Shakespeare and Accentism
Affiliation of Author, Researcher, or Creator
School of the Arts
Department
Writing, Literature and Publishing
Author(s)
Adele Lee
Resource Type
Book
Publication, Publisher or Distributor
Routledge
Publication Date
12-29-2020
Brief Description
This edited 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 and Caliban 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, "Shakespeare and Accentism" 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.
Keywords
Shakespeare, race, ethnicity, class, accentism, performance, socio-linguistics, voice
Preferred Citation Style
MLA