learnedax ([personal profile] learnedax) wrote2009-06-10 10:29 pm

On accents

The other day I was musing on acting accents, spurred partly by a discussion in [livejournal.com profile] james_nicoll's journal about how practically no one gets them right, and partly by a background train of thought on playing Elizabethan theatre. Someone asked me a while back whether I did an English accent for Shakespeare; I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess for upper class characters, at least, I do a mostly region-neutral aristocratic tone. I mused on trying to make my pronunciation at least a bit more British, but as before mentioned accents are very tricky. House, M.D. is passable, and Amy Walker seems pretty convincing to me, but this is a singular talent, I would say, which is not possible, and perhaps not desirable, for the majority of actors to use. Because an accent can also be distracting, and an even slightly imperfect accent doubly so. Some roles, like Captain Fluellen, clearly demand an accent, but that's part of the character, written in to be an accent, and so not a distraction laid on top of it.

Still, there is some thinking out there that Shakespeare is more properly played with an English accent, and so I mused on whether I was doing my parts a disservice by not learning their proper tones. But then, while looking at opinions expressed on various internet fora, I saw a point made that was terribly obvious, and completely changed my thinking: modern British English is as much evolved and changed from Elizabethan English as American English is. So until we can all learn to con a true Elizabethan speech, I do not think we should feel lessened for not speaking in a different incorrect dialect.

[identity profile] yehoshua.livejournal.com 2009-06-11 04:28 am (UTC)(link)
In Adam Hart-Davis's wonderful series "What the Tudors Did For Us" (one of several such series he's done over the years), he offers an interesting example of how much English evolved just in the 50 years before Shakespeare's works were written. Before Tyndale's Bible (an early predecessor of the King James Authorised Edition) was adopted by Henry VIII, people from as close by as 50 miles apart in England couldn't easily understand one another. Not only were their accents wildly different, but so was their vocabulary. It wasn't until Henry started putting a Tyndale Bible in every parish in England that everyone ended up adopting the Southern dialect, which is what we all speak today. Hart-Davis tries (and I'm told mostly succeeds) in mimicking the accents and vocabs of four different regions as we believe them to have existed when Henry came to the throne. It's probably worth torrenting if this sort of thing interests you.

And yes, bad fake accents annoy me. That said, I'm enough of a mimic by nature that I find I end up doing a bad fake accent when I travel (to the extent that I was warned in London that I shouldn't frequent a pub near the hostel in Earl's Court because the landlord hates Irishmen).

[identity profile] dreda.livejournal.com 2009-06-11 02:50 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] rickthefightguy.livejournal.com 2009-06-11 03:46 pm (UTC)(link)
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).