What did Shakespeare’s Eng­lish sound like to Shake­speare? To his audi­ence? And how can we know such a thing as the pho­net­ic char­ac­ter of the lan­guage spo­ken 400 years ago? These ques­tions and more are addressed in the video above, which pro­files a very pop­u­lar exper­i­ment at London’s Globe The­atre, the 1994 recon­struc­tion of Shakespeare’s the­atri­cal home. As lin­guist David Crys­tal explains, the theater’s pur­pose has always been to recap­ture as much as pos­si­ble the orig­i­nal look and feel of a Shake­speare­an production—costuming, music, move­ment, etc. But until recent­ly, the Globe felt that attempt­ing a play in the orig­i­nal pro­nun­ci­a­tion would alien­ate audi­ences. The oppo­site proved to be true, and peo­ple clam­ored for more. Above, Crys­tal and his son, actor Ben Crys­tal, demon­strate to us what cer­tain Shake­speare­an pas­sages would have sound­ed like to their first audi­ences, and in so doing draw out some sub­tle word­play that gets lost on mod­ern tongues.

Shakespeare’s Eng­lish is called by schol­ars Ear­ly Mod­ern Eng­lish (not, as many stu­dents say, “Old Eng­lish,” an entire­ly dif­fer­ent, and much old­er lan­guage). Crys­tal dates his Shake­speare­an ear­ly mod­ern to around 1600. (In his excel­lent text­book on the sub­ject, lin­guist Charles Bar­ber book­ends the peri­od rough­ly between 1500 and 1700.) David Crys­tal cites three impor­tant kinds of evi­dence that guide us toward recov­er­ing ear­ly modern’s orig­i­nal pro­nun­ci­a­tion (or “OP”).

1. Obser­va­tions made by peo­ple writ­ing on the lan­guage at the time, com­ment­ing on how words sound­ed, which words rhyme, etc. Shake­speare con­tem­po­rary Ben Jon­son tells us, for exam­ple, that speak­ers of Eng­lish in his time and place pro­nounced the “R” (a fea­ture known as “rhotic­i­ty”). Since, as Crys­tal points out, the lan­guage was evolv­ing rapid­ly, and there was­n’t only one kind of OP, there is a great deal of con­tem­po­rary com­men­tary on this evo­lu­tion, which ear­ly mod­ern writ­ers like Jon­son had the chance to observe first­hand.

2. Spellings. Unlike today’s very frus­trat­ing ten­sion between spelling and pro­nun­ci­a­tion, Ear­ly Mod­ern Eng­lish tend­ed to be much more pho­net­ic and words were pro­nounced much more like they were spelled, or vice ver­sa (though spelling was very irreg­u­lar, a clue to the wide vari­ety of region­al accents).

3. Rhymes and puns which only work in OP. The Crys­tals demon­strate the impor­tant pun between “loins” and “lines” (as in genealog­i­cal lines) in Romeo and Juli­et, which is com­plete­ly lost in so-called “Received Pro­nun­ci­a­tion” (or “prop­er” British Eng­lish). Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s son­nets, the father and son team claim, have rhymes that only work in OP.

Not every­one agrees on what Shake­speare’s OP might have sound­ed like. Emi­nent Shake­speare direc­tor Trevor Nunn claims that it might have sound­ed more like Amer­i­can Eng­lish does today, sug­gest­ing that the lan­guage that migrat­ed across the pond retained more Eliz­a­bethan char­ac­ter­is­tics than the one that stayed home.

You can hear an exam­ple of this kind of OP in the record­ing from Romeo and Juli­et above. Shake­speare schol­ar John Bar­ton sug­gests that OP would have sound­ed more like mod­ern Irish, York­shire, and West Coun­try pro­nun­ci­a­tions, an accent that the Crys­tals seem to favor in their inter­pre­ta­tions of OP and is much more evi­dent in the read­ing from Mac­beth below (both audio exam­ples are from a CD curat­ed by Ben Crys­tal).

What­ev­er the con­jec­ture, schol­ars tend to use the same set of cri­te­ria David Crys­tal out­lines. I recall my own expe­ri­ence with Ear­ly Mod­ern Eng­lish pro­nun­ci­a­tion in an inten­sive grad­u­ate course on the his­to­ry of the Eng­lish lan­guage. Hear­ing a class of ama­teur lin­guists read famil­iar Shake­speare pas­sages in what we per­ceived as OP—using our phono­log­i­cal knowl­edge and David Crystal’s criteria—had exact­ly the effect Ben Crys­tal described in an NPR inter­view:

If there’s some­thing about this accent, rather than it being dif­fi­cult or more dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to under­stand … it has flecks of near­ly every region­al U.K. Eng­lish accent, and indeed Amer­i­can and in fact Aus­tralian, too. It’s a sound that makes peo­ple — it reminds peo­ple of the accent of their home — and so they tend to lis­ten more with their heart than their head.

In oth­er words, despite the strange­ness of the accent, the lan­guage can some­times feel more imme­di­ate, more uni­ver­sal, and more of the moment, even, than the some­times stilt­ed, pre­ten­tious ways of read­ing Shake­speare in the accent of a mod­ern Lon­don stage actor or BBC news anchor.

For more on this sub­ject, don’t miss this relat­ed post: Hear What Ham­let, Richard III & King Lear Sound­ed Like in Shakespeare’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

A Sur­vey of Shakespeare’s Plays (Free Course) 

Shakespeare’s Satir­i­cal Son­net 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness