Veni Vidi Scripsi

I'm enough of a mimic by nature that I find I end up doing a bad fake accent when I travel

Oh, lordy do I know this problem. The worst part is that I know I'm doing it, I'm embarrassed by it, and still I catch myself doing it all the time.

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rickthefightguy.livejournal.com

My sense is that mostly - people don't notice. They know you have a funny accent, on account of being American, so they don't notice that your accent is a bit closer to theirs than it should be, and aren't offended (as I always expect they will be if they notice).

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umbran.livejournal.com

Still, there is some thinking out there that Shakespeare is more properly played with an English accent

I think that folks who are particularly concerned with how to "properly" play it have missed or forgotten a major aspect of theatre - it is entirely "improper". Propriety is, in large part, defined as being in accord with established procedure - for theatre to be proper, there would be one version, one interpretation that was "correct", and all others would be incorrect.

But theatre is dynamic - even from one performance to another in a given production, there is significant variation in the presentation. And between different productions, there is great variance. This is a strength, and is part of why we still do Shakespeare at all - if we had not varied it from its original presentation, we'd likely not care for it at all, as it would not have much meaning for a modern audience.

Fie on propriety, I say!

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hugh-mannity.livejournal.com

Hmmm... thinks about this.

Amy Walker is bloody brilliant -- she got most of those close enough to right as to make no difference.

What makes the difference for me with English accents, is class. There's a film of Henry VIII made in 2003 with Ray Winstone as Henry. While it's not bad as these things go (and certainly not nearly as bad as The Tudors!) what completely wrecked it for me was Winstone's obviously working class accent.

The other thing is obviously wrong regional accents. Sean Bean plays Sharpe in the 17 or so made for TV movies of the books by Bernard Cornwell. He does a pretty good job except for one thing: he's got a Yorkshire accent. In the books, Sharpe's from London. Later books have him leaving London during his childhood and living in Yorkshire (to match the movies I presume) but that wouldn't have given him a pure Yorkshire accent.

My accent is middle class southern England overlaid with British Public School/BBC English which has been corrupted by 10 years in South London, 6 years in the Middle East and 20 years in the US -- almost 21 years now.

On my last trip back to England, people thought I was American. Americans however, think my English accent is "cute".

I suspect also that it's not how you say it, it's what you say. "Wicked pissah" doesn't work in an upper class English accent. Nor does "y'all" in a French Canadian one (sort of "y'awl-eh"). I sound American to English ears, as much because of my choice of vernacular as my corrupted accent.

But I can still do a wicked pissah British Raj command voice when needed :)

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Well, as I recall they did change his background explicitly in the TV movies, because Bean was bloody well going to keep his accent, thank you.

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hugh-mannity.livejournal.com

And he's eye candy enough that I don't mind really. Though it was a bit jarring at first.

Daragh O'Malley though is amusing. He does a lovely "stage Irish" bit at times, usually when confronted by a particularly nasty senior officer. It's a definite shift from his usual self, so it is.

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arachne8x.livejournal.com

Do you mean that House's American accent is passable?

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Yes, I think he does a decent job of playing an American accent. In the discussion I was reading, several people picked at awkward corners of his pronunciation, but I think by and large it's pretty good.

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arachne8x.livejournal.com

Just wanted to make sure :) Its very strange watching him in both that show and Jeeves and Wooster.

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Shakespeare is "properly" played with an Early Modern accent. Everything else is just modern, even when it is the dulcet tones of Derek Jacobi.

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cristovau.livejournal.com

Out of curiosity, have you ever seen a production with the Early Modern accent? How about a recorded production?

I have heard that the RSC has done some in the recreated Globe with middling success. I think it would be a wonderful experiment, although hard to follow and I'm not sure if it would make good theater. Maybe with subtitles?

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I have seen scenes done this way, both on video and right in front of me (sometimes at my instigation), but I have not been fortunate enough to see a whole production.

I think worries about "hard to follow" are based almost entirely on conflation of Early Modern English with Middle English. Really, it sounds a lot like drawing your cast from extremely upcountry Maine and Vermont.

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I would be interested in seeing this approach done. It must be even harder to manage an accent that has no living native speakers - but by the same token if you get it wrong in little ways no one is native enough to catch it.

Did you find the accents in those scenes distracting in their unusuality? I could imagine them blending so well, being the native voice for those lines, that it wouldn't seem weird to our ears, but I wouldn't think it was a foregone conclusion. Even if it were something you continued to notice, it might be pleasing as you did notice it. That becomes, I suppose, a question of academic endeavor vs. theatricality.

(If you ever have the urge to put on such a production, I would be very interested.)

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Well, it's hard to say, since the whole point of the exercise was to explore the difference between modern British, modern American, and Early Modern pronunciation. There were definitely some places where difficulties with lines went away, because they were scanning properly - that sort of thing. I find the accent very pleasing, but then again, I find the North Country accent pleasing, and also the Virginia/NC barrier islands accent pleasing, and it is not hugely dissimilar. (Regrettably, the brief Google search didn't turn up any audio examples - ask me sometime if you're curious. The potted sonnet is still mostly intact in my head.)

I can say for certain that I will not ever mount a full production of EME Shakespeare, or any other playwright - that's not the place I want to pour that much energy. But I have occasionally entertained the idea of doing scenes, less as a production and more as a workshop for the interested.

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This discussion may herald bit of interest in your Pronouncing Shakespeare class. Maybe it's time to teach it again...?

:)

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alexx-kay.livejournal.com

The just-released-on-DVD series Playing Shakespeare has one bit with John Barton doing a speech in his best guess at an Elizabethan accent. IIRC, it's even from Henry V, one of the ones where the King of France is exhorting his nobles. It's just a brief taste, but a juicy one. As Dreda said, it's a fairly Yankee sounding drawl. Such an accent would probably cause less trouble than Shakespeare's vocabulary often does. (Though those two issues can, of course, add to each other.)

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rickthefightguy.livejournal.com

I dunno. Maybe Shakespeare is properly played in the exact accent that Shakespeare did it...that is to say in whatever accent the audience uses.

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Hence the scare quotes. If "properly" is "historically-informed" in the way that the early music people use it, it's a note-for-note recreation that would include the accent Shakespeare used, as best we can tell. I use the scare quotes because I don't think there's a way to "do Shakespeare properly," even though there are many people who will tell you that there is.

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danceboy.livejournal.com

It also gets into what I call the yoga question. Yoga was invented in India. In particularly warm bits of India (we think). That meant that if you did yoga, you were doing it in a 100 degree room (or 100 degree outside). This wasn't any warmer than the other rooms, it was just what the weather was.

If you want to do yoga in Boston (aside from August) you have your choice of two incorrect things: you can go into a special warm room, or you can do yoga at 70 degrees. Both do weird things.

So you can use the proper accent (which will sound weird to people if you can even do it), or you can

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danceboy.livejournal.com

ok that was weird, please forgive a lack of editing, that wasn't supposed to get posted yet...

or you can use a modern local accent (which won't necessarily rhyme or scan right). Either one will be somewhat distracting.

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That problem of conveying the right thing to your actual audience was something we had additional complications with for Henry V. A lot of French is spoken, and in theory it should be not modern, nor even merely early modern French, but whatever is an appropriate Elizabethan English view of the language - which may be relatively similar to early modern French, admittedly. Still, that's a little weird to a modern audience that has any grasp of modern French.

I didn't have to deal with that issue much, but I had a couple of lines that are supposed to be spoken in slightly bad French, which complicates things even further. The correct period pronunciation of 'moi' is more like 'mwey', so if I pronounce my French perfectly for the period it actually appears to be more clumsily spoken to a modern audience - I chose to split the difference and say more like "mweh", hopefully equally wrong whichever context the audience brings... but I think the complexity involved in pronouncing that one word highlights how challenging it can be to transport medieval work into modern speech.

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an accent can also be distracting, and an even slightly imperfect accent doubly so

True. Most "American" accents (Branagh in Dead Again is an example) are distracting to me because the actor avoids regional markers. Flat-affect is a frequent attempt to sound "Midwestern" but it's a mistake not to apply pronunciation variances alongside the tonal ones, as Emma Thompson aped to hilarious result in an episode of Ellen.

In-process, of course, a vocal coach has to somehow fine-tune an actor's fillips of individuation without mandating specific line readings.

So I agree with you, orthogonally: until we can all learn to achieve the same regional dialact, and vary it appropriately according to the character, we should not feel lessened.

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cristovau.livejournal.com

I like experimenting with accents, but my general rule is to apply the accent thickly in practice and then polish it down to something slighter in performance. The result is a subtle change that helps define character without distraction. Usually, when you notice an accent as being way off, it is because someone tried too hard.

I like reading Shakespeare with a Virginian accent when I study the lines. All the broad vowels grant a certain beauty to the speeches. I suspect it would be incredibly jarring to use such an accent in a local performance...

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Apropos of nothing else, I'd love to hear you read Shakespeare in a Virginian accent. :)

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cristovau.livejournal.com

I fear my Virginian accent doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. It needs work and detachment from South Boston.

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O faw a mews uv fahr...

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Also, mediocre-to-bad "English" accents done by Americans sound ridiculous and poncy, and are far more likely to transport the listener to a fourth-rate Faire than to Southhampton.

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new-man.livejournal.com

Of course, you don't act alone -- unless you're acting alone. Being the only member of the cast with an accent or a particular accent -- even if it's the correct accent -- can be more distracting than the wrong accent or no accent for a part that "should" have one. Henry V is funny because it plays heavily with regional and national voices. No one thinks that Theseus ought to be played with a Greek accent (modern or ancient) or that Prospero ought to speak like an Italian. In fact, most of the time, we give Prospero an upper-class English accent... but I digress. Check in with your director; make sure everyone is willing and capable to do accent work before investing yourself in it heavily. In the Shakespeare on The Common production of Henry V I saw a few years back, Henry spoke with an accent; no one else did. It was irritating as hell and made him sound like a pretentious fop.

Second.... My impression (and I'm not an expert) is that the Elizabethan accent is somewhere between modern Australian and modern southern American. It's got a lot of twang and sounds about as much like a modern English accent as a modern American accent does.

O.K., a third thought -- accents are fripparies. They are, just that: accents. They're a nice bonus, but not the first thing an actor should be concentrating on. Learn your lines, your marks, your motivations. Learn your stage combat so no one gets hurt. Once you've got the essentials nailed down, you can -- well -- accent them.

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