The New Murrey and Blue blog

The other morning I saw an interesting news item about what Shakespeare’s original audiences heard when they watched his plays or heard his sonnets. The two gentlemen concerned in the news item were British linguist David Crystal) and his actor son Ben Crystal.

I gather that David and Ben have been entertaining us with this for some years now, although they are certainly new to me. The original pronunciation—or OP as it’s called in the relevant circles—seems to be an intriguing mixture of all sorts of local accents—and the end result (which you can hear here) is surprisingly easy to follow. It didn’t sound in the least like a “foreign” language!

Anyway, if you want to learn/hear more, you can find it here and here, which latter has an amusing video of our two Queens Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeths?) having a conversation. There are many other sites too, of course.

The clips are well worth watching/listening to.