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Forsooth

David Crystal consults (more here) on original-pronunciation performances of Shakespeare. I've read somewhere else about rising interest in this notion, though I can't remember where, and it sounds in the New York Times article (first link) as if it hasn't been put into practice much since an attempt at Cambridge in 1953.

Speaking of 1953, the above-linked article from Early Modern Literary Studies gives a sense of the state of the art in that year, when Helge Kokeritz made the first systematic whack at an account of the phonetics of Shakespeare's dialect. Andrew Gurr reports that the results were unimpressive. Then again, he is of the opinion that the entire project is rather pointless and certainly doomed to failure, so you may want to take him with a grain of salt if you don't happen to agree with those conclusions.

The Times article mentions that Crystal has a small book forthcoming on his own work at the Globe. It's not showing up yet in online listings, but I believe it will be available from Cambridge University Press, eventually.

(language)


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