Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief

Abstract

also highlight the persistent fragility of such exercises as ‘social connotations that are still commonly attached to [Standard Pronunciation; StP] and [Non-Standard English] accents, on and off the Shakespearean stage’ remain dominant. Massai also deftly charts the history and role of Original Pronunciation (OP) practices in diversifying Shakespearean performance style and acoustics, and finding new audiences for Shakespeare, before taking a further step back in time to explore David Garrick’s ‘Sonic Revolution’ of the eighteenth century. By combining a carefully constructed performance history with a socio-cultural study of the contemporaneous perception of accents, she thus exposes the cultural divides that existed between those who advocated for a StP Shakespeare (although just what counted as StP was highly controversial) versus those who desired a more ‘natural’ delivery, such as Garrick and the two John Palmers. As Massai explains, ‘elitist attitudes towards the ownership of Shakespeare and spoken drama in the nineteenth century’ would result in Received Pronunciation ‘reign[ing] supreme on the English stage’ for centuries to come (140). As ever, central to these discussions is a perennial concern with legitimacy, place and ‘acoustic correctness’ (140) that therefore ‘prevent[s] the urgent, acoustic emancipation or re-activation of both performer and spectator, voicer and listener’ (194). Whilst Massai acknowledges the methodological difficulties that are inherent to studying and reimagining accents from the early modern era, she convincingly argues that accents were used, if sparingly, for characterisation and sophisticated dramatic effect on the early modern stage by drawing on two central examples: the role of Evans and the Anglo-Welsh accent in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Edgar’s deliberate use of a Southern accent whilst confronting Oswald in King Lear. As Massai powerfully concludes, ‘we tend to not only underestimate the versatility of English accents and dialects as they were deployed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the early modern stage but [also] the extent to which inflected voices carried social and cultural meanings’ (188). These meanings continue to be shaped and reformed as ‘politically charged acts of self-(re)fashioning’ (190). This accessibly written book is grounded in a thoroughly researched performance and sociolinguistic history of vital conversations that continue to shape current practices and approaches towards the intricate relationships and power dynamics between accents, theatre-making, and Shakespeare. It is an important read for students and scholars of Shakespearean performance, past and present, and the cultural and political history of sociolinguistics.