Brushing Up Your Shakespeare
I am an avid listener of The History of English Podcast, by Kevin Stroud, which helps while away the time as I commute back and forth from Stratford to the Great Satan to the south (thank you, Immigration Canada).
Unless you’re a hopeless language nerd like me, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. The podcast starts in the dim recesses of pre-history with Proto-Indo-European and painstakingly works its way forward in space and time. After over 190 fairly lengthy episodes, Stroud is only up to the 1640s!
So it’s a real commitment to slog through the whole thing.
However (and this is where the story really begins) I have reached the Elizabethan era and there are a fair number of episodes that deal with Shakespeare and his plays, some of which I have linked below.
In these episodes Stroud touches on Shakespeare’s neologisms, “false rhymes,” Elizabethan theatre history, and other fascinating tidbits. I have a feeling that some of you reading this will find this material of real interest.
Of course, Stroud’s overarching concern is the development of the language – vocabulary, etymology, pronunciation, loan words, grammar, and so forth – so there’s a lot of geeky minutiae in these episodes. I find that kind of thing fascinating. You may not.
With that caveat, here are links to some of those episodes. (The links are to Stroud’s website where you can listen to the episodes or browse through transcripts to see if you want to listen to the whole episode. You can also learn about the episodes I have not linked.)
Episode 171: Shakespeare’s English (featuring Ben Crystal)
Ben Crystal is the world’s leading expert on “Original Pronunciation (OP)” – what Elizabethan English actually sounded like.
Covers Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Merchant of Venice.
A very long episode with an extended, uber-geeky discussion of “The English Schoolmaster” by Edward Coote, but some fun stuff on Richard II and Midsummer Night’s Dream, which you might be seeing at Stratford this season.
Episode 175: The English of Romeo and Juliet
A close examination of the use of poetry in the Bard’s great romantic tragedy.
Episode 176: All The World’s A Playhouse
How the Elizabethan theatre – not the literature but the actual playhouses and Shakespearean stagecraft – influenced the language in ways that still survive today.
That should be more than enough to get you started, but there’s more where that came from, including Hamlet!
Enjoy!
