Shakespeare & language
I’m not a huge Shakespeare fan but this seems a splendid idea;
The real sound of Shakespeare
In August the Globe Theatre will stage an "original production" of Troilus and Cressida - with the actors performing the lines as close to the 16th century pronunciations as possible. By opening night, they will have rehearsed using phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will render the play just as its author intended. They say their accents are somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire - yet bizarrely, completely intelligible if you happen to come from North Carolina.
For example, the word "voice" is pronounced the same as "vice", "reason" as "raisin", "room" as "Rome", "one" as "own" - breathing new life into Shakespeare's rhyming and punning.
'Visceral' text
Giles Block, the play's director, believes the idea could catch on. He first tried the technique for three performances of Romeo and Juliet last year. "I think it helps the audiences enter more into the visceral nature of the text. It brings out the qualities of the text, the richness of sound which is closer to our emotions than the way we speak today," he says.
Whilst doing my Classics degree at Leeds I went to see Sophocles’ Οιδίπους Τύραννος (Oedipus Tyrannus) in the original Greek because it is a superb piece of work, my favourite play and part of one of the great trilogies in Classical literature. Although it doesn’t have the climactic power of Aeschylus’ Oresteia it is probably easier for a modern mind to follow as it comes across as far more human.
My Greek was not good enough to follow the play verbatim, but that wasn’t the point; my knowledge of the story was such that it was easy to follow, and I believe that a person with no Greek at all would have been able to get the gist. The event was not about the semantics of the individual words but about the whole. It was about listening to the fluidity of the language, the rhythm, the tones. It really did open up a new dimension. Maybe this is what I need to help me appreciate the bard?
The real sound of Shakespeare
In August the Globe Theatre will stage an "original production" of Troilus and Cressida - with the actors performing the lines as close to the 16th century pronunciations as possible. By opening night, they will have rehearsed using phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will render the play just as its author intended. They say their accents are somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire - yet bizarrely, completely intelligible if you happen to come from North Carolina.
For example, the word "voice" is pronounced the same as "vice", "reason" as "raisin", "room" as "Rome", "one" as "own" - breathing new life into Shakespeare's rhyming and punning.
'Visceral' text
Giles Block, the play's director, believes the idea could catch on. He first tried the technique for three performances of Romeo and Juliet last year. "I think it helps the audiences enter more into the visceral nature of the text. It brings out the qualities of the text, the richness of sound which is closer to our emotions than the way we speak today," he says.
Whilst doing my Classics degree at Leeds I went to see Sophocles’ Οιδίπους Τύραννος (Oedipus Tyrannus) in the original Greek because it is a superb piece of work, my favourite play and part of one of the great trilogies in Classical literature. Although it doesn’t have the climactic power of Aeschylus’ Oresteia it is probably easier for a modern mind to follow as it comes across as far more human.
My Greek was not good enough to follow the play verbatim, but that wasn’t the point; my knowledge of the story was such that it was easy to follow, and I believe that a person with no Greek at all would have been able to get the gist. The event was not about the semantics of the individual words but about the whole. It was about listening to the fluidity of the language, the rhythm, the tones. It really did open up a new dimension. Maybe this is what I need to help me appreciate the bard?
posted by phylos @ 13:07
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