One of the best classes I ever took in college was The History and Structure of the English Language, where one of the many, many fascinating things our lexiconnoisseur professor revealed to us like an endless buffet of the best intellectual candy was that the English accent in the time of Shakespeare is closest to what we would now, in America, identify with International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Thankfully, some theater productions do occasionally experiment with presenting the Bard’s work with the sounds of contemporary speech. This video from the University of Kansas is of a production advised in it’s Original Pronuciation efforts by professor Paul Meier. Probably the most exciting thing about this to me is that now all those awkward couplets actually rhyme again.
(via Kottke.)
