A link to a written version of this essay, with a fair number of improvements and corrections: https://www.thomaswhichello.com/?page_id=3395

A practical example of the principles advocated for: https://youtu.be/rpF7uYMZjAc https://youtu.be/qmFARvjAs1w

I wrote this essay in an attempt to find a reconstruction of 17th-century speech that was both aesthetically pleasing to me and plausible for Shakespeare's time. I hope that it may be of some use to people who are looking for an overview of Elizabethan pronunciation, and or for an alternative to Original Pronunciation. I have no training in linguistics, and I apologize for any faults on that account.

A few footnotes:

Footnote 1, on the paragraph at 14:01:

Speaking of the eye/symmetry rhyme in Blake’s Tyger Tyger, Crystal writes: “John Hart, writing in the 1570s, transcribes boldly as boldlei, certainly as sertenlei, and so on… In my work on Shakespearean Original Pronunciation, I transcribe this as a schwa + i… Blake is recalling an earlier pronunciation... by the time [he] was writing, the everyday pronunciation had shifted to its modern form, like a short 'ee'.”—But what of Hart's many spellings like brịfli, gladli, triuli, and so on, which also concern this lexical set? A solitary letter i, Hart tells us, is to be sounded like the /i/ of the Romance languages, in other words with what Crystal calls the "short ee" of our modern pronunciation.

Footnote 2, on the paragraph at 26:45:

In his dictionary, Crystal (2016:XLVI) allows that Jonson may be referring to a trilled R; but, if I understand him correctly, only when the R comes in front of a vowel, and even then as a "variant." I have not, at any rate, been able to discover an OP production where the R is trilled. Jonson's statement that R is "sounded firm in the beginning of the words, and more liquid in the middle and ends," I interpret as signifying a trill in an initial position, and otherwise a tap. I say a tap, and not an approximant, in part because countless lines in Shakespeare lose much of their beauty and power when the R is unrolled, even in the middle and at the end of words. Compare, for example, the wonderfully harsh effect produced by the line from Henry V, cited in the next footnote, only one of whose five Rs is initial.

Footnote 3, on the same paragraph.

Other examples where the R is more appropriately rolled are these lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which are said to belong to "a part to tear a cat in, to make all split":

The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates (I.2.285-294);

this onomatopoeic line in Henry V, as indicated by the phrase "hard-favoured rage," hard-favoured meaning coarse- or rough-featured:

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage (III.1.1092);

and Antony’s words in Julius Caesar, on the violent power of ingratitude:

Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms (III.2.1714).

Footnote 4, on the paragraph at 46:19:

Has Lass (1992:133) overlooked this circumstance? He writes, “Early writers like Hart … make no mention of special qualities in weak syllables,” a statement which is accepted by Beale (2014:150). Technically speaking, this is true; but Hart's dropping of letters where we pronounce a schwa, is at least, I should think, worth acknowledging. True, it does not absolutely contradict one possibility that Lass proposes, that "There was no single phonetic /ə/ in earlier times, but rather a set of centralised vowels in weak positions, whose qualities were reminiscent of certain stressed vowels, and could be identified as weak allophones without explicit comment." But if this was the case, first, why does Hart choose to omit vowel-letters at all, since this would obscure a connection with the corresponding vowel in the centralized set? And secondly, would not Hart's making no explicit mention of many different centralized qualities, as opposed to a single quality, amount to an even greater "defect of analysis" (to quote Lass) that one would be "disinclined to believe," given his "general acuity"?

-

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:50 The chief basis of Crystal's reconstruction
03:08 Problems with reconstructing pronunciation by means of rhyme
05:04 John Hart
09:40 /ǝɪ/ (Price lexical set)
11:17 /ǝɪ/ (Happy lexical set)
14:59 Alexander Gil
18:45 /ǝɪ/ (Choice lexical set)
20:28 /ɤ/ (Strut and goose sets)
22:08 /ɛ/ (Face lexical set)
24:23 /ɐ/ (Nurse lexical set)
25:30 /ɑ/
26:20 /ǝʊ/ (Mouth lexical set)
26:45 Letter r
28:37 Letter h
30:26 Conclusion
31:22 Proposed alternatives
33:05 Roger Lass
35:46 Elizabethan phoneticians
37:30 Pronunciation of words like day
39:51 Pronunciation of words like mate
40:24 Disagreements with Lass (short vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/)
45:02 Pronunciation of the schwa (/ə/)
47:52 Final conclusion