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

[jdulac.livejournal.com]

one point about period French: the final consonant was pronounced when the word was standing alone. This is the opposite of how French is taught today -- that the final consonant is not pronounced unless it comes before a word beginning with a vowel. Historically, the principle was that it IS pronounced, except when it comes before a word that starts with a consonant.

Also, the French pronunciation of a word like "moi" was more like "mway", and the English pronunciation of the same sorta rhymes with our modern word "why," except drawn out more so you can almost hear the separate parts of the diphthong.

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Popular rumour has it that Quebecois French is more like EM French - do you suppose the director needs a research team to go to Quebec and come back with some sort of definitive answer? It might take a lot of very diligent and scholarly people...