One unusual decision that David Letendre (our director) and Brigid Battell-Letendre (our producer) have made in this production of Macbeth is to take our script directly from a facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the term, "The First Folio" refers to a single volume edition of 36 of his plays prepared by the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell and published in 1623, as such, we are reading the original spellings.
Something exciting happens when one recites and rehearses Shakespeare's words as they were written by members of the King's Men. The spellings are those of the early 17th century, not those to which we are accustomed to reading in more modern editions (the better of which are incredibly valuable due to all the scholarly notes) but as David pointed out in the first rehearsal, the spellings often provide hints as to where to place emphasis. Indeed, what I have discovered is that by reading the First Folio phonetically, I do not need to think about iambic pentameter-- I hear it as I recite the lines, nor do I have to think about my accent-- the accent is there in the spellings. It may not be the accent of modern Scots-English (and perhaps not the accent of any historical Scottish king), but it is certainly not the theatrical Queen's English I heard as I watched the various Thames and BBC television productions of Shakespeare on my local PBS station (or indeed, any of the British film and television imports) as I was growing up. The long-vowels are longer than any of the mishmosh of North American English accents I speak or understand.
Consider one modern edition (edited by M.A. Shaaber):
...On Tuesday last
A falcon tow'ring in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.
With largely modern spellings, the actor is left with the option of speaking in his or her native accent or a stage accent. Pronunciation of certain words is ambiguous. Are the "-ed" suffixes pronounced as separate syllables or are they simply consonant sounds? Some of the options will read as poetry others as prose, some as awkward prose.
Compare that to the first folio:
...On Tuesday last,
A Faulcon towring in her pride of place,
Was by a Mowsing Owle hawkt at, and kill'd
Reading from the first folio edition, there is no ambiguity as to how many syllables are taken by "Hawkt" and "kill'd" nor with the ending consonant sounds. The spellings of "Faulcon" and "Mowsing Owle" also emphasize the vowel sounds and demand an accent that falls right on the stressed syllables of the iamb-- and the stresses emphasize that these are birds of prey-- something that "mousing owl" fails to do. Wonderful!
Friday, July 20, 2007
On Reading the First Folio
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7 comments:
Interesting stuff, Ian! It's possibly also worth thinking about the fact that shakespeare was a midlands any and so would have been unlikely to have had a standard RP accent anyway. I don't pretend to know much about archaic pronunciations, but as language quite clearly evolves, it seems daft that we should attempt to read a 400 year old text in a modern accent.
Katja,
That's precisely why I found it such a wonderful bit of serrendipity to come upon about the same time as I wrote this particular piece.
I suspect noone spoke RP in Shakespeare's time and furthermore, I suspect that as with today, there was a repetoire of standard accents used on stage, that were rarely used except for theatre and poetry recitations.
the "href" tag seems not to be working properly again. I had the same problem a few months ago. Sorry for the poor formating of the above comment.
What interests me at the moment is the affect that acting shakespeare seems to have some people.
Last night I was watching Much Ado About Nothing and some pieces of text seemed to make some of the actors move in a certain jerky fashion. I realized that this is something that I've witnessed before when watching Shakespeare.
Does anyone know why this happens?
I would not know, rednose. My guess is that it might be an incongruity between naturalistic acting and stylized language. The cast of this company has a wide variety of backgrounds. Some come from the world of naturalism, others from musical theatre, while I come from the worlds of mime and poetry. I will keep my eyes open for the phenomenon you describe.
Duane Moran, of Shakespeare Geek, wrote about David Crystal's Pronouncing Shakpeare website, which is a companion to the book of the same name. Duane's sense (one that I shared, but largely refrained from stating in public) was that Original Pronunciation sounds more Scots-English than the RP or Estuary English with which our American ears are more accustomed.
From The Bard Blog
Ian Thal wrote:"...the experience of rehearsing directly from the First Folio and what that revealed about the poetry of the play."
____________________________________________________________
Willshill replied:
I find it both interesting and refreshing that a Poet is less interested in the rules of Poesy,the ostensible justification for 'emending'(a less offensive cryptic-ism for 'correcting')Shakespeare for hundreds of years, than in how Shakespeare brilliantly hammered against the bulwark of acceptability.
For me, there is no replacement for the Folio when it comes to interpreting and 'translating' his work, either in the literary or dramatic realm. Understanding Shakespeare as the gifted Musician he most certainly was can happen only when his 'phrasing' is accepted at face value in what we have as the closest approximation to the original 'voicings'. It's only then that it truly opens itself to interpretation, much the same as when Mahler, for instance, 'interpreted' Beethoven when conducting Ludwig's symphonies. Color, imagery, phrasing, tempo, rhythm, mood, tone--all there to be discovered--and chosen, interpretively, and then appropriately measured and shaded by the 'Player'. HERE is where the translating begins--and belongs.
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