Shakespeare sounded more American than modern day British.

No, you’re not having a midsummer night’s dream, you read the title correctly.

Acclaimed Shakespearean theatre director and former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Trevor Nunn has claimed American accents are “closer” than contemporary English to the accents of those used in the Bard’s day. So you can think of it in terms of he would’ve sounded more NBC, than BBC.

It’s the sad truth that most of our high school plays, popular culture and movies are getting the word of the Bard all wrong. As much as I’d like Romeo to sound like a modern sophisticated Brit, the true pronunciation 400 years ago was vastly different to what the average Aussie would today identify as a British accent.

Then why don’t we often see the original pronunciation?

Quick Answer: Many are worried that people wouldn’t be able to understand it.

When asked about the issue, an authority in the world of Shakespeare, Ben Crystal said that

“There’s definitely been a change over the last 50 to 60 years of Shakespeare performance. The trend I think has been to speak the words very beautifully … and carefully — and some might say stoically — and it’s very, very different than how it would have been 400 years ago.”

So what did it really sound like?

Thanks to The British Library who recorded 75 minutes of some of Shakespeare’s greatest scenes in original pronunciation, you can hear it for yourself here:

Thanks to the diligent written explanations from linguists and people of the time, who were talking about elocution in newspapers, journals, books and more, these recording are estimated to be between 90–95% accurate. This showcases the true tongue of everyone from Juliet to Desdemona to Puck. Now it’s not simply a contemporary American accent, the 17th century British accent is thought by many linguists to contain links to modern day rural British, American, Canadian, Irish and even Australian accents.

The reason modern day Americans have similarities to the Bard is that many linguistic evolutions away from the Shakespearean accent occurred after the revolutionary war. This is where the Brits evolved their language dropping R’s, losing syllables and using the broad ‘A’, whereas the colonists in the United States instead retained a large amount of their original speech pattern.
 The evolution of the British accent got rid of those hard ‘R’s’ taking ‘caR’ to ‘caH’.

Then they got tricky and added in the broad ‘A’ turning ‘past’ into ‘PAHst’

and possibly just to mess with everyone started dropping syllables all over the place which probably wasn’t ‘ness-a-SREE’, although maybe they did find it ‘necessARY’.

So where can I go see this accent in action?

All of you diehards of the Bard, will be in for a treat the next time you’re in London at the historic Globe theatre. Reconstructed in 1997, The Globe put on a production of Romeo and Juliet in 2004 which showcased the play in the most authentic way possible, including spot-on original pronunciation. This importantly started a trend and sparked the interest of many directors, performers and linguists who have continued to increasingly stage plays in the original pronunciation and give the accent more attention. So even though performances in this original pronunciation are rare, we’ve still got YouTube right?

So now you’ve got something to talk about around the dinner table tonight, but what did you think the accent sounded like? American? Irish? Australian? Have your say in the comments below.