Shakespeare and Accentism

This collection explores the consequences of accentism—an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism—in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to a subject that has been dominated by the study of "Original Pronunciation." Yet the OP project avoids linguistically "foreign" characters such as Othello because of the additional complications their "aberrant" speech poses to the reconstruction process. It also evades discussion of contemporary, global practices and, underpinning the enterprise, is the search for an aural "purity" that arguably never existed. By contrast, this collection attends to foreign speech patterns in both the early modern and post-modern periods, including Indian, East Asian, and South African, and explores how accents operate as "metasigns" reinforcing ethno-racial stereotypes and social hierarchies. It embraces new methodologies, which includes reorienting attention away from the visual and onto the aural dimensions of performance.

Introduction: "The Accent of his Tongue Affecteth him." Adele Lee Chapter One: "Accents yet unknown:" In Search of Shakespeare’s Foreign Accents. Ema Vyroubalová Chapter Two: "The stranger’s case:" Accenting Shakespeare’s "ESL Characters." Matthew Davies Chapter Three: All One Mutual Cry: The Myth of Standard Accents in Shakespearean Performance. Ronan Paterson Chapter Four: How Should Shakespeare Sound? Actors and the Journey from OP to RP. Alec Paterson Chapter Five: Accentism, Anglocentrism, and Multilingualism in South African Shakespeares. Christopher Thurman Chapter Six: "What doth your speech import?" The Implication of Accents in Indian Shakespeares. Koel Chatterjee Chapter Seven: "What country, friends, is this?" The Indian Accent vs. Received Pronunciation in Productions of Twelfth Night. Taarini Mookherjee Chapter Eight: "Rackers of Orthography"? Speaking Shakespeare in "Engrish." Adele Lee Chapter Nine: Alien Accents: Signifying the Shakespearean Other in Audio Performances. Douglas M. Lanier Afterword: Carla Della Gatta

Adele Lee is Associate Professor of early modern literature at Emerson College, USA. She specializes in Renaissance travel writing and "global Shakespeare" and is the author of The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters (2017).