3 ms·

Fascinating! I'm glad that they're breaking that RP grip on Shakespeare. It's certainly a valid way to do it, but Shakespeare himself wanted a diversity of acce

Fascinating! I'm glad that they're breaking that RP grip on Shakespeare. It's certainly a valid way to do it, but Shakespeare himself wanted a diversity of accents, especially for his lower-class characters. It's funny that you mention Mack. A few years ago I was directing a Maccers whose native accent was Pittsburgh. Not very different from the general American, but Mac has a line, "I have supped full with horrors". Which in his accent comes out as "full with whores". I wasn't gonna mention it, but the cast giggled, and I was afraid the audience might too. It took rather a lot of work to find the right pronunciation for one word, and I think I made a mistake even trying. The cast hears it every night but an audience would have blipped right past it.

eszed 2y ago
Heh. When I try the line out in OP I'm convinced that pun was intended. It's in response to the women's cries inside the castle, no? That Mac, at this point in the show (and consciously or not), associates all women with whores is a fascinating character note. Not that you were wrong to cover it up - if the word had distracted the audience right then it would have been unfortunate - but I like your story as an example of how being aware of OP can help open up the text. You're absolutely right about diversity of accents, and "OP" (in its time) was never at all only one thing. David Crystal - I hope I'm not doxxing myself other than to my friends to say I worked with his and Ben's company - was adamant about that. We were a crazy-diverse crew, with our own underlying patterns of speech - Standard American, all sorts of regional UK dialects, Indian English, and various second-language speakers - all of which brought welcome individual "flavours" to our OP palettes. (Then David got to go really nerdy with his suppositions about what 16th-century cod Welsh and cod French accents might have been, and overlaying those was a hoot!) It's only RP that enforces standardization - which is why all of us from elsewhere (more accustomed to hearing and performing Shakespeare in our own voices) sometimes had a hard time grokking the immense effect of OP on UK performers and audiences.

eszed 2y ago

Heh. When I try the line out in OP I'm convinced that pun was intended. It's in response to the women's cries inside the castle, no? That Mac, at this point in the show (and consciously or not), associates all women with whores is a fascinating character note. Not that you were wrong to cover it up - if the word had distracted the audience right then it would have been unfortunate - but I like your story as an example of how being aware of OP can help open up the text. You're absolutely right about diversity of accents, and "OP" (in its time) was never at all only one thing. David Crystal - I hope I'm not doxxing myself other than to my friends to say I worked with his and Ben's company - was adamant about that. We were a crazy-diverse crew, with our own underlying patterns of speech - Standard American, all sorts of regional UK dialects, Indian English, and various second-language speakers - all of which brought welcome individual "flavours" to our OP palettes. (Then David got to go really nerdy with his suppositions about what 16th-century cod Welsh and cod French accents might have been, and overlaying those was a hoot!) It's only RP that enforces standardization - which is why all of us from elsewhere (more accustomed to hearing and performing Shakespeare in our own voices) sometimes had a hard time grokking the immense effect of OP on UK performers and audiences.