Last week I reported Nicolas Cage's comment that the American accent is not suited to Shakespeare - this week I found the perfect counter-argument.
I was pleased to find a story in The Telegraph over the weekend that blows Cage's theory out of the water. Trevor Nunn, possibly one of the most authoritive voices on Shakespeare in Performance as former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, said that he wants to direct an all-American Shakespeare production because he believes the accent to be "closer" to the Elizabethan dialect of Shakespeare's day.
Nunn said:
I very much want to do Shakespeare with American actors using their own accents because there is a different energy and a different use of language. Some people mock this idea, but it is almost certainly true that today's American accent is closer to the sounds that Shakespeare heard when he was writing.
Exactly how he knows this is beyond me - perhaps it just goes to show how subjective the entire "accent debate" is. As I argued before, a good performance comes from the actor's physical engagement with Shakespeare's language ... the accent is irrelevant.
Do you agree with Nunn's comment? Could the American accent really be closer to the speech patterns of Shakespeare's day? Vote in our poll and let your voice (regardless of accent) be heard.
Comments
My Shakespeare professor at UC Berkeley, Prof. Hugh Richmond, maintained the same thing — that our current American accent was actually closer to Shakespeare’s era pronunciation.
I was very privileged to study with him. We not only did the traditional survey course, we also had a course of Shakespeare and film (and you should see Hamlet by Kosintsev in Russian, screenplay/translation by Boris Pasternak – the most effective Hamlet I’ve ever seen). We also had a course on staging of Shakespeare throughout the centuries.
The bottom line is that Shakespeare’s work is written so well that it works with any accent, any sort of characteristic way of speaking (let’s say Mae West playing the part of Rosalind in “Love’s Labor’s Lost”) and in other languages. But the part about the American accent and Shakespeare’s English is academically sound.
I strongly agree with Janine. Shakespeare’s universality transcends accent, nationality, and even culture. Anyone who has read Harold Bloom learns this immediately!!!
Of course, Americans are perfectly capable of giving great performances in American accents. So what motivates Nicholas Cage to make such a claim?
Cage, who was born in Long Beach, California, my hometown, speaks a dialect that has sometimes been called “broad,” “General American” or “North Midland.” This North Midland dialect has spread in a long, expanding swath from a narrow band running from southern New Jersey through the center of Pennsylvania and through states north of the Ohio River and below the Great Lakes. It expands its geographical reach across the Midwest, widening steadily until its range extends along the entire Pacific Coast. Because of its coast-to-coast reach, this dialect does not allow easy identification of the speaker’s place of birth. As a result, it has become the least marked of all the dialects in the United States and seems geographically and socially neutral (meaning middle class). Although most Americans do not speak it, it has the impression of being “the” American accent. This neutrality should make it comfortable for the Shakespeare stage because it gives away little about the actor’s geographic origin. Much like the Received Pronunciation of England, North Midland tells us more about the speaker’s social class than their place of origin.
I wonder if this feature, its neutrality and middle class feel, is what bothers Cage. Americans who enjoy Shakespeare still find Shakespeare a bit exotic (and British) and therefore expect to hear an accent different from what they hear every day. So American actors will often affect a British “stage” accent to add an element that places the play in a different time and place. In other words, it is not the rhythm of American English that is the problem. American English is entirely suited to iambic pentameter and verse. We simply expect something a bit more foreign and exotic. Many Americans also find British accents, even the stigmatized ones, more proper. We see Shakespeare’s language as quite stylized and supposedly proper, so we expect a stylized, “proper” accent even if that accent is not Received Pronunciation.
What about Trevor Nunn’s claim? Is this North Midland American dialect closer to Shakespeare’s English than the Received Pronunciation spoken by much of the upper crust in Britain? Probably not. Both dialects have no doubt changed significantly since Shakespeare’s time. But the North Midland dialect had a huge contribution from Scot and Irish immigrants who made up as much as one-seventh of the colonists. Many early colonists who settled outside of New England came from the south and west of England and spoke dialects quite distinct from those in the London area. Also don’t forget the influence of two other groups—African Americans, who were among the early colonists, and millions of immigrants who arrived after the 1840s. Received Pronunciation developed from a regional dialect spoken in the London area before spreading around Britain as a “neutral” accent. Its geographical proximity to London suggests that it would be closer to the accents spoken on a London stage in 1600.
In the end, though, none of this matters. We have no recordings of anyone speaking English before the 1880s and precise, or “narrow,” phonetic transcription, was still several centuries ahead. We can only guess as to how anyone in the past actually sounded. Go back and listen to American actors in 1930s movies or a president from the early 20th century. Where have those accents gone? In the space of one lifetime, Katherine Hepburn’s accent has gone extinct. Good luck trying to find someone today who sounds quite like Teddy Roosevelt or Calvin Coolidge. (Then, for comparison, listen to Herbert Hoover, who was raised in Iowa, Oregon, and California. His accent seems quite contemporary).
The present day educated English accent may be far removed from the way Englishmen spoke during Shakespeare’s day but his plays will be far more enjoyable if the actors spoke like Brits and not with the horrible American twang.
Shakespeare isn’t for a closed roam of actors only, especially not based on background or accents. People all over the world play Shakespeare in different languages, so what should be wrong with American??
Nothing!!
I am pleased Janine remembers my lecture! Since I find myself cited in this debate as in favor of American Shakespeare, I might add to it that, as an English Midlander myself (like Shakespeare), I have never found the least difficulty with the American accent of my students here at Berkeley in fifty years of staging that many productions of Shakespeare, as Kent Richmond predicts. I strongly oppose attempts to stage Shakespeare in America with any dubious approximation to a modern British Accent. I do not even know what that might be, since such a style as BBC English was notoriously invented by the BBC with the dawn of radio broadcasting. I have found that both Canadian and Louisiana French is not bad French but slightly archaic in some ways that can still be heard in remoter parts of rural France. Similarly American English has preserved some of the regional character of the original immigrants. So I agree with John Alego that “present-day British is no closer to that earlier form than present-day American is. Indeed, in some ways present-day American is more conservative, that is, closer to the common original standard than is present-day British.” The issue was put even more forcibly in the PBS program of some twenty years ago, “The Story of English” with Robert MacNeil, who argued that the nearest surviving analog to Elizabethan English could still be found in the remoter island communities of North Carolina. Finally we do have some clues as to how Shakespeare may first have sounded because of the vaguely phonetic spelling of Shakespeare’s supposed hand-written contribution as “Hand D” to the script of “Sir Thomas More” (see the Riverside edition). The only change in my students’ speech that I sometimes advocated was that they speak a lot faster. Shakespeare’s plays originally took about two hours to perform, now too often they run beyond three hours!
Although English I see no reason whatsoever why Shakespeare must be performed in a Received Pronunciation accent. The accents are not the magical part of a Shakespeare play but the language and the delivery. England (not to mention the rest of the UK) contains a plethora of accents that differ from RP, including my own I hasten to add, and so why is RP perceived to be the accent of choice for Shakespeare? Certainly Shakespeare himself would not have spoken in such a manner being from a provincial Midlands town. Is it a overflow of prior class snobbery? Only those with capability of producing the correct accent, such as a Gielgud or a Richardson or an Olivier, can suitably deliver
the Bard?
Not too sure myself yet of all the times I have seen a production of Shakespeare I have never once been put off by the accent which was utilised. Jamaican, Chinese, Scottish, Candian etc…surely we miss the point if we concentrate on the accent and ignore the words?
Yes and know. Yes because Russian, French, German – even Japanese productions of Shakespeare’s work offer fresh and very interesting additional perspectives. Let’s wait and see whether Trevor Nunn can persuade American actors to enunciate consonants. You know, labio-dental fricatives, and so on that almost all Americans ’swallow’. ‘Now is our winner of discon’en’… ‘et cetera, won’t quite cut the mustard.
You may think I – me, an English woman and one time actor don’t know the difference between know and no – apologies. (Not in my right mind for the moment!)
I find all of this terribly interesting. I have just studied in my Dialects class about RP differing from GA in accents and how as an actress i am to learn the speific differences in sound, pronunciations, toungue placements, and syllabic placements. But isn’t it also true the UK would differ one anothers classes by accents (which is now becoming more and more gelled together as electronic communications are growing more rapidly.) but in Shakespeares time wouldnt it have been a big interest for shakespeares day?…. I mean he had to play and portray performances for a WIDE range of audiences through the classes. Isn’t it more than likely accent WOULD have played a big part in performance of that day? And even if this theory of “General American” being somewhat (and theoretically) closer to what had been performed in that day, then why are there so many different problems for things like “General Americans” and “Recieved Pronunciation”. In pollysylabic words such as “secretary” or “pergetory” where as “GA” punches the “-ary” into two strong syllables and “RP” closes it down to one weak one?
Foreign loan words are changed to accompany accents like “beta”
(GA)
[b ei d a]
(RP)
[b i ts a]
or on some of his sonnets where the “couplets” dont quite come together for “GA” or “RP” (sonnet 71)?