On accents

[learnedax]

The other day I was musing on acting accents, spurred partly by a discussion in 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.

Comments

[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.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

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.