Inspired by the shift in speech requirements for our class between our first and second term projects, I became curious about the vocal traditions of the English language, as influenced by the grammatical structure shifts in text from Shakespeare to Sheridan, particularly in effects on actors of the time.
In the evolution of English as a written and spoken language, Shakespeare lived, wrote and spoke toward the end of a period known as the Great Vowel Shift, which took us from Chaucer’s Middle English (which is basically incomprehensible to modern speakers) to Early Modern English (which begins to look and sound more like the language we know today). A pervading reason for this is the development of the printing press in the 15th century and the increasing need for standardization, specifically in printed English-- spelling and punctuation. Many early advancements in written standards came straight from the printers themselves, who needed an efficient system of language for quick production that would make sense to a far-reaching audience-- NOT from academics, as we might think, who continued to publish in Latin into the early 18th century. While handwritten and printed spelling did continue to vary through the next few centuries, efforts in written English naturally began to influence spoken English, particularly with the controversial publication of the Bible into English.
The Elizabethan era saw a distinct increase in literacy as a result. For the first time, the celebrated language of the court was English, which had previously been considered “rude” and “barbarous.” Elizabeth invested in global exploration and wielded international military power. English people begin to celebrate their vernacular by inventing words and expanding their uses in science, poetry, and theatre. People enjoyed complicated, witty language. By about 1700, to publish academic writing in Latin was considered “out of tune” with cultural and linguistic thought. And as the nation rallied from the Restoration and became the United Kingdom on the brink of Enlightenment and Imperialism, it become patriotically vital for language to become uniform, on the page and in speech. Such sentiments lead to the scientific study of language, proposals in defense of drastic linguistic change, and, between 1760-1800, the publication of five-times the number of works on elocution than had ever been written before those forty years.
And as a result: what linguists call Modern English and the development of Received Pronunciation.
For as much as there was interest in standardizing written language as early as the 13th and 14th centuries, the need for unified speech didn’t become a priority until the mid-1700s-- it seems, not even onstage. Though theatre has been a vibrant and integral crux of English culture and progression in the last 400 years, early voice work focused on an actor’s ability to basically regurgitate loudly. In children’s troupes, they pronounced, or recited, a play exactly as instructed by a master, for the purpose of “learning to speak and speak well”-- or, learning to parrot with confidence. Actors in Shakespeare’s day pronounced their text according to the tropes of their characters, with cadenced vocal illustration of the Passions (joy, hate, fear, etc.). They also regurgitated performances based on previous productions of a particular play or actors who had previous played a role. Rather than considering dialect or regional sounds, the idea of an accent referred instead to the rhythm of a phrase and emphasis placed on specific words.
The actors themselves spoke like the people who came to hear them. Of course we don’t know with certainty how people sounded, but by comparing contemporary texts, scholars have come to agree on some generalities. For example, Ben Jonson’s The English Grammar tells us /O/ “naturally soundeth … In the short time more flat, and akin to u; as cosen, dosen, mother, brother, love, and prove.” Additionally, James I had a Scottish court, which naturally influenced the actors who worked for him. Linguist David Crystal and his son Ben are experts in this field and have pieced together a good idea of what some Shakespeare text might have sounded like.
A far cry from RP-- earthy, of the people, and indication that some words within Shakespeare’s printed text were probably phonetic spellings of regional dialect, rather than poetical devices that modern readers have made all too precious. Words like “e’en” for “even” or “rep-u-ta-sion” for “reputation” actually represent colloquial articulation of words that happened to lend themselves to creation of verse. We must also keep in mind, however, that the majority of plays from this period are from writers living in London, so even at this point, the recorded speech patterns are of clever, emotive Londoners, not of the nation as a whole.
The idea of Accent isn’t frequently associated with delivery of text before the Restoration, and as you can see from Pepys’s commentary, he uses the word accent to indicate a relationship between words and music to create language (in this case, he’s referring to an Italian opera singer).
About a hundred years later, Samuel Johnson defines the word accent in four ways, none of them particularly having to do with region or dialect. Like Pepys, one of his definitions is language on a whole. Johnson’s first definition refers to the emphasis placed on words in an acted line to convey specific meaning; for example, he corrected the actress Mrs. Bellamy on her delivery of “Thou shalt not kill,” reminding her that the accent should fall on “not” because “Thou shalt NOT kill” is a Commandment and should be recited with appropriate elegance. The dialect isn’t mentioned at all.
The fourth of these definitions were embodied by Elizabethan actors, but especially by greatest actors of the Georgian age, like Thomas Betterton and David Garrick. These men were widely lauded for the musical and tonal qualities of their voices and their unparalleled ability to pronounce speeches with the associated gestures to convey the Passions. Betterton is said to have instructed an actor on delivering speeches: "You adjust all the Lines and Motions of the Face to the Subject of your Discourse … The Speaker ought first to fix the Tone and Accent of his Voice to every Passion, that affects him, be it of Joy or Sorrow, that he may with a sympathetical force convey it to others.” Garrick’s voice was apparently so famously tonal that it could be musically notated. He trained his actors so specifically that their speech qualities could be recognized as his tutelage, and took regurgitation of text and gestures to a new level.
However, RP as we know it now is in its early stages from the 1740s onward. Thomas Sheridan (father to Richard) addresses /H/ in words like herb, hand and humble in 1762 and insists the H be added back in (as it had been missing-- this doesn’t catch on with words like honour, however). The importance of articulating each letter in a syllable emerges (like in in-ter-est) as John Walker prepares his famous Pronouncing Dictionary, as does the politically altruistic ideal of a uniting Received Pronunciation. Walker specifically notes the proper pronunciation of words like mourne and transition, as defined by Garrick. And while Sheridan insists the “/R/ always has the same sound, and is never silent,” Garrick’s native Staffordshire dialect affected his articulation of /i/ in birth and gird to sound more like /u/ in but, forcing a soft pronunciation of /r/ in burth and gurd that sounds all too familiar.
This is a clip of the preface of Johnson’s Dictionary read in a reconstructed dialect of the time. Note the /uh/ and /r/ of the word persuaded, and that the /ah/ sound hasn’t been established yet in words like chance.
It’s important to remember, however, that regardless of the fact that dialect was not particularly standardized onstage at this time, plays were being written by people in London concerned with language standardization, about the upper echelons of society (generally in London) who were peers of this new class of celebrity actors. As a result, the dialectical speech patterns of characters within Restoration and Georgian plays can be easily assumed and naturally associated with the changing speech patterns of the day.
What we now consider contemporary standard Received Pronunciation is, in fact, based on a codified and widely-accepted dialect, specifically representing the area surrounding London during the 17th century, and generally pronounced in an accent reflective to, as Lesley Milroy said, “a select few who have lavished loving care upon it...until it has become a fine instrument of expression.” But as Charles Gildon recorded in his biography of Betterton, interest in articulation has and always will have some practical merit:
“There being a Fight and Scuffle in the Play, between the house of Capulet, and House of [Montagu]; Mrs Holden Acting Betterton’s Wife, enter’d in a hurry, crying O my Dear Count! She inadvertently left out, O, in the pronunciation of the Word Count! giving it such a vehement Accent, put the House into such a Laughter, that London Bridge at low-water was silence to it.”
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