French Pronunciation and Accents in Shakespeare

[alexxkay]

(I wrote this up in an email to a list of folks who've just started working on a _Henry V_ production. It occurred to me that some people who read this LJ might have useful/interesting input as well.)

I noticed at the read-through that lots of us have lines in French, but
are unclear on how to pronounce them. Certain other cast members offered
helpful corrections, but the more I think about it, the less convinced I
am that those corrections were, necessarily, correct.

There are at least three different 'French accents' we could consider:
A) How a modern Frenchman pronounces French
B) How a Frenchman in Shakespeare's time pronounced French
C) How a typical Englishman of Shakespeare's time pronounced French

I'm quite sure that A and C are very different, and I suspect that A and B
are pretty disjoint as well. I'm no expert on French in any period, but
I've read lots of period primary sources which mention French city names,
and they are clearly quite different from modern French pronunciation;
"Calais", which is now pronounced Call-ay, shows up in period English
books as "Callis" or "Callice".

In the scene with Pistol and the French Soldier, Pistol mistakes "moi" for
"moy" and "bras" for "brass". These mistakes are not very plausible if
the FS's pronunciation is in accent A.

I don't currently have a facsimile of Henry V handy, but I'm really
curious how Shakespeare spells the French dialogue therein. How much is
phonetically spelled (as he does with the funny-accent English), and how
much is 'correct'? Have 20th century editors 'corrected' his French to be
consistent with modern spelling?

Finally, of course, there's the question of what *we* are going to do
about French pronunciation in our production. Would researching and using
period pronunciations of French be worth the effort? Would it alienate
the audience, or be a cool educational element?

Comments

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Likewise, Falstaff has a lovely pun on reason/raisin in one of the Henry 4's that no longer exists, to pluck out another example. I would cheerfully conduct a whole play in the proper pronunciation, but I think that it would have a vanishingly small audience - I've done scenes in EME pronunciation before and it really is a specialist's kind of geekery.

(It is my kind of geekery, to be sure, especially since it cuts both ways - French spoofing English, English spoofing French or German.)

It is indeed also true that the questions for singing are different for spoken drama - however, the text I reference above is one of the standard and easily accessible resources for period pronunciations of various languages in any circumstance, and I assumed that some of the question-posing was rooted in just wanting to know what an answer might be, even if it never made it to the stage.

[jducoeur]

but I think that it would have a vanishingly small audience - I've done scenes in EME pronunciation before and it really is a specialist's kind of geekery.

It's a good point -- while I thought the period-pronunciation plays at Pennsic were fascinating, they were also not at all easy to follow. (And I *do* understand the period English accent passingly well.)

So I would guess that period pronunciation, while very educational, is in some tension with the desire for the audience to have an involving theater experience...

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that nagging, niggling doubt about the accuracy of all our guesses. We can be pretty sure about individual words, and maybe individual vowels and consonants, but the overall intonation--not every scholar agrees with the theory that the average Elizabethan sounded like a North Carolina mountaineer!

Remember Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, where they send the hapless grad student back to the 14th century with the wrong pronunciation in her built-in translator?

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

One of the funniest parts of that book!

[dreda.livejournal.com]

I would submit that Early Modern is vastly more accessible than Middle English - it sounds an awful lot like a strong Northeast Kingdom accent - and that it would be far more accessible than people might fear. I think the issue with Shakespearean English is that it wouldn't interfere with comprehension but would still just be a novelty to the audience and not really worth the time and effort involved in getting the actors to acquire it. Geekery still, but perhaps not quite so rarified.