Рет қаралды 2,167
My readings of Shakespeare's sonnets in Early Modern English pronunciation continue with Sonnets 71-74 including the famous "that time of year thou may'st in me behold".
These sonnets form a closely bound unit, so it made sense to read them in sequence. I used a type of speech largely based on the dialect recorded by Robinson (1617), though I preserve the WAIT/MATE distinction more systematically, and I do not diphthongize long /ō/ before /ld/.
Some notes on pronunciation:
In sonnet 71, note the Quarto spelling "vildest" for "vilest". This /d/ appears to have been a real thing, and I have so pronounced it here. Aesthetically it seems to provide an echo of "world" in the same and previous lines. Note also the rhyme "gone/moan" which appears to rest on the GOAT vowel in both words (which they had in Alexander Gil's dialect) although the short vowel in "gone" was already quite common by the time the sonnets were published.
In sonnet 72, over half the rhymes are imperfect in a modern accent: prove/love, desert/impart, this/is, forth/worth. In the early 17th century, there existed pronunciations making all of these perfect rhymes. "This/is" rests on the strong form of is under heavy stress, which retained voiceless /s/. Prove/love almost certainly rests on /ʊ/ in both words, though there's reason to think that /ʊ~u:/ could be accepted as a full rhyme in the period. Forth/worth rests on /ʊ/ in both words. "Forth" is quite commonly recorded with /ʊ/ by authors on pronunciation in the period. Impart/desert rests on a Middle English sound-change of /ĕr → ăr/ just like ME "derk, hert" became modern "dark, heart". This change appears to have been resisted at the highest levels of education in Romance words, as only a minority of orthoepists really show the change there. (Hodges in "The English Primrose" in 1644 shows it pretty fully though). Resistance to it became more and more strong over the course of the later 17th and early 18th centuries, so that saying "sarvent" for "servent" by the late 1700s was seen as vulgar. In Modern English, only a few Romance loanwords survive with /ar/ intact, like "sergeant", "varnish" (cf. French "vernis") and the British pronunciation of "clerk". A few others survive in buried form like "varmint", varsity ( → "University") and even "tarnation".
In sonnet 74, note that "knife" still has the initial /k/ sound and so alliterates with coward and conquest.
I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period (you might call it "Original Pronunciation" if you must, but it is not to be confused with Crystal's reconstruction). I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:
/ azforeman
I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.
Have questions? Check my FAQ
/ 64053058