> On 6 June 2010 23:27, Andrew Fildes <afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I saw the coronation speech of Henry V (1413), less than 200 years
> before Shakespeare and it is almost completely unintelligible unless
> you are familiar with Middle English.
I'm sure I've seen a great hairy fellow do something of that nature,
but I think it was Gaunt's great set-piece in Richard II ("this
sceptered isle, this earth of majesty ..."). This guy would have
sooner played Falstaff as Hal.
I'm sure it "reads" more intelligibly to the modern native English
speaker than it sounds. Of course, we're guessing at the sound of
English from those periods.
In graduate school, I had a course in 16th century English poetry --
Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney were the main ones. In one class a visiting
professor who taught Anglo-Saxon (middle English is not really
"taught" -- you just read it, slowly at first) read some of Wyatt's
poems in a manner that in his expertise might have been very close to
what it might have sounded like originally. To my ears, it sounded
more like a contemporary Irishman than anything else. (The prof was
an American, with a Scottish surname.)
At one time, I wanted to hear Shakespeare always in the manner of the
Royal Shakespeare Company. Now, as long as the acting takes its life
from the lines themselves, I don't really care. American English is
as proper a child of Elizabethan as Oxbridge. I just don't get mixing
accents. All of a sudden there is this guy and he's supposed to be
from California but he's a Brit! This happens all the time these days
on TV.
Then you have Gwynneth Paltrow playing a costume Englishwoman and Jude
Law an American from N. Carolina. Don't these countries have actors
to play their own? Of course they do, but then I don't really care if
the furriners do a good job. Jude Law made "Cold Mountain" a great
movie in my estimation, actually rivaling the book, and I finally got
why Nicole Kidman is so well-liked for her work. Still, it is just
sort of hilarious that nobody could come up with a couple Murkins to
play those roles.
Joel W.
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|