Ben Crystal talks about Original Pronunciation

to Nakota tena koe tu tena koe tokoto good evening everybody I know many of you but for those I don't know I'm professor Lin Tribble at the University of Otago English department and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our event tonight the Ben crystal has been brought to us through the good offices of Shakespeare Globe New Zealand and I've just been to the University of Otago Sheila when Shakespeare Festival which happens every Queen's birthday weekend up in Wellington and saw some really amazing Shakespeare works and very energized by that before I formally introduced Ben

crystal I'd like just to welcome Don Sanders the CEO of Shakespeare Globe New Zealand will speak very briefly tonight [Applause] [Music] tena koe - tena koutou tena koutou katoa how lovely to be here again with the universe botargo who is our biggest and best sponsor we're really thrilled to have this opportunity to bring Ben crystal here we have just had our 26th SCC and ed university photogra Shido and Shakespeare Festival and it's just growing it's unbelievable with young people not having to do Shakespeare on the curriculum anymore but just to have that enthusiasm and the

creativity the entrepreneurship the innovation which I believe are creating thinkers and leaders for tomorrow the ones who can think outside the square and present somebody to work from 400 years ago and new fresh ways and be creative in whatever capacity they end up as a profession with having been out I'd like to thank Julie Nebat who's a very well-known Wellington philanthropist and also drudge Council for assistance and there is other people who have contributed in different places in Christchurch their Issac Theatre Royal here in Dunedin the University of Otago for which was very grateful then

an Auckland so we bringing we brought Ben out to do some of his work and original pronunciation known as Opie and he's worked with some of our students and a lab and Wellington and did a production at circa which was given in generosity place to protect organisation so it's as much pleasure that I have been here I met his parents David and Hilary in 19 2006 in London and hosted them and Wellington when they were out and have followed them and been several years since and had Ben and his partner Helen who both gave workshops

at our festival and he's going to be he's given other talks and other places and he's going to give you a treat tonight so I'd like to welcome you Ben and handover thank you very much then then is an author an actor and a producer of Shakespeare a prolific offer author with his father David crystal whom Don just mentioned he wrote Shakespeare's words 2002 in the Shakespeare miscellany his first solo book Shakespeare on toast getting a taste for the bard was published in 2008 and is in fact available at the University bookshop and was shortlisted

for the 2010 educational writer of the Year award other books include you say potato or patata a book about accents and an illustrated dictionary of Shakespeare so Ben has been a pioneer in the area of original practices including original pronunciation what did Shakespeare's plays sound like in the 1590s but more widely questions of what what effect does the space have the Shakespeare performed in what about how did Shakespeare's company engage with the audience how does he work with his actors how did his actors rehearse so through a series of workshops educational events and the like

and we just saw a great sample of that this morning this afternoon when I then talked to 100 secondary school students here and really wowed them with Shakespeare so these things are not simply museum pieces it's not about just kind of delving into the past for the past sake it's really a question of how you that by reconstructing and beginning to understand how Shakespeare originally produced his work his original practices that we can re reconnect ourselves with Shakespeare and see him as he was in the original excitement that his plays produced in the globe in

in the 1590s so please welcome me and join me rather in welcoming and crystal from muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention a kingdom for a stage Prince's to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene then should the warlike Harry like himself assume the port of Mars and at his heels leashed in Lake homes should famine sword and fire crouch for employment but pardon gentles ah the flat unraised spirits that have dared on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth so great an object can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of

france or may we cram within this wooden o the very casks that did affright the air at Agincourt oh pardon since a crooked figure may attest a little place a million letters ciphers to this great a comp imaginary forces work so that was what was that that was a recreation of the sound system of 400 years ago I've been playing around with both this original practice and other original practices for the last 10 years or so there's nothing quite like experiencing Shakespeare in its original context and what I mean by that is if you can

going to see Shakespeare in an original practice space Shakespeare was not written for a proscenium arch theater where you come and sit in the dark and the audience are relaxes and doesn't participate and the actors are brightly lit and cannot see them or make contact with them some of the original practice spaces that there are in the world are the Shakespeare's Globe on the south bank of the River Thames the Blackfriars data in Virginia the pop-up globe now as well where they are exploring what the theatrical dynamic might have been like as close as they

possibly can with some compromises the shakespeare's globe on the south bank of the River Thames has a concrete floor and sprinklers because they do learn some lessons but as close as they can possibly understand it how does not to be authentic because who wants authenticity you don't want to go to the globe and get the plague but what can we learn when they produced me Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple 14 years ago where Twelfth Night was Bert was first performed four hundred years ago they perforce performed the play in the Traverse with audiences along

either side and at one end I don't know if you remember at the end of Twelfth Night viola comes on stage still disguised as Cesario and Toby and a Gertie come on protesting wildly that they've just been beaten up by this man who is standing suddenly in front of them and then Sebastian runs on apologizing for having beaten them and for the first time you see the two twins on stage it's quite difficult to stage in a proscenium arch theater for the first time in the space that it was originally written for the audience and

the actors as one became part of a tennis match and they all went and a part of the play that's been so difficult to stage for the last hundred hundred and fifty years suddenly was easy in its original context in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse the candlelit Playhouse we've been exploring what the late plays looked like those mask plays like a tempest well does Macbeth look like when we can turn out all the lights and have Lady Macbeth and Macbeth wandering around in candlelight what does that do to the human eye how does that change the

way that we received the plays Shakespeare's audience were said to go in here a play not to go and see a play your eyes work differently by candlelight it changes the way that we costume the characters by candlelight the globe have been exploring many different original practices they've been exploring the original practice of space they've explored the original practice of costume how does it change the way an actor moves whether it be male or female when suddenly they're wearing black heels a corset and a skirt with many skirts but they mustn't trip over how does

that change the way you move around the stage what does it do to an audience not to have electronic music amplified but music played by 400 year old instruments how does that change the atmosphere how does it change Romeo and Juliet to have Mercutio and Tibbles fighting in French and Italian styles they mock each other for having different fighting styles this is one of the fundamental questions that Sam Wanamaker asked when he was cajoling and fundraising and provoking people into creating the establishment that sits on the south bank of the River Thames now about ten

years or so ago the shakespeare's globe phoned up my father the linguist David crystal and said is it possible can we explore the original practice of accent he said yes yes of course people have actually been playing around with this idea for from so many years so Peter Hall one of the original architects of the Royal Shakespeare Company architect by architect I mean artistic director one of the guys has set it up and it was a party trick of his too to be able to speak Shakespeare and original pronunciation as we call it now but

they were desperately worried the Shakespeare's Globe they were worried that it would be incomprehensible that it would turn audiences away they are and should be worried about appearing to try to be authentic about being stuck for a museum piece or a Disney World where what is performed there is not thought-provoking experimental or provocative but staid and window shopping and certainly nothing that ever should be inaccessible irrelevant unable to you capture the hearts and minds of the next potential generation of bars lovers you say Shakespeare's action to people and well what do they think they hear

what do they think they're gonna hear I know what they think they're gonna hear because people come up to me and tell me they think they're going to hear their high school teacher doing Chaucer the NHANES press their stare but Jocelyn Middle English Shakespeare in early modern English just an earlier version of the way that we speak and write you heard it earlier over the next 40 minutes or so and I'll end with sometimes some questions I'll try and explain as much as I can to you of but what it sounds like we'll explore together

what it might remind you of what it does to the actors who perform it and what uses it what we can learn from it first of all that sound the sound of Shakespeare when I was a young actor when I was went to drama school I was told that if I wanted to speak Shakespeare I have to speak Shakespeare and received pronunciation received pronunciation received pronunciation of the accent of the Queen although you know if you watch the Queen's address over the last 50 odd years her accent has changed her accent since the arrival of

her grandchildren is slipping towards the estuary every day so whatever received pronunciation is it is the Queen's English it is the accent that the Scotsman who set up the BBC decided would be the clearest accent for radio and it is the accent that I was told that if I wanted to speak Shakespeare if I wanted to be paid to speak she paid to be an actor sorry if I wanted to be paid to speak Shakespeare I would have to speak it in received pronunciation now the accent that I'm speak it well the accent that I'm

speaking in first of all what is accent accent is the oral or the our role depending on whether you're speaking or listening fingerprint it's your identity its territory it's who you are in 1950s Liverpool when my dad grew up accents wouldn't just change from village to village they change from street to street as a marker of identity and territory you get beaten up if you had the wrong accent your accent tell the listener more about who you are than the clothes that you wear and the things that you like and the things that you retweet

my accent my identity is called modified received pronunciation because this is received pronunciation and this is modified received pronunciation and the difference what the difference is that whilst I was born in Ascot which is just outside of London air London sort of here and Ascot sort of here and well when I was seven years old I moved to North Wales and and so whenever I go of always scares the hell out of my girlfriend because I start speaking more like that you know I I got to my natural accent has more Welsh in it yeah

I speak more like this when I go home but I lost my Welsh left me because when I was 18 I went to university in Lancaster and in Lancashire they speak with the short a in their voice so I don't say I'm I'm going to take a bath I usually so I'm going to take a bath that's the short day and then of course in the United Kingdom if you want to be enacted then you've got to go to London that's where the acting is and so I've got a bit of cockney my voice it's

been a while since I've been home so my cockney is sort of slipped more towards Dick Van Dyke but but but I still tend to more often than not unless I'm thinking about it I'll say that I'll talk about bottles rather than bottles the glottal stop the glottal stop the flapped T sound of cockney and then after training well you know I've been really lucky with Shakespeare and he's taking me around the world he's taken me to the United States a lot and I have got a transatlantic sort of quality to my voice I talk

about boiling the kettle and take the dog for a walk instead of boiling the kettle and taking the dog for a walk so my accent is received pronunciation with a bit of Welsh bit of Lancaster quite a lot of London and a whole smorgasbord of transit Lanica that's the sound that you hear me speaking in now all of those sounds that compromise my voice my life experiences to date who I am who I've been the things that I felt the places that I felt them in should be flattened out if I want to perform this

particular style this particular work of art two households both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we lay our scene from ancient Grudge break to new mutiny where civil blood makes civil hands unclean from forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life whose misadventured piteous overthrows doth with their death bury their parents strife that's half hour for that I mocked the accent a little but I get letters letters email emails I get direct messages still to this day from drama students in regional parts of the world not

just in the UK the actors I was working with just last week in Wellington people still to this day are being told you cannot speak Shakespeare in your voice you must speak this sound this sound of the two-percent so I I mock it but I mock it with love same speech this recreation of Shakespeare's accent what accents does it remind you of what does it do to me to our souls both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we lay our scene from ancient Grudge break to new mutiny where civil blood makes civil hands unclean

from forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life whose misadventured piteous overthrows doth with their death bury their parents strife what access does it remind you common let's come back to that it's a really good point if I don't remind me yes sir south country yep little bit Irish yokel you know whenever I go in to try and go into schools about once a month because I hated Shakespeare when I was younger and I'm determined to try and rest the education system into some sort of thing that

doesn't indulge kids in hating Shakespeare so much by making them read it differently different talk different dog stop it then but I'll always give them a little bit of original pronunciation even if it is off-topic and they're never going to get examined on it and I say to them what accent does it remind you of and they all go Pirates of the Caribbean Thank You Johnny Depp although over here they go Lord of the Rings Game of Thrones yokel other accents Yorkshire yep the accent you don't want to say because you think you'll be wrong

absolutely yes the theme I get people say American Canadian Australian yep you're getting the theme we know where Shakespeare's actors came from there's an amazing scholar a Kiwi scholar actually called and ego he's Kiwis Ania he wrote a wonderful book called Shakespeare's company and he worked out where they all came from and they came from Norfolk and Suffolk they came from Kent and Cornwall death they came from Ireland and Scotland the game from the Midlands where there are are haha yokels own comes from and I came to London and their accents will mix together just

like our accents do the linguistic traits of accommodation or if I like you and you like me our accents will move together will be accent buddies if I don't like you you don't like me then our accents will get stronger territory identity so has the same thing happen in Shakespeare's time their accents all men all did together and then the accents left London a winter Bristol and sailed to the Americas and of course later on they got sent to Bristol and sent down to Australia and that's partly where those accents come from in one line

of Shakespeare you can go around the world richard ii at one point says yet i will hammer it out exact five soliloquy yet i will hammer it out in original pronunciation yet i will hammer it out i don't say yet i say yet you say yet oh I listen to that sound listen to that pronoun aye-aye-aye up here up here aye aye oh oh oh the personal pronoun switches you go back in the mouth the vowel sound and further down that has a knock-on effect which drops your pitch your center shifts your diaphragm much more

useful when you are projecting in an outdoor space a bit like the globe it makes me shift my stars I fully source some assets or weight will wills kind of the same but it's got a slightly darker quality to the L hammer or earth that strong are sound the Rohtak are AMERICA AMERICA AMERICA AMERICA it it is it oat oat is Canadian yet or you will hammer it up in half a line of Shakespeare not even a full metrical line you go around the globe two households both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we

lay our scene I remember going to see Shakespeare and the style of the 20th century to declaim I remember going up to my father's in the interval and said dad I love this but why aren't they moving and I remember going to see great physical theater companies and watching them move beautifully but not having great voices and I wanted to find a way to fuse the two I wanted to find more accessible accessible more dynamic more physical more active more passionate Shakespeare not just to see but to produce daughters to produce but to acting I

wasn't interested in original pronunciation until this first proper experiment at the Globe like I say they were worried that no one would understand it my father said well you know if you don't do it stratford-upon-avon will you've never seen a production greenlit faster but they were still nervous they did Romeo and Juliet they performed it in received pronunciation for the most part but they did three performances in the middle of the run in original pronunciation but they had to rehearse the play these changes in pitch these changes in stance these changes in movement the master

of movement came and sat down watching the actors stumbled their way through this new sound and how it was affecting them and the discoveries they were making and she whispered to my father she said my goodness the actors are moving differently accent can make you move differently that's when I started exploring this myself I knew that accents could bring different qualities but the qualities that were used to are posh accent for nobility yokel comedy accent for common how do you do Midsummer Night's Dream well the fair the king of the fairies and the Duke they

speak with a posh accent the mechanicals all they just speak like that and the work is done right you don't even have to do any acting you can just do silly voices we have become lazy with our Shakespeare the single biggest hurdle the barrier to our thinking our way into the Elizabethan mindset is this idea that we can divine educational or economic or even intelligence background from the sound of someone's voice this made no sense in Shakespeare's time so Walter Raleigh was at the top of the court and he spoke with a Devonshire accent to

his dying day people did change their accents of course they did when King James came to the throne funnily enough everyone started speaking with a bit of a Scottish try we've been it we've been exploring original pronunciation a fair bit around the world now and these changes that I'm illustrating for you this shift in stands the shift in center the shift in pitch it occurs in both boys and girls and that's interesting I like the fact that it provokes that an original practice as close as we can possibly get provokes a different style what can

we learn and how close can we get well we can get about 90% right which isn't bad we get 90% right three ways the first of the rhymes it's one of the ways we know what opie sounds like 154 sonnets are land with a rhyming couplet two-thirds of those sonnets don't rhyme in received pronunciation there are the rhyming plays like Midsummer Night's Dream in richard ii and the long poems all these rhymes they're one source of data if this be error and upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved either Shakespeare was

a really bad poet well the accents changed so it had to have been if this be error and upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved or if this be error and upon me proved I never writ nor no man aloof we know we absolutely know that the only person to have elongated that vowel of look to Lulu was Elvis - terrible jirachi let's chew the rhymes the cushy O's Queen Mab speech go back to the original practice of text we don't have any original scripts of Shakespeare but we have the first

folio edited by two of his actors at a time when they used to spell a lot more like these to speak McKee she is Queen mad speech he talks about mad flying through people's minds whipping a dragonfly or something she's what she's writing and she has a whip and the wit has a handle and a lash of film and that word film is about ph IL om e filim or possibly filler may probably fill them because if you go to island and you get invited do you want would you like after after this do you

want to come and see the new guardians of the galaxy filum i'd like to go and see the Wonder Woman filim would you like to come with I mean that's an Elizabethan pronunciation that stayed with us for 400 years fillin so the spellings of the second and then the third source of data they were linguists at the time that wrote books on what the accent sounded like now of course history is written by the historian so it has to be taken with a pinch of salt as does all of this but Ben Jonson one of

Shakespeare's contemporaries wrote a pronouncing dictionary and he goes through the letters of the alphabet and he says how you pronounces them and when he gets to the letter R he says we pronounce this sound Thank You Ben awesome go write better plays come on he calls it the Konami slitter artists the doggy sound think her possibly a uvula trill or possibly an alveolar trill for what we do in Welsh probably less intrusive just an her sound all of that takes you to the Spelling's the rhymes the accounts at the time takes you to about 90%

right that 10% that last 10% it drives my dad crazy because he's being want it to be perfect I'm really pleased because in our explorations what happens is well if we were all to learn original pronunciation together we'd all be 90% the same but the last 10% well the last time person I fill with my identity my accent my mongrel sound of receive pronunciation and Welsh in Lancaster and and London and transit Lanica and your original pronunciation would be 90% the same as me attempts at you and yours would be 90% the same as me

in 10% you and so on and so forth and we will now have an acting company who speak Shakespeare in a sound that is together and still unique still individual rather than we form a company we flatten out our regional sounds we all sound the same as the two percent when the younglings came to see a Shakespeare dopey at the globe we only said what do you think what does it sound like yeah it's great it's great what you mean it's great are they sound like us of course it doesn't sound like them but what

they meant was it doesn't sound like them it doesn't sound like the elite anymore I like the fact that this sound gives ownership for the actors it gives a familiarity to the audience because despite the fact that I'm speaking a sound that was centralized and localized in Elizabethan London you already speak a bit of it you also yet you're already pretty good original pronunciation ownership and familiarity to things that are missing for the so much when people think about Shakespeare and why people keep asking is Shakespeare still relevant how do we make it accessible should

be translated do I think that people should always speak in original pronunciation no no of course not I hope original pronunciation might be the bridge back to a place where the right accent to speak Shakespearean is your accent because you want to speak Shakespeare if you've got it in your heart it doesn't matter shouldn't matter what accent you speak it in your accent is right it does help if the rhymes work as well there are also puns to be discovered rhymes that work oh that's lovely when rhymes work in Shakespeare he must have wanted them

is rhyme z' to rhyme and we're no such thing as I rhymes it wasn't just a page Ryan people half the plays weren't even printed in his lifetime there's a great pun in as he like it and as you like it which is essentially good jook bad Jew good Jew banished runs off to a forest with his Merry Men one of them isn't so merry The Melancholy Jake's The Melancholy jegs comes back from having seen a clown in a forest and he's laughing and the jig says Jakes why you laughing and Jake says a fool

a fool I met a full lift forest as I do live by food I met a fool who laid him down and basked him in the Sun and railed on Lady Fortuna in good terms in good set terms and yet a motley fool good more a full quoth I know circle fie call me not fault 11 a semi fortune and then he drew a dial from his poke and looking on it with let lust arises very wisely it is 10 o'clock thus we may see equals he how the world wags tis but an hour ago

since it was nine and after one hour more 12 e 11 and so from hour to hour we ripe and right and from hour to hour we rot and rot and thereby hangs a tale when I did hear the Motley Fool thus moral on the time my lungs began to crow like Chanticleer that fool should be so deep contemplative and I did laugh sons intermission an hour by dial it's not funny Jimmy Choo is dial from his spoken looking on it with lackluster rises very wisely it is 10 o'clock but we may see quickly how

the world works is but an hour goes into his nine after one hour Mort will be 11 and so from hour to hour we ripe and ripen from hour to hour we rot and rot and thereby hangs a tale that's the joke when I did hear the Motley Fool thus more along the time my lungs began to crow like Chanteclair talking of Chaucer Chantecler was the cockerel in the nuns priests tale the NHANES priestess dear cockerel with the most beautiful her in all the land that's the noise this melancholy fellow made a knighted laugh he

says sons intermission an hour by his dial he laughed for an hour without a break why it's not funny we lifted it in Opie in original pronunciation the word hour is pronounced or or say it with me or yeas good isn't it in original pronunciation the word prostitute [ __ ] is pronounced or hour or [ __ ] or a full a full I met full in forest as I do live by foot I met a father laid him down and bashed him and the son and railed on lady fortune in good terms and good

set times and yet a motley phone good morrow full cool fight no circle feet coming up fault 11 I sent me Thornton and they need to retire from his pork and looking on it will let mr. Royce is very widely it is 10 o'clock does he miss a call sir how the wild wags but an Oracle since it were knowing an Arthur Owen or more twill be Allen and so from or to or we ripe and ripe and then from or to or we rot and rot and thereby hangs a tale it's a really root

sex joke Shakespeare's full of them we put sex jokes all over Shakespeare these days because we can't make him funny he was making them before we even came up with them that we insert in them the last time I saw this play the actor came out in 2007 our to our we rape and rape and from hour to hour we Ross and rods and thereby hangs a tale anyway out there's a pun I said the pun ending two households both alike in dignity earlier I've got it wrong from forth the fatal loins of these two

foes the line goes on I said lines because the words were pronounced the same in Opie and forth the fatal loins it is loins of the families but it is also lines of the families I love the fact that an original pronunciation there's more color to the word color is when you make a word sound like it's supposed to like making a word majesty sound like majesty and the word dustbin sound like a dustbin you could make the word majesty sound like dust bit majesty if you wanted to but giving a word color makes shakespeare

come alive cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war whar hello I'm a dog of war pleased to meet you we're going to have some war now and then key cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war say it with me why doesn't it feel awesome and doesn't it sound like the thing it's supposed to sound like I got to play Hamlet a few years ago to be or not to be a speech that has been talked about and confused about and argued about for hundreds of years what does it mean most people

think it's Hamlet talking about suicide but Hamlet talks about suicide early in the places oh that this too too solid flesh would melt thaw and resolve itself into a dew or that the everlasting had not fixed his Canon gainst self-slaughter Oh God Oh God and then he sees ghost of his father and he gets put on this mission give himself a hard time in all other rogue and peasant slave am I give himself a hard time and having done anything yet he thinks the audience calling him a coward that's what those speeches were there for

it was an opportunity for the protagonist to come to the audience his friend that he could see in a shared light in a theater like the globe and say do you think I'm a am i a coward oh god you're probably right I haven't done anything yet the plays the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king I'll put a play on that all sorted out and he comes back on stage a few minutes later and says to be or not to be that is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer

the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them what's it about I've seen a production where the actor comes out on stage with a bottle of water and a bottle of pills because he talks about making his own Caiaphas with a bare bodkin cutting his wrists with a with a simple knife rather than during the pain of the world but he's just decided what he's going to do he's going to put on a play they've moved the speech backwards Peter Brook moved the speech

to earlier in the play because it didn't make sense you know it's a sad truth that where suicides don't tell their best friend that they're going to commit suicide and if you're my best friend why am i coming to you to that with this speech what's the problem I want to solve if you're going to play Hamlet work out why you're going to say to be or not to be that's that's what mine was my approach why is he saying and from that I might be able to work out the rest of the play I

was looking I was doing it in original pronunciation and I was using the First Folio as well now they hadn't standardized spelling I certainly hadn't standardized publishing or printing and in modern addictions a lot of random seemingly random capital letters are edited out of Shakespeare's text for those capital letters I was taught a clues from Shakespeare or clues from his actors this is an important word and when Hamlet asks in the first folio if he is a coward it's capitalized that see and in original pronunciation you pronounce the word coward cord cord it's struck a

chord I'd seen that word somewhere else thus conscience does make cowards of us all capitalizing to be or not to be - suddenly I thought hang-hang what if he hears the audience am ia coward who calls me villain breaks my pate across plucks off my bidding blows it in my face gives little live the throat is deepest to the lungs huh we might rather perform the scissors at the globe he waited he said huh and waited and some someone went yeah because the next thing Hamlet says is swoons I should take it for it cannot

be but I am pigeon livid and lack gall to make oppression bitter wear this i should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's awful bloody abortive eminence and so forth and he tried to explain himself at the end he says the spirit that I have seen may be the devil Hamlet went to Wittenberg to study stead of philosophy with her with Horatio it doesn't necessarily believe in heaven and hell but he knows that the spirit that he seems may be his father he may be the walking corpse of his dead father or it

could be the devil sent in disguise to tempt him to evil or it could be nothing either way if he kills Claudius and Claudius is innocent then whether or not he believes in heaven or hell he has to admit that that's a possibility and actually what would you do in my position would you kill him would you kill him would you kill him do you believe in life after death do you do you know that there is something after this we might have faith but this is a question we still haven't answered and if you

thought about life in death the way that I think about life and death you would be a coward too so have patience with me and come into it to be or not to be that is the question whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die to Sleep No More and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to tis a consummation devoutly to

be wish'd to die to sleep to sleep perchance to dream aye there's the rub for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause there's a respect that makes calamity of so long life for who would bear the whips and scorns of time the oppressors wrong the permanent inle the pangs of despised love the laws delay the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes when he himself might his Quietus make with a bare bodkin who would these fardels

bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the threat of something after death the undiscovered country from whose Bourn no traveler returns puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have and fly to others that we know not of thus conscience doth make cords of us are and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied or with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action soft you now the fair failure it's been fascinating

to explore it it's been fascinating to share Shakespeare with people in this accent because it seems to release something else shall I compare thee to a summers day thou art more lovely and more temperate rough winds do shake the Darling Buds of May and summers lease hath all too short a date sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines and often is his gold complexion dimmed and every fair from fair sometime declines by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed the die eternal summer shall not fade nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st nor shall

death brag thou wand'rest in his shade when in eternal lines to time thou grow'st so long as men can breathe or eyes can see so long lives this and this gives life to thee I remember hearing my drama school principal jumping up on Shakespeare day and performing that not be no idea what it means what a nice thing to do hey you like to be compared to a summers day it's nice right come on you ever been to Britain but I grew up in Wales which is essentially Britain this is a summer day for me

summers not that nice it's either too hot and we complain about it it doesn't last very long or you know we get out there in Sun Tan Lotion and everything and then it starts raining or if you have a picnic there are ants and wasps everywhere and actually you know we were just in Japan before we came here and they celebrate spring with us the arrival of the cherry blossom and it's beautiful because there's nothing like the Japanese are so happy when the Sakura comes the cherry blossom comes and it is beautiful but it fades

everything in nature fades you're beautiful you're all beautiful you'll fade we all do we'll all die everything in nature does you won't you're not even going to die when you grow old and you get all wrinkly you're never going to die death the character the actual living embodiment of death like Terry Pratchett's death is never going to be able to brag about claiming your souls sweeping it under his cloak when you're talking about Shakespeare that's impossible of course we're all going to die now now because I'm going to I'm going to write your beauty into

this poem and I'm going to write my love for you into this poem and in 400 years time a ginger actor is going to be standing in a lecture theater in Dunedin and talking about how beautiful you were and how much I loved you and so you'll live forever because this poem is going to live forever because I'm that good shall I compare thee to a summers day thou art more lovely and more temperate rough winds do shake the Darling Buds of May and summers lease at I'll too short a date sometime too hot the

eye of heaven shines and often is his gold complexion dimmed and every fair from fair sometime declines by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed thy eternal summer shall not fade nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade when in eternal lines to time thou grow'st so long as men can breathe or eyes can see so long lives this and this gives life today thang the we got like five minutes of some questions right there are some recordings we did a full CD for the British Library in

many different voices about many different ages just this last year my father published the Shakespeare's original pronunciation dictionary and you can look up any word in Shakespeare and if you have even the barest and in fact the book teaches you how to read it with the understanding of the international phonetic alphabet then you can work out how to pronounce it do have confidence in the fact that you you naturally already speak about a third to a half of the sounds whenever we explore original pronunciation half the work is on my shoulders having to pick up

original pronunciation and half the work is already done by the actors wherever they are in the world if they're speaking English and and then the third way is once you start having a go at it and you feel like you like to move on then send me a recording and we'll have a Skype session yeah you'll be welcome ironically not in the United Kingdom um I talked about ownership earlier when I've gone to the United States and to Australia and India and and here there's a relief but we don't have to speak Shakespeare in this

sound right but in the United Kingdom there's still a great desire to hear Shakespeare and received pronunciation there are very few companies that speaks Shakespeare in a regional accent and until recently they will look down upon for doing down upon for doing it and there have been 13 productions of Shakespeare and original pronunciation there are 26 plays left 26 new entire works haven't been heard for 400 years with puns and rhymes to be discovered new things to be discovered about Shakespeare rather than just rewriting another biography of him and there are there's a treasure trove

waiting to be done and most of the productions have been in the States as of last week there may well be a production coming to these shores the lab that we did with the Kiwi actors and the Maori actors provoked a great deal of interest in Wellington there is some talk of some support in which case very much hope that if production raises we might be able to take it around as well maybe bring it down here if we have good fortune how did the audience responded to the the scope - two lovely stories of

that the first is that when Romeo and Juliet meet they share a sonnet and at a dance and the director beautifully wonderfully had them share the sonnet and and and and and and speak to each other and dance with each other and when they finished the sonnet they finished dancing now you might have noticed we don't have an awful lot of clues about the prosody of Shakespeare's original pronunciation what it how fast they would have spoken or the music of it but we do have Hamlet's speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it

to you trippingly on the tongue but do not move it as many of our players do for then I'd as lief the town crier spoke my lines do not mouth it speak it trippingly and the folio as well there's a lot of elisions there's a lot of our pasta feet eh ' it seems to be a speech that was supposed to be spoken with alacrity so it was not oh it is my lady O it is my love o that you knew she were it was autism a lady autism allowable but you know she wore

so when Romeo and Juliet shared the sonnet they finished speaking the sonnet in O P but they still had a minute a half of dancing left with nothing to say to each other [Laughter] the original pronunciation production was 10 minutes faster than the RP 2 hours traffic they coped you have to cook the other is the in rehearsal this idea of common of yokel of social status came up and the actor playing the Prince I think came to the director and said look how am I supposed to show that I'm noble and all these fellows

are common if we're all speaking the same bloody accent and the director said act how do we show that someone is Noble or kingly or royalty give them a crown that helps and when they enter everyone else Neal's royalty isn't taking it's imbued status isn't really taken as well as it is given I suppose by those around you so but I again back to that idea of the storytelling its back on the actor's shoulders rather than funny voices I suppose but the acts of the actors merely called the mutiny as well because at the end

of the three days of dopey all but one wanted to completely carry on performing in it and there were stories of Juliet's finding herself more grounded of the nurse finding herself more grounded of both of them being far more able to fight verbally there further Juliet's father and they tried to carry those discoveries back into RP but it lifted them back off it so they coped but and yes the audience is generally I believe you know there are some people that come it I don't want to understand it so I won't which is fair enough

you know people do like to hear Shakespeare in a particular way and for the record you know I'm a big fan of Laurence Olivier and John Gill and Maggie Smith and Julie dent they are superlative Shakespeare performers Shakespeare and RP is not something I am fighting against I'm fighting against the idea that Shakespeare should be spoken in a or any particular way like I said earlier your voice is the right points P Shakespeare their voice was the right voice for Shakespeare even if some of them have regional accents originally like Sir Ian McKellen but the

audiences generally come and say oh it sounds familiar or they speak a bit like that where I come from because of course technically hope is the great-great-great great-great-great great-great-great grandmother of this sound absolutely yes it's the way that I used to rehearse my audition speeches I be when I got an audition to the globe and I'd go to a part not far away from me in London and I'd be like oh not why this before Island Opie I was using my Welsh and I do the same with Opie now oh you're renowned it'd you'll see

us from our troops I strayed to gaze upon a ruinous monastery and as I honestly do fix my eye upon the wasted building suddenly I heard a child crying Denise a war and I went to the audition and renowned it Lucius from our troops I strayed to gaze upon natera where are you from and I said I'm from Wales actually and she said can you speak in a Welsh accent and I said yeah and I was using it to help me find my way into it and she said can you do it now when I

performed to speak to my Welsh accent and she said yeah you've got the job if you speak it in your Welsh accent and I did every day for six months on the globe stage we found that speaking in Opie certainly reveals a lot it gives people access to these rhymes into these puns and then if we weren't using RP and we weren't using Opie then I would certainly try to find some kind of marriage and negotiation point between the actors natural accent and and these discoveries so I worked with an actor once who who would

I thought he was from he spoke with RP and and he was actually from Scotland he's got a beautiful Scottish voice that's gorgeous and he's got a great RP too and I asked him to speak a speech he'd learned of Lennox in Macbeth and he started sort of speaking it in RP and I said no no no Johnny generally speaking you're Scott's voice and he said you are speaking of Scott's voice he did and at the end of it he broke down and cried a little bit he's a big boy so Johnny what's the matter

that was beautiful he said I've never spoken it in my voice before now your voice is the right voice but we do have to have the rhymes do we have to have Rhymes and have to have anything it's nice if it rhymes anything that can add to the pile whatever the route if it helps Shakespeare make a little more sense if it helps make it a little more accessible if it helps the actor find a little more emotional or just active or physical ownership over it whatever the route is keep them alive let's keep them

accessible and keep them relevant ladies and gentlemen thank you [Applause]