Customer Reviews

Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The title of my review states clearly what I was looking for in this book, and what I had found difficult to extract from the standard scholarly works of Kökeritz, Dobson, and Cercignani. I award this book four stars because it (and it alone, as far as I know) contains (buried in its chatty commentary about the weather, how the author doesn't get nervous before giving lectures, etc.) this simple desideratum. If you've ever felt frustrated that you couldn't find the 2-5 pp. account for Shakespeare equivalent to such easy-to-find information (on a basic level) as "How to pronounce Chaucer" or "The sounds of Italian," this book is a decent remedy. It would have been better (both for usefulness and book sales) for Crystal & Cambridge to have brought out, instead of this diffuse and incomplete large-font-with-lots-of-white-space-between-the-lines book, an even slenderer (but far more detailed and thorough) volume entitled "Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation: A Practical Guide, With Transcriptions." (Perhaps Crystal, because he is not an expert, was too modest to go this route, but the experts have conspicuously failed to provide this for teachers, readers, and actors.) If you want the meat of the reconstruction, actual phonetic information is contained only on pp. 13, 37-41, 47-54, 60-92, 115, 175-181 (and could have been distilled into a five-page handout). The rest of the book will mainly interest theater people who want additional behind-the-scenes commentary on how the production happened (dealing with actors' personalities, what the audience thought, etc.).

Anyone interested in things Shakespearian will not be able to put this book down. I was astonished how interesting it was, and informative.

Just what the book title said: it's about the experiment of OP in Globe. Very interesting, and I liked the author's style: lucid, clear and with humor. Very clear explanation of THE question ("How do you know?").
Heartily recommended to the interested in the topic.

I have enjoyed all of David Crystal's books that I have read. He is an excellent linguist, whom I greatly admire for his ability to communicate effectively to a wide audience of varying linguistic experiences. However, this book is a simple narrative description of a project, not much more than a diary. The linguistic impact of this issue would accommodate one article in some journal, certainly not a whole book. If linguistics is your interest, choose another book.

This book might not be the most inventive from a linguist's point of view, but for those, like myself, who are fascinated with modern Shakespeare performance and the Globe Theater, it is quite enjoyable. A welcome addition to any Shakespeare library.