Romie O’ and Juliet – An Irishman’s Diary on why the accents of Shakespeare may sound strangely familiar

You may recall a skirmish in these pages recently on the subject of how James Joyce and Sean O'Casey spoke, specifically whether their accents sounded Irish or English.

For what it's worth, I agree with Dr Liam P Ó Murchú (Letters, February 26th) that they sounded very much the former, contrary to what another academic had suggested. Based on his readings of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which includes some of the broadest vowel sounds ever committed to record, Joyce could have won prizes in an Irish accent competition.

So, more surprisingly, could George Bernard Shaw. In 1927, Shaw made a series of albums for Linguaphone, aimed at teaching foreigners (including, I suspect, some of his British audience) how to speak English properly.

We might expect now, given his background, class, and years in London, that Shaw’s accent would be somewhat anglified. But au contraire.  His vowels and diphthongs were even more rotund than Joyce’s, and he rolled his Rs as lovingly as a patriotic Cuban tobacconist rolls cigars.

But never mind Joyce and Shaw. I had an even more startling realisation recently while watching BBC’s Newsnight and an item about the accents of Shakespeare’s time.  More particularly, they had a professor of linguistics on, reading from the Bard’s plays as (it is believed) they were originally pronounced.

And – lo! – not only did it sound Irish, it sounded positively Oirish in parts. True, when you listened carefully, there were also bits of west-country wurzel, and the occasional flat-capped vowel from Yorkshire. No doubt English speakers from other parts would have heard bits of themselves in it too. But the dominant tone, to my ears, was Irish, and stage Irish at that.

How do they know what OP (Original Pronunciation) Shakespeare sounded like?  Well, as Prof David Crystal explained, there are three types of evidence.

The first is recorded comment on the language from that time. So although the rolling of Rs has since been suppressed in most of England, like the monasteries under Henry VIII, we know it still happened then, because Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's contemporary, tells us it did. He likened the sound to a dog growling.

The second strand of evidence is rhyme. The Bard was very skilled at putting words that rhymed in certain places, such as the ends of sonnet lines. So where they don't rhyme, now, there are grounds to suspect that pronunciation has changed, not that he was having an off-day when he wrote the poem. This also explains puns that have been rendered meaningless by modern speech. If the linguistic detectives are right, there are now missed word-plays scattered throughout Shakespeare, like unexploded war-time ordnance, that can still be triggered by the use of OP.

A classic example lurks in the preamble to Romeo and Juliet. “From forth the fatal loins” is, the OP experts argue, a typically Shakespearian pun that depends on the words “loin” and “line” having exactly the same pronunciation – something they do now, in England, only when the natives are imitating the way they think Dara Ó Briain speaks.

The third type of evidence is spelling. The same Romeo and Juliet has the word “philome”, meaning “film”, for example.  So, yes, the many Irish people who today enjoy watching “fillums” are being impeccably Shakespearian, whether they’ve heard of him or not.

But probably the main reason why original Shakespeare sounds Irish is something that happens at the end of the sentence: “In fair Verona, where we lay our scene”.

As rendered in OP, the word “scene” sounds like the river in Paris. And as such, it’s a first cousin of such quintessential Hiberno-Englishisms as “lave” (for “leave”), “dacent”, and “tay”.

I'm reminded that in his English As We Speak it in Ireland (1910), another Joyce – PW – recalled a coach journey from Macroom to Killarney, many years before, when he sat opposite a young, self-consciously superior, dandy.

When the latter alighted in Kerry, he was met by an old gentleman who greeted him warmly and offered a “nice refreshing cup of tay”. To which the scoundrel replied: “Yes, I shall be very glad to get a cup of tee”, in the process correcting the older man.

Joyce said the incident left him with a “shrinking shame for our humanity” and asked: “Now which of these two was the vulgarian?”

Alas, as we know, the shifting sands and vowels of time were on the side of the dandy. But the old man, whether he realised it or not, was on the side of Shakespeare.