First of all, I apologize for this post being a bit late. I was JUST ABOUT to upload it when the internet at my house cut out. This should not have been a surprise, given all the various technical difficulties in the US yesterday…
Anyways… today’s comic deals with one of the more interesting topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Original Pronunciation!
O.P. and the amazing ways in which it has been reconstructed, deserve a lot more space than six stick-figure comic panels, but hey, barbarically reducing things of great literary and scholarly merit to their bare bones is kind of my “thing”. At the very least, now you know that when Hamlet tries to rhyme “move” and “love”, it’s not actually him pretending to be mad.
The super-linguist in question is David Crystal, whose praises I repeatedly sung. In his O.P. endeavors he has been ably assisted by his son, Ben Crystal, an actor who, armed with Shakespeare’s O.P., can make the prologue of Romeo and Juliet sound sexier and more piratical than you could have ever imagined. If you don’t believe, just take a listen:
Seriously. That’s gorgeous. Here’s a longer video, featuring Papa Crystal and Ben at the Globe:
It’s easy to get snobbish about Shakespeare and to believe it works only when performed in the elegantly trained received pronunciation of an Ian McKellen or a Benedict Cumberbatch. But, as the Crystals point out, received pronunciation is even further away from Shakespeare’s original accent than American are from it.
Shakespeare can be performed in any accent. English, Welsh, Scottish, American, Canadian, Singaporean, I don’t care. His words still have immense power. However, when you hear it spoken in O.P., you really get a sense of what it must have been like for those first groundlings at the first Globe Theatre.
It’s easy to forget because we’re so used to English spelling not really making sense, but the vast majority of English words are spelled that way because they were once actually pronounced that way.* We don’t have a phonetic spelling system, we have an etymological one.
*Except for a few silent letters that were falsely re-added later, such as in “debt” (which comes from French dete but the “b” makes it look more like Latin debitum).
This past spring some of my friends and colleagues participated in an experiment, bringing a 360 degree camera into the middle of one of our annual Patriot’s Day reenactments. They then made an interactive informational video about the battles of Lexington and Concord. The best part is, you can rotate the view at any time while you’re watching. This is as close to the real thing as you can get!
An archaeological dig on the Menemonee Reservation in Wisconsin yielded a clay pot. The pot was dated to 800 years ago and contained seeds. Some of the seeds were planted to see if 800 year old seeds were viable. An ancient squash was the result.
This is the coolest fucking thing, and don’t try and tell me otherwise.
Wow this guy is amazing uhhhhhh uhhhhhh such awesome work
-blogger at Afroculinaria.com
“Twitty is deeply engrossed in both the African American and Jewish food traditions. “Blacks and Jews are the only peoples I know who use food to talk about their past while they eat it,” says Twitty, 38.”
“From Richmond it was a short jaunt to Colonial Williamsburg, where Twitty spent the week lecturing, conducting training sessions and cooking in period costume at three of the living history museum’s venues. In all his talks, Twitty emphasized the impact of chefs and cooks of African descent on shaping American and Southern cuisines in colonial times and after.”
“At a conference he met the scholar Robert Farris Thompson, author of “Flash of the Spirit,” a book about the influence of African religions on African American art that helped him see that “soul food” was, among other things, a spiritual term describing a mystical connection between humans and the animals and plants they eat.”
“He cooked and he gardened. He studied heirloom seed varieties, some that had been brought from Africa and some that had been carried from the New World to Africa and then, on slave ships, back to North America, among them okra, black-eyed peas, kidney and lima beans, Scotch bonnet peppers, peanuts, millet, sorghum, watermelon, yams and sesame. He called those seeds “the repositories of our history” and wrote about them in a monograph published by Landreth Seed in its 2009 catalogue.”
“Twitty’s embrace of all the various parts of himself — African, African American, European, black, white, gay, Jewish — sometimes raises hackles, as does his habit of speaking his mind. An article he wrote in the Guardian on July 4, 2015, suggesting that American barbecue “is as African as it is Native American and European, though enslaved Africans have largely been erased” from its story, elicited scorn and worse: Many commenters were outraged by his idea of barbecue as cultural appropriation.”
omg i’m SO EXCITED to see Michael Twitty on my dash!! do you guys know about Michael Twitty? He is a gay black Jewish culinary historian, writer and chef whom I met when he was one of the best speakers on a truly great panel I got to attend last year.
It’s especially cool that he should show up when we were just talking about the power of Shabbat – he really believes in and practices the power of sharing meals, and not as a sort of meaningless get-over-it platitude.
“It’s in the dead quiet after the laughter than I know I’ve made the dent,” he said. “Food is lovely and nice, it gets us to a new place of understanding, but then you must deal with the serious stuff. I guess my model, again, is Passover. It’s a riot, right? Kids doing little plays, wine, and songs. But the best Seders are when, in-between, you get a lofty discussion of freedom and slavery and what they mean, what oppression does and how self-liberation takes place. That’s what I try to capture in how I teach and how I cook.”
The cure is to not lie or obfuscate. The cure is to bear witness, to be real, to be truthful. The way to change our fate is to change the names we give and take, to re-arrange our place, to change our deeds, to pray yes, but also to give back and to cry out. (I thank the Rabbis of antiquity for this formula.) My path is not one of quiet acceptance but of a heritage born of the ring shout, forged in blood, sweat and tears in the slave quarter. This is why I cook.
[…] I disagree with some of your supporters when they assume that the spotlight put on your search for inspiration and ideas is on an “overgrown path”—when African, African American and Afro-Caribbean and Latino culinarians have been writing about these connections and celebrating them without you—and without any media coverage for quite some time. Pierre Thiam’s Yolele and my Fighting Old Nep pre-dated your trip to Senegal—but nobody lauded us for making the connection—nobody said we were exploring “unchartered territory,” nobody said we were going where nobody had ever thought to go.
Please appreciate that those basketballs had to be inflated to different pressures to produce notes. Not only did they have to tune the balls, they had to figure out not when the balls should hit but when they should be dropped to hit at the appropriate time.
326 Miles 