Interesting you make that comparison, because it reminds me of something I read a few years ago. Somebody was doing the whole “rap music isn’t real music” routine when the person they were talking to quietly pointed out that Shakespeare – as we know it today – is rarely recited properly, and if you wanted to hear it done right, a good rapper would be one of the few people who could. Because Shakespeare is all about dropping rhymes to a beat and the themes of Shakespeare’s plays are a lot closer to a lot of rap songs than anything else we’ve got going.
The artsy-fartsy snob had no comeback. People always forget that Titus Andronicus was more Game of Thrones than high, sophisticated art for only the few, privileged. Right down to the blood and body-count.
When I was in first-year university, I saw a stand up comedian (who was also a sociology prof) rap Romeo and Juliet after talking about how they were both in iambic pentameter, except updating the words to make them more “rap”, hilariously (maybe that was just because of her wind up before the punchline).
Yeah. That was also big in my various speech/oral interpretations of literature classes. I was criticized for making Poe too rhythmic. Uh, that’s kind of the way his poetry is written.
I think each of those philosophies misses an important point about Shakespeare.
Treating it as rap (or otherwise over-emphasizing the iambs) ignores that Shakespeare wrote plays, meant to be acted.
Demanding that someone abandon the meter ignores that those plays are also poetry.
My own preference for Shakespeare (I’m not making any claims that this is the “right way” to perform it) is a more natural delivery. Not “bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH”, but “bahBah bahBah bahBah bahBah bahBah.”
Speech in the English language almost naturally falls into an iambic pattern (I wrote this trying to keep to how people would speak naturally and, IMO, more-or-less succeeded, “e’er” notwithstanding). Neither overly stressing the metre nor abandoning it is necessary; a middle ground where it’s allowed to occur somewhat naturally (to grant the speech mellifluence) is ideal.
There’s also the point that, metre aside, Shakespeare uses a fair lot of enjambements and caesuras (and so does rap). Reading it line by line with a dead stop at the end of each line is not following the actual rhythm.
Some of the Original Pronunciation reminded me a tiny bit of the Cockney accent. I wonder if that was what he was referring to as “the one you don’t want to say”?
I love accents, even if I can’t always recognize the nuances of one dialect versus another. And I’m fascinated by the differences in actor’s voices when they shift their speech. If you hear Claudia Black talking in “American,” the tones and pitch are subtly different than when she’s using Received Pronunciation.
I live his and his dad’s work! It’s funny – even though both their accent and OP are different from my accent, I find the OP Shakespeare easier to understand. Definitely easier to spot the puns, as they note.
I didn’t think that sounded very American to me. It would be amusing to learn that not one person in the audience suggessted their own accent. It would fit into the mongrel nature of the Elizabethan London accent.
I’d heard the Robert Newton theory before. One cavil, though:
In the early 1950s Disney produced films of “Treasure Island” (1950) and “Blackbeard the Pirate”(1952), and the same actor was used to play Silver and Teach – Robert Newton.
Blackbeard, the Pirate was not a Disney film, although (according to the IMDb) it was almost directed by Robert Stevenson, who directed lots of films for Disney, including Blackbeard’s Ghost starring Peter Ustinov as the eponymous haint.
This has been your useless trivia (with bonus 10 cent vocabulary word) for the day.
I figured it reflected non-rhotic perceptions of strongly-rhotic accents. Not one accent, such as around Penzance, but anything from western Britain, Ireland, or the colonies. “Arrr” may be more local, but it accentuates the differences.