THE Globe Theatre is to become the first professional theatre company in 400 years to stage an entire run of a Shakespeare play in the original pronunciation.

The actors will recite their lines with accents that are believed to be close to those that would have been heard on the Elizabethan stage — a mix of West Country, Scottish, Irish, American and Australian.

A six-week run of Troilus and Cressida, the Bard’s 1601 portrait of the fall of Troy, follows the success of brief experiments with Romeo and Juliet last year.

Musicians have long sought “authenticity” in performances of classical music, but there is now a growing interest in the roots of classical theatre. The Royal Shakespeare Company is exploring an original pronunciation project.

The play opens on August 24. In rehearsal, the actors found that the original pronunciation inspired them to be faster and more conversational.

Giles Block, the director, believes that it adds meaning and vitality to the text, although he was sceptical at first. “I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to make Shakespeare as clear as possible,” he said. “I thought the original pronunication would get in the way. Within 20 seconds I thought, ‘I can understand it’. Within a minute, I was realising how rich the language had become. The meter, puns, verse and rhymes work again.”

The Globe is being advised by one of the world’s foremost authorities on language, David Crystal, an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, and author of many books on English phonetics and Shakespeare. He spoke of “the many shafts of linguistic sunlight” that illuminate a Shakespeare play done in the original pronunication.

“The sounds of Elizabethan English add a freshness and vitality to the text,” he said. “The speech is much faster than today. The more the text relies on pronunciation for its effect, the more you’ll notice it. Midsummer Night’s Dream is entirely based on rhyme. When you listen to it, a fair number of the rhymes don’t work. With the original pronunciation, they will all work.”

He added: “There’s a great joke in Troilus and Cressida, but nobody ever gets it. It’s when Thersites harangues Achilles about Ajax in Act 2 — ‘for whomsoever he be, he is Ajax’. It isn’t noticed in modern pronunciation. Indeed, the line seems rather pointless. But in original pronunciation, it would have raised a huge laugh among the groundlings. In Shakespeare’s time the name was pronounced like ‘a jakes ’ . . . the word for a pisshouse.”

RHYMING TWANG

In Troilus and Cressida, Achilles kills Hector and says: “So Ilium fall thou; now Troy sink down, Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone.”
Here, “down” rhymes with “bone”

Troilus says to Ulysses, of Cressida:

“She was beloved, she loved, she is, and doth; But still sweet love is food for fortune’s tooth.”
Here, “tooth” rhymes with “doth” (“tuhth”), a pronunciation which, incidentally, is quite common in Wales

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