips were down at the end and Richard had his back against the wall and his, you know, everything's gone except these last moments. At that point, they thought it'd be good to have him slip into OP and have him speak, as it were, in a more natural speech of the time, maybe with a bit of Yorkshire accent in it and so on and so forth, contrasting with earlier on. And there have been other examples where people have decided to use OP here and there in order to make a speech perhaps slightly clearer in certain respects, because it misses a pun or whatever, or to identify it with a particular character. It's not the case that if you do something in OP, suddenly Shakespeare's language will become clearer. It doesn't become less clear. One of the interesting things is that when we've done OP productions abroad, which has happened from time to time, actually, listeners who have English as a second language find the OP clearer than in Modern English for certain reasons. For instance, one of the big features of OP is that ‘r’ is pronounced after a vowel: ‘O for a muse of firre’, ‘sworrd of Marrs’, ‘In fairr Verrona’, and so on. The ‘r’ is there. Whether it's just a retroflex ‘r’ like ‘r’ like that, like the Americans do, or West Country people in Britain do, or whether it's a trilled ‘r’ – ‘fairrr’ and ‘Marrrs’ and so on – well, that's up to the individual. But there is always an ‘r’ there. Now, one of the big things that foreigners have to learn when they're learning English RP, Received Pronunciation, is you don't pronounce the ‘r’ after a vowel, and this causes great anxiety, you know: they want to say words like ‘car’ and ‘heart’, and they have to say ‘cah’ and ‘haht’ and leave the ‘r’ out. And so many foreigners, you know, throw up their hands at that point and say, why don't they pronounce the ‘r’? I'd rather learn American English because at least they do there. Now, the thing about OP is that it does pronounce the ‘r’ all the time, and this makes it a much more familiar kind of accent to them. And the same point applies when native speakers listen to OP. Everybody who goes to an OP production in the talkback afterwards says, you know, we speak like that where I come from, wherever they come from. So the people who are from Yorkshire hear words like ‘brehk’ instead of ‘break’ and say, oh, that's like us; people from the southwest of England hear, you know, ‘hearrt’ instead of ‘haht’ and say, oh, that's like us; people from Wales and some other places hear, you know 'Aw, for a muse of fire' not, 'Oh, for a muse of fire', and say, oh, that's like us. And so what happens is that the audience identifies with the language in a way that often is not the case when they only hear a production in RP. RP, Received Pronunciation, is spoken by about two percent of the population of England. Not in Wales, not in Scotland, not in Ireland, and not in most parts of England either. And so there is always… – I mean, RP is valuable because it allows a more universal level of intelligibility, which is why the BBC and so on uses it. Or used to use it. Not so much these days, but, you know, on the whole it's used, but it's distancing. RP speakers don't speak like me, and therefore I find, you know, I mean, Olivier is wonderful, Gielgud is wonderful. They're all wonderful actors, but they're in a different world from my world. And when OP comes along, then you feel more at home. And the people who say this most are the Americans. There have been several OP productions in America. The Americans fell in love with it. Why did they fall in love with it? The Baltimore Shakespeare Factory for a while did an OP production every year, and the reason is because Americans have been told, either explicitly or implicitly, ‘you can't do Shakespeare because you can't pronounce it right. You don't have Olivier's accent, you see, so how can you do Shakespeare?’ And they believed it, you know, and many American directors have told me this, you know, ‘we felt Shakespeare wasn't ours’. Along comes OP, which sounds more like American English than RP could ever be. And so they fall in love with it. And they, it makes them feel that they own Shakespeare more. And this is the word I like to use more than anything else, Sebastian: ‘ownership’. You need to own a Shakespeare play or a sonnet or whatever it is, and OP allows you to enter into that ownership relationship in a much clearer way than the tradition of RP, which, remember, is not an old tradition: RP only arrived in the early nineteenth century. It's only been around for a couple of hundred years, and it's a tradition that, of course, became the voice of the theatre and the voice of poetry, when I'm speaking poetry aloud, you know. But in actual fact, most people don't speak like that at all and appreciate it when they hear poetry spoken in a local accent, a regional accent, or in this case, in OP. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, it is somewhat a source of regret to me that I did not grow up in Manchester, where I was born. I grew up in Switzerland, and so my English is of course exactly the English that you refer to: I learned English as RP, and of course what it lacks is if you like, the colour of a region and the culture in which you grew up. And so while I have the advantage of being reasonably easy to understand for quite a wide range of people, I don't actually have my own regional accent because I never grew up in… – DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes, this is a distinction in language study between intelligibility and identity: RP guarantees a wide intelligibility, but you lose identity as a consequence. Identity has the opposite problem. Identity makes you feel at home and at one, so long as you know that accent. I have heard a couple of Shakespearean and indeed other productions who perform the play in a local accent. You know, a local Scottish accent or a local Welsh accent or something like that. And while obviously the clientele that is from that part of the world enjoys it, it can sometimes be a bit of a barrier. And that's one of the things about OP that it tends not to be a barrier, because it still shares a great deal of its sound system with Modern English in RP, or any other accent for that matter. Virtually all the short vowels, for instance – ‘ih’, ‘eh’, ‘ah’, ‘oh’ – they’re the same; they haven't changed at all in four hundred, five hundred, or even more, a thousand years. It's the long vowels, the ‘ees’ and the ‘ays’ and the ‘ows’ and the ‘ohs’, these are the ones that have changed, but they haven't changed too much in four hundred years. I take issue with people who say that Shakespeare's language is difficult. It isn't, except occasionally. If you go to our website, shakespearewords.com, and look at the vocabulary there, there are something like 900,000 or so words in Shakespeare. If you ask the question, how many of them are so different from Modern English that they pose a problem of understanding, the answer is less than five percent. Five percent. Ninety-five percent of Shakespeare has no difficult words in it at all. And the evidence is quite clear; when, you know, I've often been in Stratford and London, where a group of teenagers are there from a school and they're listening to a play and they're getting it, you know, ninety-five percent of the time. Occasionally they're not, because the words are indeed a bit difficult. And yet they've been led to believe that Shakespeare's language is difficult. Now, where did they get that idea from? They get it from the textbooks that they've been given. They've been reading him on the page. They open a Shakespeare play and you get page one, Act One, Scene One, and you get four or five lines of text and then three quarters of a page of notes. Well, of course he's difficult then, if there are all these notes. But if you read Shakespeare on the page only, you are going to get that impression, because that's what the editors have done a jolly good job in doing, is exploring the cultural and literary and linguistic background to the text. But these plays were never intended to be read. They were intended to be heard. And if the first step is to go and hear a Shakespeare play and enjoy it for what it is, or hear a sonnet for that matter, we are talking about the whole canon here, and get the jokes and get the impact, get the emotion, get the tears, get the laughter, get everything out of the play. And then there were bits I didn't understand. But that's true of any language at any time. There are words we use all the time in Modern English that we don't understand, and nobody cares, so long as they're said in the right tone. I'll give you an example, Sebastian. If I say 'that feller is a blithering idiot’, you know what an idiot is, don't you? You could tell me. What does ‘blithering’ mean? People have no idea. And it doesn't matter. The point is, ‘blithering idiot’ means something like ‘a great quantity of idiot’ or something like that. You don't need to know the meaning of the word to get the effect. And so there are lots of cases in Shakespeare where you may not know the meaning of the word, but the effect is quite clear. When Falstaff and Henry, Prince Hal, haranguing each other with insults, half the insults we don't know about today because they're just too culturally specific to the time, and the notes help here, but you don't need to know in order to get the idea that they're insulting each other. And two good actors will get that effect across with no trouble at all. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Of course. Yes, I couldn't agree more. I despair at the thought that at schools, Shakespeare isn't done or taught because he's ‘too difficult’ or that ‘the kids won't get him’. The experience and the evidence very much proves otherwise. And exactly as you say, the moment you listen to him and the moment you get into the language and relish the language, rather than fend it off, so much makes sense that may not make immediate sense semantically, but you know what he's talking about. You know what he's doing with the language, and you even get the idea that he's punning, for example, that he's being rude or he's being mischievous, or he's being clever, even if you don't actually, wouldn't be able to write down precisely what it is that he's done. DAVID CRYSTAL: There are cases where, I mean, it is difficult. Some of the soliloquies, for instance, where nothing is happening other than the actor coming forward and telling the audience how he feels or she feels about whatever's going on. Then the poetry can indeed be something to… – is a challenge. I don't want to suggest that there aren't any challenges. There are lots of challenges, but these are a small proportion of the text as a whole, and therefore a small proportion of the theatrical experience. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes. And I wonder has it to do also a bit with the fact that we are so object-orientated and have such very short attention spans that we want to know what happens in the story, and that maybe that was a time when people were happier than we are to enjoy fireworks with language, to enjoy the cleverness of good language or of interesting language and of poetry itself. DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes, he was well aware that a story can get totally boring and turn people off. I mean, the best examples of this are in the history plays. I think if you take a play like Henry VI Part Two, which is all about the very early stages before the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, and it's a history play. So, all right, people are interested in history and they're interested in that period, because it wasn't so long ago. But a whole play, just history, history, history, history. No, no, no. So he brings in all sorts of little scenes here and there, a scene where the Duchess of Gloucester is engaging with wizards and conjurers and trying to raise spirits from the dead. A scene where an apprentice and his master fall out. And so they are going to have a fight about it. Jack Cade's rebellion, which comes along, you know: these are all valid historical points, but the point is, they lift the play from a level of historical meandering which some people might find a little dull, into something which gives a completely different take on the whole thing and makes the play much more interesting as a result. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: You mentioned earlier, doing OP in non-English speaking countries and in countries other than the UK where English is spoken as a first or second language. Can anything be said about a significance that OP has for translation? Or are we there getting into a territory that then really no longer is relevant because we have to make so many choices in any case; is there a significance OP has for foreign language versions of Shakespeare's texts? DAVID CRYSTAL: I don't think OP has very much to offer there. It is, as I say, one tool in the director's toolkit, and therefore it's up to the individual how much use they make of it. And in many cases, for example, there are alternatives. Two ways of saying a particular word. The moisture that comes out of your eyes: are they ‘teers’ or are they ‘tares’? And there is evidence for both. You know, some people at the time must have said ‘teers’ because the rhyme suggests it. And some must have said ‘tares’ because ‘tear’ rhymes with ‘there’. And so there were two pronunciations then, as there is now. You know, so many modern words have alternative pronunciations. Do you say ‘shedule’ or ‘skedule’? You say ‘controversy’ or ‘controversy’. And we're all happy about this – I mean, you know, some people get upset about it, but on the whole, you know – that Modern English exists despite these alternatives. It was the same in Shakespeare's day. And so there are these variations, and sometimes there's a choice between whether you go for a modern pronunciation or an older one. I remember Tim Carroll, who was the director of Romeo and Juliet in 2004 at Shakespeare's Globe. Whenever I would present him with an alternative like this, I’d say, ‘Tim, look, this line can be said with this word being in a modern way, or this word being said in an older way: you have a choice here’. He would say, ‘David, I'm going for the older way every time’. And I say, ‘why?’ He says, ‘because people are coming to The Globe. They're paying to see and listen to an OP production. We've got to give them their money's worth’, he said. And I see the point, you know, if you're expecting something to be in an older accent, then let's hear the older accent as often as possible, even though linguistically it could have gone either way. Well, when people listen to OP in a second language context, the same issue applies. I remember here a case in point. Ben and I were in the Czech Republic at a film festival, and they asked us to do a midnight sonnets presentation, and the way Ben organised it was like this: we chose a sonnet, and we were going to do it in Modern English and in OP, and we invited six Czech poets to translate that sonnet into Czech and gave them no guidance other than just, translate it! And what we got, of course, was six very different versions. So one sonneteer would try to represent the rhymes in Czech, another sonneteer wouldn't be so bothered about the rhymes, said he wanted to represent the meter. Another one went in another direction, and so on. One went for an older pronunciation, bit like OP, except they didn't know anything about early Czech OP, but you know, they were guessing. And so we got six different versions, and the audience sort of listened to all of them, and they couldn't choose which was the best. Not that they were being asked, really, but, you know, they enjoyed all the variations that were there. And this is what I think, that you can enjoy a play or a sonnet in two different ways, in Modern English and in OP, and you'll enjoy both for different reasons: they give you a different experience, a different sense. Sometimes the OP will help, sometimes the Modern English will help. The point is, I don't find this as an ‘either/or/. It's a ‘both and’. You know, the two versions are there now. Now that we have OP available, use it, exploit it, dive into it, enjoy it. If you don't like it, leave it. Go back to Modern English. If you do like it, then try it out. And here's the interesting thing, Sebastian: it hasn't yet been tried out on the entire canon. As far as I know, only about, oh, I'm not sure, fifteen or so plays have been done in OP out of the thirty odd that are there, and every time we've done a play in OP, we've learnt something new about something or other in the play. And not just we as linguists or actors and theatre people. The literary critics have as well. I mean, I've got one good example of this in my head, suddenly, when we did Romeo, the opening lines that I keep forgetting, but in the middle: From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life. And in OP: From forth the fatal loiens of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life. 'Loiens'. ‘Loins’ was pronounced ‘loiens’. So is the word ‘lines’ pronounced ‘loiens’. So there is a pun here: from forth the fatal ‘loins’, meaning sexual loins, as it were; from forth the fatal lines meaning ancestral lines of origin. Suddenly there's a pun which is not possible in Modern English, because ‘loins’ is ‘loins’. It could never be ‘lines’, but in OP the two words are identical. Now, when this point came up, it impressed not just the theatre people, but it impressed the literary critics as well. And when René Weis – that’s W e i s – René Weis did his new edition of Romeo and Juliet for Arden a decade or so ago, he was really interested in OP. I actually recorded the whole of the play in OP for him, and he was so impressed by this ‘loins/lines’ thing, because it had never been noticed in the literary critical literature before. And that's the thing, every time a new play comes along and people say, I'm going to do it in OP, they often ask me to make an audio recording or a transcript or something like that, or they used to. And I'm always finding new things turning up. That's the beauty of it. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: It really is. And what a lovely example of the ways, the many ways, in which the works of Shakespeare continue to be a treasure trove, indeed. Now, on this podcast, we are focusing, of course, on the sonnets, which are not primarily composed for performance but which do form part of an aural or auditory, did you call it, poetic culture, and when I was talking to Professor Rokison-Woodall recently about Speaking Shakespeare generally, we touched a bit on the difficulty of rhymes that no longer rhyme and how, as a result, some meaning and especially humour can be simply lost. And the sonnets are not especially humorous, but they do often pack multiple layers of meanings on top of each other. So from your perspective, thinking about the sonnets maybe specifically, what should the contemporary reader of the sonnets do? Should we accept that these lines simply no longer rhyme? Or should we honour the rhyme, even if to us it sounds really perhaps quite odd and unusual, even a bit alienating. Do you have an opinion on this? DAVID CRYSTAL: Well, you have no alternative, of course, if you don't know OP, you just got to say them as as they are and accept the anomaly and think, oh well, maybe they were eye rhymes, for instance, visual rhymes, and use that as an excuse. And people do often say that, but eye rhymes were simply not around in Shakespeare's day. For there to be an eye rhyme, you have to have a standardised spelling system. And spelling was not standardised in Shakespeare's day. You've already mentioned the fact that in the sonnets there are all sorts of spelling variations as you go through, and so you can't rely on spelling as a guide to anything, really. It just gives you a hint as to what the sounds are. Certainly can't use the eye rhyme argument, that comes much later. Eye rhymes become very important once spelling has settled down. Where we're talking seventeenth, eighteenth century and after. But no, there's no discussion of eye rhymes in the literature of the time. And so you have no alternative: you’ve just got to say the sonnet, accept the fact that it's ‘loved’ and ‘proved’. And there we are. And go on to the next one. You know, that's that's really all you can do. And then worry about the reasons. So many people have said, but they must have rhymed. How did they rhyme? And that's one of the big entrances into OP. Even if you don't do anything else in OP, then at the very least have footnotes or auditory notes or whatever they are, in these problematic cases where two words don't rhyme. And in the sonnets they have to rhyme. That was the whole point in those days. Rhyming was so important. And just give them a little note and say it was ‘prohved’ and ‘loved’. You don't need to know about the rest of it. This is a good example where you don't need to do the rest of the poem in OP. Just use it for the rhymes at the end and get rid of that difficulty. And I know a lot of people have done it that way. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: In the wider study of Early Modern English literature, what is your view on how OP – I mean, we've touched on this maybe somewhat already, I get a sense, I think – what is your view on how OP should be integrated and considered in our approach to these texts. Is this a highly specialised niche interest that comes into play at the advanced level, or should OP really be part and parcel of learning about Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the beginning? So even from school age onwards. And if so, how can this be achieved? DAVID CRYSTAL: Oh, I, my view, and I know that Ben's view as well is the earlier the better. And indeed we have experience of introducing OP to youngsters, teenagers, and they love it, because it gives them that sense of ownership. It relates to their regional background and so on for the most part, and the RP schools as well, you know, the students who speak RP, nonetheless, they appreciate the point that we've just made about rhymes working and so on and so forth. So I would want this to be part of a broader scheme of things, which I know many teachers are already doing. They're giving the kids a sense of Early Modern English, not Shakespeare's English. Early Modern English, how the language was used at the time. The Shakespeare Institute produces little booklets every year called Will’s Word Warriors, which Ben and I have contributed to. And there are other things that they do. And the whole point is to get the students, get readers, get listeners, get the kids a sense of how it was at the time. I mean, it's so easy to do. How would people at the time say ‘good morning’? You wouldn't say ‘good morning’, say ‘good morrow’. ‘Morning’ in that sense didn't come until much later. Oh, really? Yeah. Once, you know, you know: people say ‘verily’ and ‘forsooth’ and all of this. The distinction between ‘thou’ and ‘you’ so important in the plays and in the sonnets, too. Why was there that distinction? And once you know it, you know it, and the earlier you know it, the better. And so I would see OP as just one of the features of Early Modern English, along with vocabulary, along with grammar, like in ‘thou’ and ‘you’ and so on. Not in a very detailed way, but just in a broadly kind of perspective way. Just as you would never teach little kiddies all about grammar in one year, you know, you'd spread it over a long period of time. You don't teach them all vocabulary in one year. Vocabulary is learned over a long period of time. But it's the same with Early Modern English. If you're having a Shakespeare class, whether it's first language or second language, bring in that little bit of extra information about Early Modern English, which will then be useful not just for the play you're studying at the moment, but for every play. And not just for Shakespeare, but for every dramatist of the period. So once you know that ‘thou’ is used in a certain way between certain types of people, and ‘you’ is used in a certain way between different types of people, once you know that, then you know it for all time. And even though you've just been studying Romeo and Juliet, you know that the other thirty odd plays are going to have the same sort of thing, and also for Ben Johnson and all the others. They're all going to use the same distinction. You suddenly realise that you've got an insight into the time that no other method can give you, really. If you've dropped into it at the deep end as a late teenager for an exam. Oh, I've got to learn it all at once this year. No, you've been picking it up bit by bit by bit over the years. It's so much better in my view. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: I notice this almost every day: it is a code and you realise that there are patterns and there are ways of expression. There are phrases that keep coming up that are being toyed with. I am learning the sonnets by heart and it becomes easier, and even the most difficult – even a sonnet that you look at on the page and you think, how am I ever going to remember this? – it goes in, and because it's rhymed and because it's verse and because it has a meter, it then stays, and it's really quite remarkable. Without wishing to put you on the spot, out of curiosity, do you have a favourite sonnet that you could or would want to read or even recite in OP? DAVID CRYSTAL: Well, as you have heard, my attempt to remember Shakespeare flutters every now and again. A function of age. I could read one in OP with no trouble at all. If you'd like to suggest one. What sonnet would you like me to say? SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Which one shall we go for? Maybe one of the really well-known ones. Maybe – why not – 116. You already mentioned it. And we know we have a rhyme in there that doesn't work. DAVID CRYSTAL: Let Me Not [to] the Marriage of True Minds… SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Exactly. Yes, and it's one of of these sonnets that people hear at weddings. So that would be a lovely one to hear. DAVID CRYSTAL: Oh yes. And interestingly, that's an example where one of the critical words in the first line did have alternative pronunciations, because ‘marriage’ could have been ’marriahge’ or ‘marridge’. Anyway, let me let me say it in one way and see what happens. Let me not… notice the short vowels are the same: ‘let’, ‘not’, no change there at all. Short vowels stay pretty constant over the period. Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove O no; it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken, It is the star to every wandering bark Whose worth's unknown. Although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Some very interesting ones there, aren't there? SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: That’s wonderful. DAVID CRYSTAL: Notice ‘time’s full’, not ‘time’s fool’, ‘fool’. It's another example: ‘fool’ could have a long vowel, could also have a short vowel. There's a lovely pun somewhere else in Shakespeare where somebody says, ‘you're full of full’, ‘you're full of fool’, ‘full of full’. With the two rhyming like that. ‘Wandering, wandering bark’. Yes. That's there. ‘Whose worth's unknown’. ‘Taken and shaken’. Very Yorkshire again. ‘Rosy lips’. ‘Oh, no’. There's those very strong ‘o’ vowels. And then throughout ‘love’/‘remover remove’. Yeah, it's a good one. That's right. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: And also, do you happen to know, or have you come across it, how the name – because he has a certain significance to Shakespeare and his poetry writing and the sonnets, how the name Henry Wriothesley would have been pronounced at the time? DAVID CRYSTAL: No. The problem with names is that they are unpredictable. It's the same today. I mean, how would you pronounce your name? Until I know it, I don't really know. It could be variants. And there are some famous cases, like, you know, Cholmondeley being pronounced ‘Chumley’ and things like that which have come down over the centuries. No, people and, place names and people names are very personal things. This is the way I pronounce my name and it's the way I expect you to. And if you don't know it, then you can make a blunder. Now, Henry whatever it was. 'Rottesley'. 'Ritseley'. 'Riseley'. It could be anything, really. And unless the spelling gives you a really clear indication, and I don't know that because I've never looked at it, then your guess is as good as anybody else's. You’d pronounce it in a modern way. How would you pronounce it in a modern way, Sebastian? SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Well, is the big question. We don't know. The name does not seem to be in use anymore, we don't seem to know a family that uses it. It's spelled W r i o t h e s l e y. So Wri-oth-esl-ley, if you had a language like Italian or Spanish, we would have to say ‘Riothesley’. So people generally speaking in conversations tend to say 'Ryesley'. But it could be 'Rosley', it could be 'Roseley', it could be… DAVID CRYSTAL: The ‘th’ could be dropped, ‘th’ could become a ’t’. The pronunciation of ‘apothecary’ is often spelt with a ’t’ instead of the ‘th’ in Shakespeare. So ‘apotecary’. So it could be 'Ritesly' as well, you see, that's another possibility. There are so many. The e-o distinction would probably have been a diphthong, 'rithe', in Modern English, or 'roith' in OP. So ‘Roites’ and then the ‘e’ at the end would almost certainly have been an ‘oy’, ‘Roitesloy’ or something like that, or ‘Ritesloy’. With ‘loy’ at the end, today ‘ly’, of course. And the evidence of that is that there are many cases in Shakespeare where the ‘y’ ending rhymes with words which clearly have a diphthong in them. A famous example is Oberon's speech “Flower of this purple dye | [Hit] with Cupid's archery…” has to be ‘Flour of this purple doye | [Hit] with Cupid's archeroy…’ has to be ‘archeroy’ to rhyme with ‘doye’. Otherwise it wouldn't rhyme at all. And all the way through that speech, this ‘oye’, ‘oye’, ‘oye’. And there are spellings in the period which clearly indicate that that final, what we say today as an ‘e’ as in ‘happy’ would be ‘happoy’ with ‘happoy’ with an ‘oy' at the end. So ‘Ritesloy’, ‘Roitsloy’, maybe ‘Rithsloy’, maybe voiced. Who knows. It's the same with Shakespeare. How did he pronounce his name? The spellings are various, there are over a dozen, nearly twenty spellings of, more than twenty spellings of Shakespeare's name, and some of them are simply ’S h a k s p e r’: ‘Shaksper’ it probably was. Or something like that. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: Yes, he rhymes ‘alchemy’ with ‘eye’. DAVID CRYSTAL: ‘Alchemoye’ with ‘oye’. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: So that's a very typical example. Now I have really only one more very open question for you, and a bonus question which I ask all my guests; and maybe the open question first, is there anything else that you think we should cover? If we're going to talk about OP on a podcast about Shakespeare and the sonnets, and/or is there anything else you would like to say about this really super-fascinating website you've got there, shakespearesords.com? DAVID CRYSTAL: Well, shakespearewords.com started at Ben's suggestion back in the early 2000s, when we realised that there were an awful lot of words in the standard glossaries of Shakespeare's English that simply were completely out of date. I mean, one of the standard ones was a glossary by Oxford Professor Onions, 1911, at a time when kids were taught Latin and everything in school and so on. And things have changed, and there are lots and lots of Shakespeare words that are not in that glossary. So we felt we needed a new glossary, so we went through the entire canon separately. We read every one, every play, every poem, took an age, underlined or highlit all the words in the plays and the poems which we felt have changed their meaning in modern times, or would pose a little bit of a difficulty to modern times, like the classical gods and goddesses, that sort of thing. And then compiled Shakespeare's Words as a book published by Penguin in 2002. And a fat book it was, it was, you know, 700-odd pages, one of the biggest books that Penguin had ever done at the time. But even so, that was only a fraction of everything. People… – we put in a word like ‘bootless’, which means ‘unsuccessful’, but we give three or four examples of where it turns up in the plays, because there's only space for two or three, four examples in any entry. And there are over twenty instances of ‘bootless’ in the plays and poems. So it very quickly dawned on us that we needed to have a website. And remember, this is early 2000s, websites are still rather unusual at the time, so it took us a few years to get a designer and all the things that you have to do, and put the first edition of shakespeareswords.com up in whenever it was 2008 or 9 or something like that. And that meant we could have all the words covered. So all: if you want to type ‘bootless’ into shakespeareswords.com, all 22 or whatever they are, examples will turn up in the plays. You can click on them, go straight to the play and so on. And similarly with the poems. And if you were interested in a word like ‘thou’, you can type in ‘thou’. And thanks to the wonders of speedy technology these days, in the click of a finger you'll see all 14,000 instances of ‘thou’. If that's what you want to do with your life, you can read down them all and look at them. And that's how it started. And then we realised that there were aspects of Shakespeare's vocabulary and grammar that we needed to add; questions that people would ask. How many lines does Romeo have? How many lines does Juliet have? Does Romeo have more lines than Juliet? Does Romeo use the word ‘love’ more often than Juliet, or is it the other way around? So we suddenly realised we needed to add on all kinds of dimensions to answer these sorts of questions. So we eventually added on a thesaurus, a page on word families, how the words sort of group together. And then, not so long ago, four years ago, we added an OP dimension to the glossary. So every word in the glossary is now given in a modern pronunciation and in an OP pronunciation as well. And we keep adding to it in that way. You know, each year somebody will ask a question about something or other. Last year somebody wrote in and said, ‘I'm a teacher, I want to teach Shakespeare to my class. I want to find a scene in the play which has just got four characters in it, because I've just got this group of four kids here’. Another one wrote in and said, ‘I want a scene in a play which has got eleven characters in it, because I've got a class of eleven. Can you tell me?’ Well, no, I couldn't. We can now, because we went through every scene and counted every character and named them. And now you can click on ‘casting’ and you get the scenes that have the most characters in, down to the scenes that have the least characters in, which is very helpful, apparently, for – it never occurred to me before – to teachers and others who are wanting to cast in that way, or for, that matter, theatre groups might want to do the same thing in rehearsal. And so we keep adding to it every year. And there are always questions that come up. But most people use Shakespeare's Words, I think, for the glossary because they're reading a play. They want to find out what a word means. It's difficult. They look in their textbook and it's not there. I mean, I've looked at all the textbooks that have been written on individual plays, the Arden, the Oxford, the Cambridge, and so on, when we were doing this, checked out their linguistics. And while they all do have many difficult words at the bottom in the notes, none of them has all of them. And so the beauty of Shakespeare's Words, in our view, is that it does give all of them. There's no exception. And that’s, when we look at how people are using the site, that’s what they're doing most of the time, seems to me. So yes, it's been a very successful site. And, you know, we're very pleased with the way it's gone, but it's not complete. I mean, you know, we'll keep adding something next year. Always add something on Shakespeare's birthday. Not quite sure what it'll be yet, but we'll add something new in response to the questions that we get. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: It's amazing. I have the book and I can vouch for this. It's a big fat book and quite large. If this were a video podcast, I would happily show it. But the website is great and it is that kind of thing where for all manner of reasons, you suddenly are interested in the hapax legomena, or you are interested in a word that you come across. I mean, ‘bootless’ features in Sonnet 29, of course. So it would be interesting, perhaps, to see in what plays does it appear. So it's an amazing thing, this resource you're building there. Maybe finally, then, to the bonus question: I'm always a bit hesitant about asking this because it feels, in a way, almost perhaps a bit like an imposition, but I ask it because it interests me what scholars and people who really know about Shakespeare have to say. And it is the question ‘who was Shakespeare?’ Is he the man from Stratford who we think he is, or is there something to the various other theories that go around about who he might be? Has he written his own works or have other people written his works? What is your opinion on the controversy, if one might call it that, or on the conspiracies, or on the theories that float around in the… DAVID CRYSTAL: Yes, and have floated around since the middle of the Victorian period. Nobody queried it before that, and my view is very clear: Shakespeare was Shakespeare. I think there's plenty of evidence of the time to indicate that there was such a person, that he was respected as a dramatist, and so on. Unlike many other dramatists of the time about whom we know very little. But with Shakespeare, we know more than most people give him credit for. Which of the, at the last count, 57 alternatives, or was it 47? I can't remember now, alternative suggestions for alternative people who wrote Shakespeare, ranging from the famous ones like Johnson and the Earl of Oxford and so on, to Queen Elizabeth herself: I don't credit any of those. The argument that Shakespeare, how could Shakespeare have known about the Court and everything? It has to be a nobleman. Well, he plays at court. You know, he was in there. He knew about it. The question these other guys have to answer is, how would the Earl of Oxford know about tavern life and everyday down-to-earth life? That's more to the point, really. But whether it's one or the other, at the end of the day, I don't care. I care because if I was Shakespeare, I would be very upset to think that my works were being given to anybody else. But as a modern thing, you know, the play is the thing. The fact that we have these plays is a hundred percent the issue. The fact that they are so wonderful in all their different ways, the fact that we can extract from them extracts that are still relevant to us today in all sorts of ways. Ben, in my book that came out last year called Everyday Shakespeare: Lines for Life, we went through the canon and pulled out lines that are not so well known and yet resonate today, so much. Lines like “better three hours too soon than a minute too late,” which anybody who's going to catch a train knows is relevant to them. Do you go to the train station three hours before, to make sure you catch it, or do you go at the last minute and hope to get it? There are lots of lines like this and we put them into Everyday Shakespeare: Lines for Life. Now, whether they are everyday Shakespeare or everyday somebody else, in a sense I don't care. It's a wonderful line and I like to use it, and so do lots of people. So I'm not bothered really. The play is the thing. The fact that we've got these plays is wonderful. If push comes to shove, I do believe there was somebody in Stratford who wrote these plays and that he had that gift of imagination and listening, which is so rare but happens from time to time, and that we don't need to go into all the conspiracy theories and all the rest of it. Now I've looked at them, I've been into, I think all of them. I have Ignatius Donnelly's book on my shelves here. I've studied it in a way that most people haven't. He proved quite conclusively that it wasn't Shakespeare, based on all sorts of codes that he found in there. But if you apply his codes to other dramatists, you find that they didn't write their works either. And so you can knock down these arguments if you take the academic trouble to go and do it. But life is too short, frankly. I've done it once or twice and realised that there's no point. These guys have spent their lives trying to prove the opposite. I've spent my life not bothering with that and trying to explore the plays as we have them to get the most out of them, to see their relevance to today and just to enjoy the experience. SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: What a brilliant note on which to end. Unless there's anything else you want to add. DAVID CRYSTAL: We’ve talked an awful lot, Sebastian, about all sorts of things. Thank you for giving me the time… SEBASTIAN MICHAEL: It’s been my absolute pleasure. I really, really appreciate your time and your knowledge and your insight. So thank you very much, Professor David Crystal. Just to remind you, the website we've been discussing that David and Ben Crystal have set up together and continue working on is called shakespeareswords.com, and I do recommend you go and have a look. |
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To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!