"Spayk the Speech Oy Prithee": Dialects of Shakespeare's England and the American South

In their 1986 television series, The Story of English, Robert MacNeil, Robert McCrum, and William Cran make reference to the belief that a dialect of Elizabethan England survives in the Appalachian Mountains. While they refute this notion (countering that the Appalachian dialect is Scots-Irish in origin), they contend that dialects in Eastern seaboard communities from Chesapeake Bay to the Carolinas have evolved relatively slowly since the of the English settlers of the Stuart era. Longtime director and teacher with the Royal Shakespeare Company, John Barton, who is interviewed in The Story of English, says in his 1985 television series Playing Shakespeare that the American accent is closer to the Elizabethan accent than current British Received Pronunciation. These two claims and Assistant Professor Alexander Harrington's work with Southern students on speeches from Shakespeare's plays prompted the formation of a research group consisting of Professor Harrington and a number of students. The group conducted research on early modern English and dialects of the Southeastern United States. In the Playing Shakespeare program and his book based on it, Barton points out that the i in time is a diphthong and that Elizabethans pronounced it so that the two constituents were perceptible to the ear. (1) Later in the book, he spells Shakespeare's pronunciation of the word as Tay-eme. The contemporary English long i in time is a diphthong--rendered by linguist Helge Kokeritz as [ai]. In his book, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, Kokeritz holds that the diphthong was subtly different in early modern English. According to Kokeritz, in early modern English (from approximately the late fifteenth century to the seventeenth century), the first constituent of the diphthong was either the [^] of cut or the [e] of the second syllable of better. He renders the diphthong as [ei]. (2) This sound is somewhere between the contemporary English long i and the [ai] in boy and coin. As evidence of this, Kokeritz points to the rhymes die: joy: annoy, exploit: right (1 Henry VI, 2.3.4), groin: swine (Hamlet, 3.3.24); the puns bile: boil (Twelfth Night, 2.5.2-4), fine: foin (Comedy of Errors, 2.2.73), vice: voice (Cymbeline, 2.3.33); the spelling of smile as smoile in the Folio version and smoyle in the Quarto version of King Lear, voyage as viage (Hamlet, 3.3.24), employ spelled imply in the quarto of 2 Henry IV, 4.2.24; and imply and employ listed as homonyms by orthographers Hodges (1643) and Cooper (1685). (3) Barton focuses on the i in the word time because of the importance of the concept of in Shakespeare's plays. While he does not spend as much (or Tay-eme) on other sounds, he does recite seven lines of the Act 4 chorus from Henry V and reproduces five lines in the book. In the book, Barton phonetically spells now.... ne-ow. The contemporary English diphthong in now and house is pronounced [au]. Helge Kokeritz renders the early modern English pronunciation of the same diphthong as [eu], a sound between ow in house and the oo in loo--essentially, the sound in the much-maligned Canadian about. (4) In listening to Barton on his TV program, the authors perceive his pronunciation of the diphthong in now as the sound Kokeritz represents as [[??]u]. In the transcription of Romeo and Juliet he did for Shakespeare's Globe, found in his Pronouncing Shakespeare, David Crystal uses the same representation for the ou in household. (5) In his transcription, David Crystal only uses phonetic symbols in the spelling of words whose pronunciation was different in early modern English from what it is in contemporary British Received Pronunciation (RP). He renders both and Verona as bo[??]th and Vero[??]na. Since in contemporary British RP, the o in these words is pronounced [o[??]] and not [ai] or [e], it is reasonable to assume that Crystal is indicating a longer sound than is currently used. …

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