Chapter 4 - ‘Usual Speech’ and ‘Barbarous Dialects’ on the Early Modern Stage

Summary

This chapter carries out a critical survey of early modern attitudes to English accents and dialects in order to show how effectively Shakespeare and his contemporaries activated their connotations in performance and how marked voices lent local resonance and social specificity to their characters and to the fictive world of their plays. Despite their lower prestige, English accents and dialects other than the emerging standard known as the ‘King’s English’, or ‘usual speech’, had wider and more varied dramaturgical functions than merely serving as comic caricature of specific social types. In fact, closer attention to a selection of plays – some of which are discussed at greater length in mini case-studies embedded in the central section of this chapter – produces radically new readings of well-known characters and plays, including Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor or Edgar in King Lear. This chapter also reconsiders how early modern anti-theatricalists were particularly concerned about the actor’s voice and its ability to reproduce high- and low-rank accents and phonetic registers.