Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard (9 page)

But should a king speak like us? Or the God of Love? Or an Italian? Surely it wouldn’t sound right. Now we’re on the subject, how do you make kings, dukes and princes sound different from ‘us’, while using regular 17th-century London speech?

Putting on another accent wasn’t an option: nowadays, if we want to make someone sound like a king, we can put on a posh accent. But people didn’t start thinking of someone’s accent as being indicative of their intelligence or
their social status until relatively recently. The so-called ‘posh’ accent we know of today is only 200 years old. Not only did this accent simply not exist in Elizabethan times, the ideology of it being a thing you could use to segregate yourself from others didn’t exist either.

Original pronunciation

We have a fairly good idea of what Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded like. There have been two ‘original pronunciation’ experiments at the Globe in London, and the accent they used is thought to be about 80 per cent right.

How did they work it out? Well, if you go to see a Shakespeare play, you might notice that not all the rhymes actually rhyme when they should. This is because English pronunciation has changed since Elizabethan times, and one of the ways we can work out what the Elizabethan accent would have been like is by looking at the rhymes.

In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(Act 3, Scene 2, lines 118–19), Puck says:

Then will two at once woo one –

That must needs be sport alone.

In modern English pronunciation,
one
and
alone
don’t rhyme, so we know, because it’s supposed to be a rhyming couplet, that in Shakespeare’s time the pronunciation must have been different. In fact, we know that
one
would have sounded more like the modern English pronunciation of
own
(so rhyming with
alone
) – and so the couplet works.

Likewise, in the prologue of
Romeo and Juliet
(lines 9–12):

The fearful passage of their death-marked love

And the continuance of their parents’ rage

Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,

Is now the two hour’s traffic of our stage …

From the rhyme scheme, we can work out that
remove
would have been pronounced [ree-muv], rhyming with
love
[luv].

There are pronunciation dictionaries written at the time that can help give us an idea of how their speech sounded. Plus, the Elizabethans spelt their words more closely to how they spoke them.
Film
is spelt
philome
in
Romeo and Juliet
, so we know it was a two-syllable word, like the Irish pronunciation [fil-um].

Kings and peasants, lords and commoners all would have spoken like this, though their vocabulary and word ordering would have been quite different from each other, depending on the amount of education they’d received.

There’s a popular myth that the early colonists of America, having left England around Shakespeare’s time, continued to speak in Elizabethan English, but it’s most definitely a myth. While language does move slower when isolated from other languages, the Pilgrim Fathers had too much contact with other peoples and accents for any real trace of Elizabethan pronunciation to have survived into modern American speech.

Using a country accent to show that someone wasn’t very clever wouldn’t have made sense to Shakespeare’s audience. As we’ll see in the next Act, in
King Lear
the character of Kent disguises himself by shaving his head and dressing as
a commoner, and at one point goes
out of his dialect
(in this case,
dialect
means the type of words he uses and the way he uses them), but at no point does it say that he changes his
accent
to make himself appear more common.

So if you can’t make your characters show social status by getting your actors to use different accents, how
can
you do it?

Shakespeare did it with poetry, and we’ll deal with how in Act 4.

But before we get to that good stuff, some issues with the language need to be taken care of.

Act 3

Listen Carefully

Scene 1

The year 2001

H
ere’s a line from the King James Bible (1611):

The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak

(Matthew 26:41)

A friend of mine works on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Apparently, one of the biggest problems with successful AI is Natural Human Language Processing – in other words, getting a computer to tell the difference between, for example, the economic sense of the word
depression
and the psychological sense. A good way of testing an AI’s language processing ability is to get it to trans late a phrase from language A into language B, and back again. In one of my friend’s experiments, the computer took the line above from the Bible, translated it into Russian, then translated it back into English. It came out with:

The whisky is great, but the steak is terrible

It’s good, but it’s not great. I know next to nothing about AI, but I do know that translation is an incredibly difficult
thing for a computer to do – even an artificially intelligent one. It still made me chuckle. What would it do with Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be …’? I know it would be hard (though not impossible) to translate into Chinese Mandarin – a language that doesn’t have the verb ‘to be’ in its system.

Shall I live, or shall I kill myself?
just doesn’t cut it somehow. It misses the beauty of the poetry, and part of the beauty comes from the not knowing, the way the meaning slips and slides in and out of your reach.

K
LINGON
C
HANCELLOR
G
ORKON
: You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.

K
LINGON
: Tak Pah, Tak Beh …

A
LL
: (laughter)

from the 1991 film
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

That’s the problem with translation and adaptations. They try to make something easier to digest, but can end up taking the heart out of it. When it comes to Shakespeare, faced with the peculiar-looking poetry and the 400-yearold words, many people will turn to translated copies of the plays; indeed, adapting or translating Shakespeare into ‘modern’ English has become a bit of a fad in recent times.

There’s a growing number of people who feel that you can get rid of the Olde language, make it all fresh and modern, and it’ll stay the same.

It won’t, of course. Part of the problem with Shakespeare’s plays is, as we saw earlier, that the stories aren’t original. Nor are they flawless. Translate, update, adapt Shakespeare’s writing, and all you’re really left with is the story. Take the poetry away, and you very quickly realise you’re pulling at a piece of string that will make everything unravel.

Shakespeare didn’t seem to care so much about the actual stories he was telling as much as he did about the characters and the language he used to tell them. There are plot holes in
Hamlet
you can drive buses through. Shakespeare
is
the poetry and the language, pulled together by the man’s wit and his take on old stories, and all of it driving towards one end: creating some truly terrific drama.

More to the point, a lot of Shakespeare’s writing doesn’t actually need translating. The English language the Elizabethans spoke is known as Early Modern English (as opposed to the English spoken 200 years before – Middle English, which was the English of Chaucer). Just from a vocabulary point of view, Early Modern English isn’t really that different from Modern English, the language I’m using now; as I said in Act 1, only 5 per cent of all the words Shakespeare used are difficult enough to need a definition.

There are parts of Shakespeare that
do
need work to under stand them, but by completely rewriting the poetry, the beauty of what is being said is often lost. And Shakespeare without the poetry is The Beatles’ ‘Long and Winding Road’ covered by Cher. Sure, you
could
listen to it, I suppose, but the heart of the song lies with Paul’s delivery.

Most modern adaptations and translations don’t encourage us to learn how to understand the original texts. There are some that do. A new series of graphic novels published in November 2007 provides three versions of the same play: an original text, a plain (modern) text, and a ‘quick’ text. I’m not sure about the other two, but at least they’ve used the original text as well as the updated versions.

I have a
Manga
graphic novel adaptation of
Hamlet
which also uses the original text. Like the Baz Luhrmann film of
Romeo + Juliet
, the play is heavily edited down, but the fact that they’re using the original text at all, rather than updating it, is fabulous. The original words next to the crisp
Manga
drawings, just like the freshness of Luhrmann’s Mexican settings, makes the play sing.

But go to an edition of Shakespeare that does away with the original text and has been translated into Modern English, and you lose the impact of Shakespeare’s choice of language. But what does
that
mean exactly?

Language is made up of choices – choices of grammar,
of words, and of sound patterns. All of these things can come together with great effect, and Shakespeare was one of the first writers not only to realise this, but to openly acknowledge it. How do we know? He tells us through one of his characters.

Look at this extract, from
King Lear
. Kent is King Lear’s faithful servant who’s been banished from Lear’s service but returns disguised as a commoner, under the name of Caius, and convinces Lear to employ him again.

He is accused by Cornwall (Lear’s son-in-law, and one of the rulers of the land) of not being able to flatter, so Kent speaks as poetically as he can. Cornwall asks him why he’s suddenly started to speak so differently. Kent switches back to his ‘low’ speech, and replies that he changed his dialect because it seemed Cornwall didn’t like it:

K
ENT

Sir, ’tis my occupation to be plain.

I have seen better faces in my time

Than stands on any shoulder that I see

Before me at this instant.

C
ORNWALL

This is some fellow

Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect

A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb

Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he!

An honest mind and plain – he must speak truth!

And they will take it, so; if not, he’s plain.

These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness

Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends

Than twenty silly-ducking observants

That stretch their duties nicely.

K
ENT

Sir, in good faith, in sincere verity,

Under th’allowance of your great aspect

Whose influence like the wreath of radiant fire

On flickering Phoebus’ front—

C
ORNWALL

What mean’st by this?

K
ENT
To go out of my dialect which you discommend so much. I know, sir, I am no flatterer.

(Act 2, Scene 2, lines 90–108)

Kent’s use of high vocabulary, complicated words and sentence structure, and the classical allusion to Phoebus (the god of the sun) which Cornwall interrupts, is a risky thing for him to do: it could betray the fact that he’s in disguise, and isn’t really a commoner at all. Kent is punished for the clever way he uses his language – it seems to surprise and embarrass Cornwall, who wouldn’t expect a commoner to speak so articulately – but he proves his point well.

All this would be lost, in translation.

As for this idea of difficult Olde words …

Am I a coward …?

Boy, but Shakespeare knew how to insult someone. These days, we don’t seem to be nearly so creative with our insults as the Elizabethans were, for the most part sadly limiting our exchanges to a repetitive series of swear words. Shakespeare did it so much better, from the picturesque
cockscomb
(the crest on the top of a cock’s head =
fool, halfwit
) to the very commonly used
whoreson
(son of a whore =
bastard
), to this incredibly colourful outburst from Falstaff in
Henry IV Part 1
:

You starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish.

(neat =
ox
, stock-fish =
dried cod
, pizzle = I’ll leave to your imaginations)

Calling someone
base
(= dishonourable) would usually upset them a fair bit, but in
King Lear
, Kent really lets rip when he calls Oswald a
base football player
. Not a particularly great insult nowadays, but football in Elizabethan times was a real game of the gutter, described by a writer of the time as a game of ‘beastly fury and extreme violence’ (so not that much has changed) and to be ‘utterly abjected by all noblemen’. If you played football, there really wasn’t any lower you could sink. Kent outdoes himself, though, a little later in the play (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 13–22), and really lets rip at Oswald, with a tremendous diatribe: