Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
First of all, I apologize for this post being a bit late. I was JUST ABOUT to upload it when the internet at my house cut out. This should not have been a surprise, given all the various technical difficulties in the US yesterday…
Anyways… today’s comic deals with one of the more interesting topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Original Pronunciation!
O.P. and the amazing ways in which it has been reconstructed, deserve a lot more space than six stick-figure comic panels, but hey, barbarically reducing things of great literary and scholarly merit to their bare bones is kind of my “thing”. At the very least, now you know that when Hamlet tries to rhyme “move” and “love”, it’s not actually him pretending to be mad.
The super-linguist in question is David Crystal, whose praises I repeatedly sung. In his O.P. endeavors he has been ably assisted by his son, Ben Crystal, an actor who, armed with Shakespeare’s O.P., can make the prologue of Romeo and Juliet sound sexier and more piratical than you could have ever imagined. If you don’t believe, just take a listen:
Seriously. That’s gorgeous. Here’s a longer video, featuring Papa Crystal and Ben at the Globe:
It’s easy to get snobbish about Shakespeare and to believe it works only when performed in the elegantly trained received pronunciation of an Ian McKellen or a Benedict Cumberbatch. But, as the Crystals point out, received pronunciation is even further away from Shakespeare’s original accent than American are from it.
Shakespeare can be performed in any accent. English, Welsh, Scottish, American, Canadian, Singaporean, I don’t care. His words still have immense power. However, when you hear it spoken in O.P., you really get a sense of what it must have been like for those first groundlings at the first Globe Theatre.
So, this old post has picked up about 700 new notes in the past couple days, which makes me happy because the world needs (a) more appreciation of OP, and (b) more appreciation of the Magnificent Linguistic Crystals. Here, let me add on a couple more links:
Passion in Practice - Theatre company founded by Ben Crystal, does awesome OP productions. Or at least I assume they’re awesome, but they haven’t come on tour to Michigan yet. What’s up with that, Ben?
Original Pronunciation - Site run by the Crystals, including tons of great resources for people who want to learn OP.
@ahsimwithsake … I would like Shakespeare to be read to in original pronunciation for like all the days.
President Barack Obama issued one of his most forceful critiques of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Friday, rejecting the candidate as a divisive liar and shooting down Trump’s claims the U.S. is on “the verge of collapse.“ Obama also provided another compelling argument against Trump’s claims about border security.
- the rise of old friends senior dog sanctuary
- Hamilton
- pokemon go
- female ghostbusters
- i don’t give a fuck im outta here Obama
- captain america civil war
- girl, black guy and latino guy leads in new star wars
- deadpool
- lemonade
- literally???! Nothing??? Else????
… . and this is just what I came up with in a pretty lazy google search in an hour, including distractions where I went down the research rabbit-hole for a bit because holy crap some of that stuff’s NEAT, guys!
And I know I’m missing stuff, because I wanted a citation for every single thing I put on there.
And like I do actually get the sudden overwhelmed feeling of EVERYTHING SUCKS? but that mindset is, at this point, literally our worst enemy. “Everything is terrible somebody do something” helplessness is what will in fact consign us to everything BEING terrible.
Everything is not terrible. In fact there are new ways, every single month, wherein new opportunities and miracles are happening and no that does not balance out the bad shit but it gives every reason to FIGHT the bad shit, and to get past the bad shit, and to make sure the bad shit ISN’T the overwhelming stain.
So.
I want EVERY single one of my followers to read this. PLEASE I know a lot of bad things happened this year and it’s ok to be upset but all of this pessimism is only making things worse
