Betsy Langowski, on Mastodon:

I rediscovered a video I've been thinking about for YEARS. A father and son explain how Shakespeare texts, when recited using the original pronunciation, reveal rhymes, jokes, and PUNS (!!!) that are destroyed using modern English phonetics.

Shakespeare, pronunciation, and puns? I mean, c’mon, this was an arrow shot from a well-experienced archer, targeted right at me; I am practically obligated to link to it.

David Crystal and his son Ben demonstrate what Shakespeare’s words might have sounded like 400 years ago. It’s nothing like the standard British Shakespearean (aka Received Pronunciation) accent we’ve heard all our lives. It sounded similar to Scottish or Irish to these untrained ears. Someone also told me once that some American Southern accents are pretty close to “Original Pronunciation.”

I also remember learning, while studying Shakespeare as an 18-year-old actor, that Much Ado About Nothing was a double pun, as “nothing” would have been pronounced closer to “noting,” spotlighting the ongoing spying and gossip that is central to the play’s misadventures… and also a thoroughly filthy pun on the female anatomy (no-thing…), which just gets hammered home in Hamlet’s even filthier back-and-forth with Ophelia:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia: No, my lord.

Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?

Ophelia: Ay, my lord.

Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.

Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

Ophelia: What is, my lord?

Hamlet: Nothing.

No-thing and count-ry matters… I still blush.

Speaking of, let’s not forgot this, from Twelfth Night:

Malvolio: By my life, this is my lady’s hand! These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus she makes her great P’s.

Big Willie was naughty.

Down this primrose path was I led by the nose. If you’d like to follow me, here are a few related items:

• Ben Crystal doing Hamlet’s “To Be, or not to be...” in Original Pronunciation.
• Speaking the Bright & Beautiful English of Shakespeare, an enlightening 90-minute lecture by Crystal.
• Such Ado: The Fight for Shakespeare’s Puns in The Atlantic (archived copy).
• Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation: Speeches and Scenes Performed as Shakespeare Would Have Heard Them.