Nobody alive has heard William Shakespeare speak. He died in 1616, nearly three centuries before Edison’s phonograph. But we know more about how he sounded than you’d expect — because he left clues in every play he wrote.
Built for Breath
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a playwright, and not a minor one. He performed in his own plays at the Globe Theatre and in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and Sejanus His Fall. The Globe was an open-air amphitheater that held up to 3,000 people, and there was no amplification. You projected or you were replaced. Shakespeare’s voice had to carry across a standing crowd that was eating, drinking, heckling, and — in the cheap seats — throwing things.
We don’t know his vocal range. We don’t know his timbre. What we know is that he understood the mechanics of the human voice better than anyone who has ever written in English. His plays are built for breath. The iambic pentameter — da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM — maps onto the natural rhythm of English speech and the natural capacity of a human lung. Ten syllables, one breath. When Shakespeare breaks the meter, he’s telling the actor to break their breathing. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” doesn’t scan perfectly because Hamlet is not perfectly composed. The irregularities are stage directions for the voice.
Ben Jonson and David Crystal
The primary evidence comes from three sources: the plays themselves, the observations of contemporaries, and the work of historical linguists who have reconstructed Early Modern English pronunciation.
Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary and rival, wrote in Timber, or Discoveries (published posthumously in 1641) that Shakespeare “had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions.” Jonson also noted that Shakespeare “flow’d with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d” — suggesting a fluency in speech that matched his fluency on the page. The First Folio preface by John Heminges and Henry Condell (1623) describes Shakespeare’s writing process: “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
David Crystal, the foremost authority on Shakespeare’s original pronunciation, spent decades reconstructing what the plays sounded like in performance. His work with the Globe Theatre’s “Original Pronunciation” (OP) productions, starting in 2004 with Romeo and Juliet, demonstrated that Shakespeare’s English sounded closer to modern rural dialects in Ireland and the West Country of England than to Received Pronunciation. Crystal’s book Pronouncing Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2005) is the definitive scholarly treatment.
Original Pronunciation
Shakespeare’s accent was not the posh, clipped diction that audiences hear in most modern productions. It was something rougher, earthier, and considerably more musical.
Shakespeare grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, in the West Midlands of England. His accent would have been rhotic — pronouncing the /r/ after vowels, which modern RP drops. “Lord” was “Lorrd,” with a rolled or tapped /r/. The vowels were broader and more open. “Name” was closer to “nahm.” “Time” sounded like “toim.” “Love” rhymed with “prove” and “move” — which is why Shakespeare rhymes them and modern actors have to pretend not to notice.
David Crystal’s OP reconstructions revealed something striking: when you perform Shakespeare in the accent he wrote for, puns that don’t work in modern English suddenly become audible. In Romeo and Juliet, the word “hour” was pronounced identically to “whore” — which makes the Nurse’s lines considerably filthier than modern audiences realize. “Reason” and “raisin” were homophones. The bawdy wordplay that seems labored in RP flows naturally in OP because the sounds actually match.
The accent also moved faster. Crystal estimates that plays performed in OP run approximately ten minutes shorter than in modern pronunciation, because the vowels are shorter and the consonants crisper. A three-hour Hamlet in RP might have been two hours and forty minutes in 1601.
The Words on Stage
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” From As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII. In OP, “stage” would have had a longer, more open vowel — closer to “stahge.” The line was written for the Globe, where the metaphor was literal: the audience was standing in the “world” (the Globe’s original name was simply “this wooden O”), watching players on an actual stage. Shakespeare was an actor delivering a line about acting, in a theater, to people who paid a penny to stand in the rain. The self-awareness is dizzying.
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” Polonius says this in Hamlet while being anything but brief. Shakespeare gave the most pompous character in the play the best line about economy of language. That’s the joke. In OP, “wit” carried a broader meaning than its modern sense — it meant intelligence, wisdom, the whole apparatus of the mind. Polonius is right about the principle and incapable of practicing it. Shakespeare understood that gap between what people say and what they do better than anyone.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Gertrude’s line from the play-within-a-play in Hamlet. In Elizabethan English, “protest” meant “to declare solemnly” — the opposite of its modern meaning of objection. Gertrude is saying the Player Queen is overdoing her vows of faithfulness, not that she’s complaining. The irony is that Gertrude herself has re-married with suspicious speed. Shakespeare loaded the line so that it works on at least three levels simultaneously.
The Globe, 1601
It is the afternoon of some day in 1601, at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. The flag is flying — a play is on. Three thousand people are packed into the wooden O. The groundlings stand in the yard, pressed together, a penny each. The galleries above hold the gentry. It smells like beer and sweat and the river. The sky is open above the stage. Shakespeare is not performing today — he’s watching from somewhere in the tiring house, or maybe from the gallery. But his words are in the actors’ mouths, and those words are being spoken in an accent that sounds, to modern ears, like a farmer from Somerset arguing with a Dublin dockworker. The /r/ sounds roll. The vowels are broad and open. “To be or not to be” comes out closer to “Tuh bee or not tuh bee” — the vowels rounder, the consonants sharper, the pace faster than any modern production. Richard Burbage, the company’s leading man, delivers Hamlet’s soliloquy not in the measured, resonant tones of Olivier or Branagh but in something rougher and more urgent. The crowd is not silent. They never are. But they’re listening. Shakespeare wrote for this — for voices that had to fight through noise, for rhythms that could hold attention without amplification, for words that landed in the gut before they reached the brain.
Sources
- Crystal, David. Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal. Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. Penguin, 2002.
- Jonson, Ben. Timber, or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter. 1641.
- Heminges, John, and Henry Condell. “To the Great Variety of Readers.” Preface to the First Folio, 1623.
- Shakespeare’s Globe. “Original Pronunciation” productions and research, 2004-present. https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/