Shakespeare William - Pronouncing Shakespeares Words

Pronouncing Shakespeare's Words

Pronouncing
Shakespeare's Words

A GUIDE FROM A TO ZOUNDS

DALE COYE

ROUTLEDGE

NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2002 by

Routledge

29 West 35th Street

New York, NY 10001

www.routledge-ny.com

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane

London EC4P 4EE

www.routledge.co.uk

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

Copyright 2002 by Dale Coye

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

1O 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pronouncing Shakespeare's words : a guide from A to Zounds / Dale Coye.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-415-94182-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

I. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616-Language-Glossaries, etc. 2. English language- Early modem, I500-I700-Pronunciation-Dictionaries. I. Title.

PR3081. C87 2002

822.3'3-dc21 2002009622

Contents

Preface

First, what this book is not: It is not about how Shakespeare might have pronounced his words four hundred years ago. It is a guide to how they are pronounced today. It is a book for students, actors, readers, and teachers of Shakespeare who find themselves wishing there were pronunciation notes for all of the unfamiliar words they otherwise must guess at or take the time to look up in a dictionary.

Readers of Shakespeare, especially those confronting him for the first time, often feel overwhelmed by his language. Much of this has to do with unfamiliar meanings, but part of the difficulty also arises from questions of pronunciation. This is something which actors obviously must struggle with, and this book is certainly intended for them, both at the amateur and professional levels, but by far the largest number of people reading Shakespeare do so in classrooms, usually with very little understanding of how to speak the lines or pronounce the unfamiliar words. One professor who read this manuscript commented that Shakespeare classes at the college level, and English courses in general, seldom include any effort on the part of the teacher to have students read out loud. Surely this is unfortunate, for when students are encouraged to speak the verse themselves, their experience inevitably becomes richer, more personal and immediate than would otherwise be the case if hearing the language only through lectures, films, or tapes. This Guide then, was written with students in mind, to help them confidently negotiate metrical and pronunciation difficulties on their own. But it was also written for teachers, both at the high school and college levels, who are themselves often uncertain about many of these archaic or literary words. Here they will find an authoritative, up-to-date, comprehensive guide to pronunciation. The hope is that this volume will encourage teachers to read with their students, helping them to discover the rhythms of the verse as they learn to savor the sound of the spoken word.

Anyone who has ever opened a volume of Shakespeare knows how quickly the barrage of unfamiliar words begins. Although obscure meanings are noted in any good edition, no Shakespeare glossary or edition of his work offers any consistent guidance to the pronunciation of obsolete or literary words, leaving the reader to struggle with the dictionaries. But dictionaries are not always very helpful. Some of these Shakespearean words are not listed in the average college dictionary or even in the thickest unabridged volumes. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists nearly all of them with the British pronunciation, but for some archaic words gives only meanings without pronunciation guidance. Furthermore, proper names are not included in the OED, and if they are given in other dictionaries, it would be hopeless to expect that the many obscure people and places mentioned in Shakespeare would be listed.

Dictionaries can also be misleading. Consider Shylock's cry of triumph:

This is the fool who lent out money gratis. (MV 3.3.2)

Gratis is a literary word rarely used in our everyday, spoken language. Students seeking advice on its pronunciation would find different answers depending on where they looked (symbols have been translated to the system used in this volume).

In this case, the dictionaries generate more questions than they answer: Are all three pronunciations really used today, and if so, by whom? Are some of them old- fashioned? Is one pronunciation more often heard in England and another in the United States? What method did each of these dictionaries use to determine which pronunciations are actually in use?

To give another example, a reader seeking the pronunciation of quietus in Hamlet's To be or not to be soliloquy will find only one pronunciation given in nearly every dictionary, /kw EE tus/, although two other variants are commonly used by scholars and actors, /kw AY tus/ and /kwee AY tus/. What are the implications of this discrepancy? Is there a right and wrong way to pronounce it?

Then there is the question of bade. Whenever a group of students or even a company of professional actors rehearses a Shakespeare play there is always an argument over the pronunciation of this word, as well as of wont, adieu, wassail, zounds and many others commonly found in Shakespeare's works. In all of these cases an appeal to the authority of the dictionaries will only yield a list of variants without further comment.

Recordings are also of limited value as sources. First, because most of them were produced in Great Britain, reinforcing the unfortunate tendency of North American students to shift into their notion of a British accent whenever they speak Shakespeare's lines. Second, because actors on recordings sometimes use obsolete or even incorrect pronunciations. Peize in one recording of King John was pronounced to rhyme with size, rather than as /peez/ or /payz/. Counterfeit ends in /-feet/ in some of the recordings, an unusual pronunciation in the United Kingdom today and unheard of in the United States.