I do really wish more Shakespeare was performed in an original accent, as there's an awful lot of rhymes and jokes that don't work in modern pronunciation. Like "hour to hour" being pronounced like "whore to whore", which suddenly makes that line quite a bit funnier.
I do like that he mentioned being asked to perform using his native Welsh accent in the OP's video. Shakespeare was after all the playright for people of every standing, and it feels a bit daft to posh it all up.
> I do really wish more Shakespeare was performed in an original accent, as there's an awful lot of rhymes and jokes that don't work in modern pronunciation. Like "hour to hour" being pronounced like "whore to whore", which suddenly makes that line quite a bit funnier.
Things like this, among others, continue to convince me that reading Shakespeare plays in high school is largely a waste of time. Unless you have an excellent teacher, who explains the puns, the historical context, and other things, it's about as useful as looking at storyboards of a movie instead of watching the movie itself.
I remember the footnotes in one Shakespeare play I read at school saying something like "[2] this is a humourous reference to Christopher Marlowe's contemporaneous play..." which I sort of rolled my eyes at and remarked how that was a bit of a stretch and was anyone really supposed to notice that.
My teacher drew the analogy to Scary Movie (which was relatively new at the time) and how we could all enjoy it just fine without footnotes explaining "this is a humourous reference to contemporaneous horror film Scream..." etc. It suddenly struck me the difference between studying culture historically and actually experiencing it "live". This analogy has only gotten better with time because I probably would need footnotes to get half the jokes in Scary Movie nowadays.
My favorite example of this was actually from my middle school days. We read Romeo and Juliet from our textbook in class, and I hated it.
In the course of getting ready for a test I read over the Cliff Notes on the play as well. Much to my surprise it it described several humorous scenes which were completely gone in the version we read. It turns out they were cut from the middle school version because they were considered too bawdy for us.
In addition, I think it's absurd for your first exposure to any of the plays to be reading it; so much of the dialog only makes sense when being spoken. The homework assignments should never be "read Act I", it should be "watch the first 45 minutes of movie version <blah>". Even a disengaged viewer will get more out of watching it than having their first experience be reading it.
When I was in school we were never assigned reading Shakespeare as homework, it was always done by reading it out loud in class, rotating parts every several lines, with the teacher interjecting whenever something needed to be explained.
Hearing a kid struggling to read Shakespeare is even worst that reading it in your head. Acting is hard. But most kids can't even read out loud a newspaper add decently.
Ben notes in the (second) extended video that perhaps 80% of Elizabethans were illiterate and that plays are to be performed, not read.
He'd prefer that Shakespeare be introduced first by the drama department in early secondary school so that kids as young as 13 or 15 could perform Romeo and Juliet at their intended character ages - thus bringing the work to life.
And that only once they've experienced the energy of performance that later in final years of 16-17 should they study it formally in English Literature classes.
Interesting, that sounds like the perfect solution to above problem.
This reminds me of reading I needed to learn C++ to make games back in the early 2000s, because that was what all games were made with. I probably missed 3-4yrs of programming exposure because I found C++ so impenetrable from the local library books I got on the subject.
Working from appreciation of the subject matter, to a light introduction to the inner workings, to the hairy details of how it was all put together seems to be the ideal approach.
Although this analogy may be a bit more niche and involved, the idea of being forced to read Shakespeare at a young age before being able to really appreciate the plays in production, with all of it's subtleties, seems comparable to attempting to pushing their heads into C++ before they appreciate the basic mechanics of game construction.
This is a reason to read it out loud. Reading difficulties are going undiagnosed because teachers seldom hear students read, especially past the first couple years. Even in the more advanced tracks (ability levels), many students are unable to smoothly read with proper phrasing.
It really is torture to listen to some people read.
That's my point: don't use Shakespeare for that. Use something simple and agreeable, even if you read it in a terrible way. Read video game news, celebrity gossip, science development, sport results, etc.
At my highschool we read all of Shakespeare plays. Not one paragraph a class. Not one play a year. We did a play in a week or two. We also had reading lists for summer and Christmas breaks. We were expected to read constantly. Reading is good. Forcing kids to read something they don't like, or perhaps do not fully understand, is good for them. Being able to sit down and read a hundred pages is the more useful thing anyone can get from school. And it is the thing that is least taught in modern schools.
If your goal is simply to use the plays as a whip the students self-flagellate with until they can tolerate joyless reading, there are probably other texts better suited for the purpose. If your goal is to teach Shakespeare, the students will likely not develop an appreciation or an understanding of the significance of the plays by simply reading them.
The literal "old school" goal was to indoctrinate kids with a standard background in English literature, a common knowledge, to allow them to better communicate amongst peers of similar backgrounds. The start of this is a grounding in words like Shakespeare. In the past it would have also included the bible.
Someone can read a play and not understand it. That happens. But to understand a work you first have to at least read it. Watching can be a poor substitute, but good luck finding any modern production that performs an entire Shakespeare piece. Most everything on modern stages is heavily edited for time.
It's pretty strongly believed that they were cut in Shakespeare's day too. Something to do with limited legal opening hours and other things that had to go in the programme meaning there simply wouldn't have been time.
I have also been told that the reason Macbeth is so short is that it was probably transcribed from the working (cut) copy of the play rather than the original draft.
Reading is fine, and reading challenging material is fine, but what pedagogical value are students deriving from binging all of Shakespeare's plays, if there isn't a lot of discussion and contextual explanation to go along with it? Just saying "we read hundreds of pages of words" sounds a lot like "uphill both ways", without that.
I'm also curious as to what else y'all read, given that Shakespeare wrote 30+ plays, and at a rate of one every week or two, that's just about an entire school year spent on nothing else.
Being able to sit down and read a hundred pages is the more useful thing anyone can get from school.
I strongly disagree. A solid base in mathematics, critical thinking, and the ability to say "I'm not getting anything out of this, I should switch to something else" are far more important.
You can't solve problems without knowing stuff. At least, unless you want to reinvent necessary background.
Yes, one can read without doing any critical thinking. But scientific and technical literature invite it. And indeed, require it for real comprehension. Good fiction, too.
A very narrow, specific kind of critical thinking comes from problem solving. Reading critically is a thing, and certainly part of being a well-rounded critical thinker.
> Reading is just consumption. You don't have to do any critical thinking
If that were true, you would believe anything and everything you read. I doubt that, barring Trump tweets, I will read a more ignorant statement all week.
Stop taking such an absurdly uncharitable interpretation of what people are writing. This is HN, don't assume others are idiots and then move on from there.
How the hell are you supposed to gain abilities in math or thinking critically without the ability to sit down and read?
I'm genuinely confused as to the worldview that says that the earlier doesn't come with the later as a necessary cause, unless we're talking absolutely trivial levels of math/critical thinking...
Surely you understand that I'm objecting to the idea of sitting down and forcing yourself to read Shakespeare with the justification that forcing yourself to read is internally a good thing, right?
I mean, it's right there in what I wrote. How you jump to an insane, uncharitable interpretation that I'm advocating not reading is beyond me.
Math and critical thinking are great, but being good at those things is means little if you cannot express yourself or learn from others in your field. That requires reading.
I was forced to read Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte in 4th grade. Luckily I already loved reading, but the experience nearly made me entirely reject the idea of reading for pleasure.
I don't think we ever had reading homework of Shakespeare; I suspect our teachers knew it would never happen. Instead, we read aloud in class, sometimes rotating roles in class to make sure everyone got a turn to speak.
(Naturally, this didn't do any favors for anyone, except when someone got to exclaim "BRING ME MY LONG SWORD, HOE!" in class.)
I remember that exact moment in class. Ms. Zank smirked just a bit because she knew how the student was going to read that line. Then we had a nice class discussion about how it was more similar to a cry of "land ho!" or some such.
Shakespeare is most effectively taught, not just by speaking it, but also with acting - they are plays after all. The poetry suggests action, and I think it really helps to understand a character or scene if you're physically submitting yourself to the emotion of the dialogue.
Yeah but teachers don't have the time to train 30 impatient and still incompetent youngsters to the art of acting in the few hours they get.
Without at least a year of practice (and even then...), the results will be atrocious, humiliating even, and the students will be even less convinced.
You should not study Shakespeare in school, it needs a lot of things to be appreciated, and hence it's a terrible material given the school constraints.
Same here. That's still my favorite adaptation of the work, given the amount of work that went into making it stylistically modern while still fitting the original lines.
Yeah, I remember hating Ruy Blas for the entire year. Then we got forced to see it in a play. It was nice.
When you read it, most people follow the lexical rhythm. It makes not sense. You are supposed to speak naturally, with the emotion and speed matching the context.
But again, I never had any teachers remotely good enough to realize that and do anything about it.
On key problem is that you need to be really good to be a decent teacher, and after sampling 11 schools because of my father's work, probably encountered 2 teachers that had the skills and cared enough.
This is carried over from a pre-AV time when books were the only media you had. The curriculum just needs to be updated (and probably has been, in many places).
The only one I found funny at school was Twelfth Night, and the rest were extremely arduous. I went to college in Stratford Upon Avon and I found his writing so much more interesting once I actually got to spend more time learning about the context and the period.
One of my high school English teachers really went above and beyond when it came to teaching Shakespear. Took the time to explain everything, showed us movie versions and so much more. Also walked us through a bunch of other pretty complex literary works making hen really easy to digest. It’s a shame he died this last year, we really need more teachers like him. I’ve never seen a class where all the students were truly excited to read Devine Comedy.
The Divine Comedy in particular gets a lot more amusing for students once they learn it's self-insert fanfiction with the writer's enemies written into humiliating positions.
You are arguing that people shouldn't be exposed to something if they can't understand all of it, or if they don't have a good enough teacher. First of all, everyone finishes their first reading of Shakespeare with a partial understanding. Second, how sad is that for the people who don't get to read it because they don't have a "great" teacher-- never mind how you decide who that is.
I do agree it is better acted than read, because that is how it was meant to be presented. But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.
Oh, I don't know. There is also the very real possibility that it will seem hopelessly obtuse to the student who will never approach it again. IMO, a poor introduction to a subject is worse than neutral.
And maybe that's okay, too, but high school isn't the only place that many students will get to experience Shakespeare and if it can't be done right there might be more damage than good done.
There is a difference between not exposing a student to something that they cannot understand at first glance and not having a teacher who doesn't understand the matter themselves try to muddle their way through a presentation the material. Making it part of standard curriculum means that we will have a heavy dosage of the latter, whereas making it optional means that only those teachers who truly have a passion for the thing will present it (theoretically, of course).
Then again, I'm in America so our teachers don't have time to teach anything that isn't showing up on a standardized test, and for me this debate is purely academic :)
Students choose to never approach it again at good schools and bad. Should teachers that we don't think are good enough to teach Shakespeare teach Our Town instead?
My education was deficient; I don't understand the Our Town reference :)
But in general, yes - if I were thrown into a classroom as a substitute teacher for a month, I certainly wouldn't teach Shakespeare, because I'm not anywhere near qualified to do so. My wife probably would be - she's the one who enlightened me about a few things in Romeo & Juliet that were completely opaque to me when I read it. But I'd probably focus on the things I felt qualified to teach without reading from a Teacher's Guide To Keeping Students Awake During Hamlet, or whatnot.
This is highly compatible to mathematics education in the US, which is largely taught by uninspired teachers who don’t quite understand what they are teaching.
Second, how sad is that for the people who don't get to read it because they don't have a "great" teacher
It's not sad at all. You don't regret what you don't know you missed. Let them discover it on their own, from a better source, at a later date.
Shakespeare study was one of the worst periods in my education. It's boring, irrelevant, and to this day I don't understand the obsession. I'd rather that any child read the full works of Steinbeck than anything by Shakespeare.
It reminds me of the way we learned geometric proofs in 8th grade. When I finally got into proper algebraic proofs in college it was an indescribable joy.
If you think it is irrelevant there is probably a lot of things going on in contemporary books and plays that are going over your head. Which is fine. But why keep others away from it because you didn't like it?
If you think it is irrelevant there is probably a lot of things going on in contemporary books and plays that are going over your head
I don't watch plays, and I doubt I'm missing many Shakespeare references in modern books. Even if I am, I don't lament what I don't know I'm missing.
But why keep others away from it because you didn't like it?
Because it's an enormous time sink that could be better used on other things. Why turn so many kids off of plays, poetry, and appreciation of literature because of an obsession with one playwright?
> You are arguing that people shouldn't be exposed to something if they can't understand all of it
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as that extreme. You don't have to understand all of it, but I - and I suspect, so did many of my peers - understood so little of it that the time was effectively wasted. There is other literature available that would likely have served us much better.
> But a modern audience is going to require explanation regardless of accent.
Exactly - and without some explanation, it's very much like reading something in a foreign language.
I know you weren't being that extreme, but I think the point you are making could be made to dumb down a lot education.
Should we not teach kids the best programming languages because most teachers really aren't very good programmers?
Regarding explanation, I have never seen a Shakespeare book without a lot of annotation.
> Should we not teach kids the best programming languages because most teachers really aren't very good programmers?
I would argue that a bad teacher teaching a good language can do a lot more harm to a novice programmer than not learning it at all.
My band conductor was fond of saying that practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. It can be harder to replace bad habits with good habits than to instill good habits from the start.
> First of all, everyone finishes their first reading of Shakespeare with a partial understanding.
At best. I knew people at public school whose major projects were coloring maps with colored pencils. They didn't have to draw the borders, they just had to color the countries correctly. It was literally a complicated color by numbers.
Shakespeare's Globe in London did full OP productions (on the main stage) of Romeo and Juliet (2004, [1]) and Troilus and Cressida (2005, [2]). David and Ben were advisors. Highly recommended if you ever get the chance to see something similar; besides the rhyming/punning issues you mention, it's a lot brisker and more natural-sounding.
Interestingly, the prologue for R+J announces that the play "is now the two hours' traffic of our stage". It's rare for an uncut modern production to clock in much below 3.
Ahh that sounds so amazing! Perhaps Stratford, ON will give that a shot someday.
I can't imagine the original productions clocked in much under four, what with vendors selling pasties between each act and the occasional dancing bear. It points to a different concept of time: a modern Brit wouldn't dare describe a four hour affair as "two hours" but someone from Southern Europe might...
I'm pretty sure intervals weren't a thing in Shakespeare's day; he certainly didn't write with them in mind.
Which isn't to say that nobody was selling pasties, of course. Theatres were very much public spaces back then (and the Globe's yard still feels like one).
I would also recommend that if you want to find a way into enjoying Shakespeare again after it was most likely ruined for you in school, to watch the comedy Upstart Crow, made by the BBC. It's a good-humoured jab at Shakespeare's writing and actually helped get me interested in it again.
I remember reading on some listicle website that the original English accent used by the commoners in that time period was much closer to the modern American accent. Something about how the accents of colonies tend to become fixed in time. And a quick google for "original english accent american" turns up a few links supporting that idea. I'm trying to reconcile that with this here. Is this performance based on newer, more nuanced evidence? Or maybe this is more specifically the accent of Londoners, while the average rural Englishman would be closer to the American accent? Or perhaps what he was speaking really is very close to the modern American accent and I just have a tin ear (definitely shouldn't rule that out!)?
Moreover, I'm curious how one finds evidence to support what historic accents were like. It's not like it shows up in writing, after all. Is it by studying all the accents of the neighbors and trying to extrapolate? Maybe someone stumbled across a 17th century pronunciation guide? robotmay on here commented that some of the puns and rhymes only work in this sort of accent, which is a particularly clever way of gathering evidence.
Well, it's not entirely unlike a general American accent. First of all, it's rhotic. Then, some of the vowels sound more American than their contemporary English / British counterparts.
Apart from a few dropped h's, which could be attributed to London, where Shakespeare spent much of his life, it's not unlikely that colonists in North America sounded pretty much like this. It's been more than 400 years since then and languages change over time, sometimes drastically so.
One way to research accents is by examining language in poems, (if these exist for the time and language), rhymes in particular. Another is by analogy and extrapolation. Writing systems and their development over time can help, too, if there's some sort of phoneme-grapheme mapping in the language at hand.
Last time I heard people from Québec I was astonished by one of them speaking with such a strong accent that it seemed a foreigner language if I didn't make conscious effort to listen to her. I wonder when will the two variants will diverge enough to be considered different languages.
Do you have have a source for [1]? I want to know from were the commenters where from.
They aren't different languages, they are both French, just with different accents.
There are some expressions (locutions) that differ in France and in Québec, but I don't believe this makes the two mutually incomprehensible.
It's not as if France has one single pure accent that everyone can understand. How about the St Denis accent for example? To say nothing of all these accents.[0]
In addition, while I lived in Brussels, I did some volunteer work with the English-speaking theatrical groups (American Theater Company, English Comedy Club, and Irish Theatre Group), who had all gotten together and purchased an old beer factory for set production and rehearsal space, as well as a small stage location across the courtyard.
For one particular production, the volunteer lighting designer was also a professional lighting designer for Francophone theater, and was with the touring version of the French Language "Lion King" production. He explained to me that he was volunteering with our group because he wanted an opportunity to practice his English.
I got drafted in to be his assistant [0], and we talked a bit about what the world is like for professional theater company members in the French-language world.
One striking thing he told me was that there was a rule that regardless of how different places in the world might speak French on the street or elsewhere in their lives, when it came to how French was spoken on the stage, they insisted that it must be the official Parisian style as regulated by Le Académie française.
So, here was a Belgian, who spoke French in the Bruxellois style, but he was also able to speak it in the Parisian style, and he knew and understood the difference and why there was a difference. And he could explain it to me, a "dumb American in Brussels".
[0] Turned out that he was due to travel to Canada shortly for the opening of the "Lion King" there, and wouldn't be in town for the actual production. So, I got to learn how to operate a simple analog lighting board.
I lived in Brussels for almost eight years. I know that when I traveled to France on occasion, they would usually look at me like I was a total moron, and I never understood why.
I'm sure part of it was that I was a classic "dumb American" in Paris, but Belgian natives also explained to me that they speak French much more quickly down there, and anyone who speaks it more slowly (as is done in Brussels and virtually all other Francophone places in the world, including most of the rest of France), likewise get treated like they are morons.
So, the Belgians certainly noticed that French has changed over time and it has changed more quickly in Paris over the other parts of the world, and they were helpful enough to share this information with me.
I don't guarantee that it's talking about Canadian French specifically, but Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GUBIJ8/ ) has some discussion of the relationship between new world French and France French, including a contemporary source remarking on how "good" (= upper class Parisian) new world French was at the time.
First in 1759 the French lost the war against the English in North America.[0] Canada, then known as 'New France,' came under English rule, and all the French elites that had the means to leave went back to France.[1]
The connection to France was severed. Thirty years later in France society would be upended by the revolution.
Now in the 18th century Paris there were two 'usages' or accents in current use. The 'bel usage' and the 'grand usage.'
The 'bel usage' was spoken by the monarchy down to the common people. The 'grand usage' was used for public speeches and by priests and politicians etc.
The bel usage was more familiar, more a relaxed pronunciation, with many elisions («leux valets», «sus la table») while the 'grand usage' was more 'pointu', that is to say more precisely pronounced, picking out each syllable more individually, with fewer elision and dipthongs.
The linguist Jean-Denis Gendron, in his book 'D’où vient l’accent des Québécois? Et celui des Parisiens ?'[2][3] argues that after the third estate won the revolution, they purposefully adopted the 'grand usage,' perhaps as a means to distinguish themselves from the old order.
Ironically, people in Québec now speak a derivative of the 'bel usage', which has evolved over time, but more slowly because Québec culture was very conservative even up to the 1950s.
It is said that when the king famously said: 'la loi c'est moi', it probably came out like: 'la loé, c'est moé' sounding like a Québecois.
You've repeated the claim that Quebecois has changed "more slowly" or "less" than French has, but for all your historical discussion, you've provided absolutely no evidence or even a metric for similarity.
I do not believe any such evidence or metric exists. A language is a point in a space with many dimensions; while on any particular dimension it is easy to evaluate whether more or less change has occurred, this is not possible overall.
When I think accents stuck in time in American English I think of the outer banks around the Carolinas, or tidewater like Tangier island, rather than say Cape Cod.
There was a documentary produced back in the 1980's called, "The Story of English" and it explored the origins and evolution of the language. Episodes 2 and 3 focus on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the arrival of Raleigh in America. Cool stuff :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7D...
I mean, most of what we think of as "the English accent" is pretty much a contrived accent to begin with. Received Pronunciation (or BBC English) is just that. You learn it.
Kind of like the Mid-Atlantic accent you hear in old movies.
It is kind of weird, there are several accents basically created to give the illusion of class.
Yeah, there's the Tangier Island in Virginia where people have an accent that some claim is closer to the English accent spoken in pre-colonial times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16320595
I've been to Tangier and the accent there is truly strange. It has a very archaic sound, for sure. And it's not just the accent, there are grammatical differences as well. One branch of my family is from the Great Smoky Mountains region of Appalachia. The accents and speech there also have archaic features due to isolation and influences from Scottish, Irish, and Welsh settlers.
Some years ago, I read Ben's father David Crystal's book "Pronouncing Shakespeare" and it has a whole chapter on how they reconstructed the original pronunciation. In Shakespeare's time, they did, in fact, write about elocution quite a bit, and some clues come from there. And, as others have noted, you see rhymes and puns show up when you revert to the old pronunciations. As I recall, Crystal claimed that he thinks they got it at least 80% right.
In fact, that's one of the ways Shakespeare's English was reconstructed: by finding rhymes or probable puns in his and contemporary texts that would make sense with one pronunciation but not another.
> Something about how the accents of colonies tend to become fixed in time
It's about isolation. Colonies tend to be far away and difficult to travel to and from. So the american colonies only had what they brought with them, and a relatively thin trickle of trans-atlantic traffic, while England remained knee deep in European culture and the linguistic influences that come with it. A few hundred years of that leaves a deep mark.
Not necessarily. An innovative center and conservative periphery is commonly observed even in language families where the center is far from trade routes, while on the periphery the languages are spoken in territories along major trade routes.
The fantastic featured bit on the accenting aside, in the full video he breaks down a possible model for the way Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter. He turns it almost in to sheet music; you know the time signature by way of the meter, and any difference between the expected notes (syllables) and actual notes are almost as on to rests; pauses in the music that the actors may fill with other means of communication. But fascinatingly, instructed pauses, communicated by the writer, rather than the director or the actor. I find this absolutely fascinating; the amount of extra information and nuance and immense complexity that a few simple rules and constraints over a system can generate. If we take this model to be true, suddenly the communication becomes that much clearer, and that much more concise, both between the writer and his players, and the players and their audience, and the by proxy again the writer.
Since he obviously existed before audio recording technology, how do we know this is the accent of Shakespeare's time? Did someone from that era write down some phonetic pronunciations of their words, or was some technique used to arrive at this conclusion?
There are clues to pronunciation in the text such as words that should rhyme, or that should be homophones so that puns work.
You can also get clues from forks of the population, such as the Boston accent that forked from mainly British emigrants around Shakespeare's time, and have evolved somewhat independently since. The distinctive things modern British and Bostonian have in common could date back from the time of the fork, for example.
Also we have a rough changelog of incoming pronunciation changes as communication with e.g. France increased. Back out those changes and the accent sounds more like the rural/remote parts of the UK still does, but they would have been mixed up in a metropolis like London.
Also a healthy dose of imagination and artistic license :)
There are also contemporaneous or nearly-contemporaneous pronunciation guides. Like poetry of the era, they work with rhyming words, so they're just another part of the puzzle. It's not often that the word being "pronounced" (a new coinage or import, or something uncommon or technical) is of any interest, but it's often the only clue that the example words given as rhymes should rhyme.
That actor's charisma modifier is off the charts. A true pleasure to watch.
I'd never considered his point about how accent also impacts the flow of speech and potential speed so noticeably. Speed of speaking always drove me crazy when trying to learn Spanish, and I never got nearly as profecient at understanding spoken spanish as I did with French. Maybe if I had studied Spanish with a different accent from a different era I would have stood a chance! But it's crazy to think that plays which are 3 hours today were 2 hours in the past (though speech is likely not the only factor there). I don't have the patience for 3 hour plays, and Shakespeare never stuck with me from school, but after this I'm curious to watch a full production in the original accent.
I've seen Ben Crystal do some other Original Pronunciation Shakespeare videos. It's his specialty, and I would love to see one of his "original practice" productions live one day.
Is there any published video of full Shakespeare productions in the original pronunciation? I'm curious how appealing it is over the course of a couple of hours. Also wonder about critical and popular reception of those performances.
I would suspect that like any production, it takes a bit for the audience's ears to adjust and then it likely goes largely unnoticed. As for critical reception, Crystal uses some of this linguistic approach to make very specific creative choices. I would imagine audiences and critics respond more to those choices than they do the linguistic reasons that led to them.
As a Canadian, original pronunciation made me think of a Newfoundland accent. Strongly. I wonder if British theaters will start recruiting more newfies?
That's pretty much exactly a strong English west-country accent - spoken a little more gruffly (not sure if that's supposed to be dramatic effect or authenticity), and I say that with the authority of growing up and living in that region and hearing it in all range of strengths and subtle variations.
I wonder how it was determined that would have been the accent.
That'd be a Yorkshire accent. The closest this comes to in terms of modern accents is West Country, which both geographically and linguistically probably is as far away from Yorkshire as you can get.
Here's another video of the same bloke that I've seen in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
I do like that he mentioned being asked to perform using his native Welsh accent in the OP's video. Shakespeare was after all the playright for people of every standing, and it feels a bit daft to posh it all up.