KU Theatre - Students perform Shakespeare in original pronunciation

KU Theatre professor Paul Meier, in collaboration with Linguist David Crystal, are staging the first-ever American rendition of a Shakespeare play in its original pronunciation. Here, KU Theatre students rehearse a scene in original pronunciation from the play "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

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[Mazdak1]

this would be much better if they were actually.. dressed the part. people today are such slobs :(

[KU]

@Mazdak1 This is from a rehearsal session. You can see some examples of the costumes from the performance itself at lawrence.com/news/2010/nov/18/­review-midsummer-nights-dream/

[Yehudittx]

@benjinewton that's kind of the point. That's how English people talked back then. It sounds Irish to you because that accent survives to this day in parts of Ireland and Northwest England. Shakespearean actors didn't sound like Lawrence Olivier. it was popular entertainment.

[muskndusk]

In Shakespeare's time "on the ground/I see no wound" the words ground/wound would have rhymed. The actress fails in her rendition of OP, imho.

[EsraRanter]

David and Ben Crystal and Paul Meir are to be applauded for their this project, as should be the Globe Theatre . I am a character role playing historical re-enactor and find for playing my more serious characters I attempt C17 accents, though not as profficently as those KU students and Professional Actors. I find it liberating and more expressive, it removes the polite Victorian cultural cleansing and lets the character be their more earthy selves.

[EsraRanter]

@stigler30 Great English Bibles of the Time, the Geneva and the King James, would most probably heve been read and preached upon in very similar accents (speech was more regionally variant then) with those Tudor Promnounciacions common to all. David Crystal. Paul Meir and KU drama students have made the language of the Globe Theatre, Drake's Sailors, Elizabth's Court and Jamestown and New England live again. Brilliant.

[dennisjiewenliu]

Irish/Pirate accent!!! The ansere to meh prairs! xDD

[potpie921]

Amazing!!

[noamben2]

YOU'RE TEARING ME APART LYSANDER!!

[wissam24]

@scottydu81 Shakespeare's writing of course being one of the pinnacles of English (and by extension American) literature. Good enough for sitcoms? That's because the sitcoms are copying him, badly.

[wissam24]

@stigler30 Do you have a pronunciation guide for the King James Bible, it being a many editioned work itself? Or any source to back that claim up?

[16MattC]

How do we know that this is what people sounded like? There were no recordings to know for sure so we are only guessing?

[evilmick66]

@stigler30 Who's to say the King James Bible wasn't pronounced like this?