Shakespeare takes advantage of this text to create the greatest performer of them all, the legendary Richard who can kill your husband one day and make love to you the next; the brother who can embrace you with tears in his eyes and send murderers after you. . . . Such a performer deserves a Vaudeville stage where change comes lightning quick and everyone can applaud his miraculous transformations. Vaudeville in the early twentieth century also gives the characters a time where cutthroat competitors vie for the spotlight at a moment when singers, comedians, dancers and all the others had to find a place in a world changed forever by the movies or disappear.  Richmond becomes the marquee idol, and Richard disappears. But if you find Richmond a little flat after Richard’s demonic energy, credit the magnetism of a true Vaudeville star in the live theatre.

The success of that production depended on the full commitment to realizing every element possible in building up a show from a concept, whatever it may be. But taking their cues from the historical context, Mather and director Denice Hicks did not go so far with the concept as to misrepresent the play itself. I think the success of the production had something to do with the dedication we gave to developing era-specific dialects to go along with our entirely imaginary roles in the vaudeville show and finding ways to link those characters with the historical personages Shakespeare writes versions of in his play.

Choosing the dialect is a pertinent consideration when planning to stage a production, whether that choice is to let the actors embody their characters using their own pronunciation, to invent a world and coach a unique pronunciation, or to use a standardized dialect such as the British Received Pronunciation (RP), or the Queen’s English, which is traditionally associated with “high-style,” “proper” Shakespeare. Phonological concerns are essential to building a world, whether a director is building a world from a concept as above, or attempting to represent the play (faithfully, as it were) without inventing an outside concept as a “draw.” A “faithful” representation is hardly something to be wished for, however, if it involves the stuffy business of prescription of the kind that alienates actor from audience, reader from text, or audience from understanding. Received Pronunciation, being such a prescription when taken as the official dialect of Shakespeare, can make audiences feel alienated, particularly those who do not happen to come from the British upper-middle-class, because it has a connotation of wealth and education.

When audiences hear a play performed in a familiar dialect, they may be glad that the alienating factor of standardized dialect no longer makes them feel like Shakespeare is above them, yet RP persists as the predominant cultural idea of “proper Shakespeare.” Directors have taken countless approaches to address this problem. The lion’s share of the ones I have seen or participated in have been conceptual, like the one described above, with varying degrees of success, depending on how well-researched or thoroughly envisioned the production is. However, it would be a poor world where overlaying a concept simply to modernize a work as tangible and moving as Shakespeare’s were the only recourse to keep an audience’s attention. I think a perfect alternative lies in making the language of Shakespeare more accessible, working out the textual, historical, phonological, and theatrical nuances of the plays in a way that ensures people keep studying, performing, and enjoying them. I am most interested in the way Shakespearean performance is contingent upon Shakespearean studies and how Shakespearean studies is contingent upon phonological history, and how student and audience understanding is contingent upon all.

The full expression of a play in production requires mediation between text and audience. So much cannot be said for Shakespeare studies taken as a separate, literary discipline, but in order for there to be mediation between idea and action in performance, someone has to study the text, and someone has to bring those studies to the stage, unless the staging ensemble has no interest in ideas outside of the purely theatrical. Such a lack of interest can see directors mounting productions that amount to immediately spurious spectacle. The person responsible for the interchange of ideas from study to stage is often named dramaturg. The transmission of ideas from academic study to performance takes plenty of forms, but I am interested in the tangible things that are still “playable”: those that can be transmitted between thought and dramatic action. Later, I develop a discussion of puns revealed by the study and performance of Shakespeare in a facsimile of the Early Modern English of his time. I turn to David Crystal’s work of constructing an as-comprehensive-as-possible version of Early Modern English (EME) Pronunciation (“Original Pronunciation,” henceforth OP, as abbreviated by Crystal). I have chosen to work with speeches from Troilus and Cressida to demonstrate the value of such a method, as it tends both to invite possible interpretations and to resist them. I hope to offer suggestions as to the staging of this “problem” play. Why, in the words of Eric Partridge, does the play “[leave] a nasty taste in the literary mouth” (54)? I am following here Laura Lodewyck’s maxim from “‘Look with Thine Ears’: Puns, Wordplay, and Original Pronunciation in Performance”: “An analysis beginning at the level of the words themselves can open the text to the performative aspects of these words, by attending to their oral (and aural) qualities. These are important considerations that influence how the language of Shakespeare’s plays resonates with a contemporary audience” (42).

David Crystal published the Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation in 2016, twelve years after the Globe Theatre of London contacted Crystal to provide a transcription of Romeo and Juliet and act as linguistic consultant for a three-performance OP experiment. Crystal published Pronouncing Shakespeare, an account of that experiment, the next year. Despite the anxiety of the Globe company that the OP “Would not be intelligible . . . the experiment was sufficiently successful, in terms of audience reaction, to motivate the Globe to mount a second production the following year of Troilus and Cressida—this time with the whole run being presented in OP”; Crystal follows by listing at least twenty-four OP projects, including fourteen full or touring productions of Shakespeare’s plays, a reading of John Donne’s 1722 Easter Sermon, and recordings by the British Library (ODOSP xxxix-xl). OP studies have not gone without criticism (“Talking”), but it is a compelling approach that offers a unique precision in reading and production.

That is not to say the use of OP is not without pitfalls. Lodewyck notes that “the notion of the ‘authentic’ is troubling, and is neither possible nor particularly advisable” (44). She is correct. Seeing OP as anything but a method of performance and study is counterproductive at best. She notes that OP’s “intent should not be to fetishize the idea of Shakespeare, to reify false notions of a singular genius, or to perpetuate elitist ideas about what Shakespeare represents as part of the Western canon” (45). Crystal is cautious in the same way, being certain to acknowledge that OP studies and productions do not constitute anything more than a version, a facsimile. Thinking otherwise is dangerous because it assumes authority beyond the premises and already ample uses of OP and could lead to false claims about Shakespeare’s culture and language. As Crystal warns, “It cannot be stated too often that OP is a phonology—a sound system—which would have been realized in a variety of accents, all of which were different in certain respects from the variety we find in present-day English” (ODOSP xi). The fact of the ultimately limited realization of OP in contemporary renditions and the fact of its temporal distance from contemporary dialects beggar any one region’s hope of claiming the linguistic privilege to be the sole heir of Shakespeare’s English (D. Crystal, Think 1). The reason behind stating the fact of its limitedness so often is that a false notion of its “authenticity” could lead to misinformed approaches and claims. To avoid those and other such traps in the section below, I will defer, where possible, to Crystal’s methods and offer conjectures of my own.

First, a few words on reading puns: Catherine Bates says, “Whether the pun is cursed as a traitor to the language or blessed as the welcome guest who brings two meanings for the price of one, its tendency to distort or to extend meaning is dealt with by the interpretative process which, however playfully, ultimately restores priority to the serious business of making sense, to showing what a pun finally means” (428). That is a succinct explanation of the reason Bates argues that the historical tilt is toward ranking puns hierarchically, as those that yield their signification to traditional analysis easily, “good” puns, and those that resist such methods, “bad” puns. Her definitive example is Umberto Eco’s treatment of puns, which she views as belonging to a long tradition of a textual damage control attempting to keep the destabilizing nature of puns in literature at bay. In describing Eco’s concerns about puns, she defines the “good” pun as “the pun that finds itself in the text and which, on being unpacked, yields meanings that are additional yet relevant to it” (431). A “bad” pun does not yield so readily or proceed necessarily from sound to sense; it has often been rejected, even relegated to the status of nonexistence. Bates says that there are good reasons for trying to limit puns in this way, “but to play safe is not to control the market” (435). That is, at the end of the day, the nature of the punning produces both types described by literary and semiotic studies, and in the end, whichever pun a reader chooses has “as much to do with what kind of reader he is or wants to be as with anything else” (436). So, “good” and “bad” puns are in the eye of the beholder. Bates means to demonstrate that no matter how studiously a critic may sort the good puns from the bad, or by what criteria, “the bad pun—that lightest of words—is like a ghost which can never be put to rest” (438).

In using OP to seek out puns in Troilus and Cressida, a play full of what some might term “bad” puns, I am forced to consider all, both the good and the bad, and especially the ugly. I must invoke Eric Partridge’s assertions at the end of the fourth chapter of Shakespeare’s Bawdy. Partridge says that scholars need to “ask themselves, Do I perceive every nuance? . . . Am I sufficiently versed in Shakespearean slang and cant and colloquialism to know that a pun has been made or a double entente certainly or, at least, probably intended” (47). Partridge’s questions are essential to understanding Shakespeare’s bawdiness, his ribald and deft wit and wordplay, his punning, but the questions leave room for the outright denial of puns that would not fit with the understanding of what, exactly, belongs to Shakespeare’s language. Our understanding is made more precise by a knowledge of OP. The danger of excluding puns that should not be excluded on the principle of sense is lessened by what certainties OP can suggest. OP transforms the most probable linguistic conclusions about the dialect of Shakespeare’s time into a phonology that allows for the discovery of new puns that can be found in the text just by reading it aloud. The next section is an exercise in unpacking a problematic speech from Troilus and Cressida using OP to read a possible pun that I found troubling.

Sandor Rot discusses one of the more common Shakespearean puns that is lost in modern pronunciation, the same pun I deal with below, in “On the Philological Essence of Shakespearean Humor.” The essay is a treatise on Shakespeare comedic stylings that sequences types of humor in Shakespeare as follows: “(a) humour of situation; (b) humour of characters; (c) humour expressed by linguistic-stylistic means” (64). Rot notes that “text-linguistics, with its suprasegmental approaches, helps, despite changes in pronunciation and notion of some words which have therefore ‘hidden’ some monosemes to modern readers, to notice some bawdy puns of Shakespeare” (68). For readers who may find themselves echoing the Dane (“I know not [mono]seems!” Hamlet 1.2.76), a monoseme is a unit comprising the length of one short syllable, or mora, of time, with the connotation of prosody. It is a rare word (OED). Prosody is the branch of knowledge that deals with metrical composition, and formerly with the pronunciation of words (OED). Prosody is a vital factor in considering Shakespeare’s plays because there is so much to the composition of the text that would seem to suggest the way they are to be performed, such as the relationship of shared single lines between characters in a scene. What Rot is saying treats the composition (and sound) of Shakespeare’s puns, rather than their sound or sense alone. It is vital because, if we are to refer to Shakespeare’s composition and use the understanding of it to study and perform him, we must understand where a monosemic pun was possible for him when it no longer occurs to us. Rot’s essay is evidence that academic interest in the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s language has not waned in such a drastic manner as theatrical interest had before the Globe’s 2004 Romeo and Juliet. That is likely because knowledge of the original pronunciation is such a useful tool in searching the text for meaning, so that students of Shakespeare may use it to profitably search for and assert puns that either could have been, or certainly would have been heard by Shakespeare’s audience.

The example Rot uses is one of the more common monosemic puns one finds in OP: “whore” and “hour” were pronounced the same in OP, the first vowel of each being /o:/, a long monophthong, a “pure o.” The example Rot draws is one of the more famous instances of this pun; it is from Jacques’s account of a fool he has just met in As You Like It:

’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,

And after one more hour ’twill be eleven.

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,

And thereby hangs a tale. (2.7.24-28)

The Norton Shakespeare acknowledges the pun on “whore” in the fifth footnote on the page (1646). It is a joke the fool has told Jacques, whose name puns on “jakes” (an outhouse) (D. Crystal, ODOSP xxv). Helge Kökeritz explained the pun before Rot, with the addition of a reading of “ripe” as “ripen” (Shakespeare’s Pronunciation 59). In the video of his lecture “Speaking the bright and beautiful English of Shakespeare” (Ben Crystal 52:58), Ben Crystal gives said speech in OP, hitting both the conventional /oːɹ/ pun, and using a thrusting movement of his hips and balled up fists to drive home the other with the word “ripe,” to ripen, presumably to orgasm. In OP, “ripe” would have been pronounced with the diphthong /əɪ/, a movement from the unstressed middle vowel (ə, “uh”) to a high, lax, front vowel (ɪ, like that in the word “it”), /rəɪp/ (D. Crystal, ODOSP 469). Ben Crystal’s combination of movement and pronunciation can suggest both Kökeritz’s reading of ripen and “rape,” though “rape” would have been pronounced with a long, mid, lax, front vowel in OP, /rɛːp/, so it is not a rhyming pun: “ripe” and “rape” are not identical monosemic twins (D. Crystal, ODOSP 451). Close readings of Shakespeare’s puns require as deep a knowledge of their original pronunciations as the reader can glean. I must stress again that OP is a facsimile dialect, nothing other than a version of dialect that gets as close as possible to its dead antecedent; it is pieced together from textual evidence and may suggest certainties, but the examination of resonances like “ripe” and “rape” produce, if nothing else, plentiful fodder for theatrical choices. Those choices ultimately define the way Shakespeare’s plays are received and understood.

In act 5, scene 2 of Troilus and Cressida, the famous triple eavesdropping scene where Troilus witnesses Cressida’s alleged betrayal, Cressida has relented and told Diomedes to come to her tent that night, and after he has exited, Cressida says:

Troilus, farewell. One eye yet looks on thee,

But with my heart the other eye doth see.

Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find:

The error of our eye directs our mind.

What error leads must err—oh, then conclude:

Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude. (5.2.107-10; my emphasis)

It is an instance of the same monoseme as hour/whore (“our” is pronounced with the exact same vowel [D. Crystal, ODOSP 390]). When one considers Thersites’s line directly after the speech, “A proof of strength she could not publish more, / Unless she say, ‘My mind is now turned whore’” (5.2.111-12), the monoseme’s fourth occurrence in five lines, it seems like the pun could be intentional. Partridge includes Thersites’s line as one of the instances of usage in his definition: “whore, n. A prostitute; hence, occasionally, a very loose woman; hence, as an insult… T.&C., v.ii.115, ‘My mind is now turned whore’ (Cressida loquitur)” (220), but he says nothing about the sort of pun I examine. Kökeritz does not mention it either. If Crystal acknowledges it specifically, I have not found where. There is more than just the line “poor our sex” to suggest intention, though. If that line is read as a pun, then “the error of our eyes directs our mind” must also be read that way, suggesting meanings such as “the error of whore I directs our mind,” or “the error of whore eye/I directs whore mind.” Eye is, of course, also a pun; “I” for “eye” is the only pun the Norton Shakespeare indicates for the speech (2060). I must also draw attention to the possibility of Thersites’s line rendered as “My mind is now turned our.” It is possible that there is another level of nuance to these lines. In this reading, the pun may offer an affirmation of Valerie Traub’s claim that

Cressida is blamed as agent of contamination, the circulating meanings of sexual exchange become located, even fixed in her physical being. Her body is transfigured into an “encounterer,” the projected site of exchange of the desire that is disease. Reduced from subject to object, a veritable “spoil” of war, Cressida-as-encounterer serves the psychic function for the male characters of localizing and thus holding at arm’s length the paranoid fantasy of diseased erotic circulation. (82)

Traub’s equation of the male obsession with desire as disease necessitates a further equation of the female body as the agent of disease and therefore death can be read into the dialogue not just of Thersites and Pandarus, as Traub does in the essay, but in Cressida’s speech as well. Thersites calls her a whore, and with my reading of the OP monoseme in her speech, it is an echo of what she calls her entire sex. I do not think that can be taken comfortably as an honest statement of anything but her station as a devalued encounterer, with implications of the fate awaiting Trojan women during the sack of Troy. What makes it tragic is that Cressida herself takes on the same style of rhetoric used by Thersites and Pandarus throughout the rest of the play. When Cressida finally relinquishes her indecision, she tells Diomedes, “Ay, come, O Jove do come! I shall be plagued” (5.2.105). The line is of the same nature as both Pandarus’s prophesizing, “If ever you prove false to one another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world’s end after my name: call them all panders” (3.2.185-88), and his closing speech wherein he wishes syphilis on all who share in his trade (5.11.35-55). It is in keeping with the play’s leitmotif of ignored prophecy inevitably coming to bear on the characters. The Norton Shakespeare footnote glossing “I shall be plagued” reads “Vexed; teased [but also alluding to her eventual fate in late medieval narrative as a leper]” (n.8, p.2060).

If Cressida cries, “Poor whore sex!” the moment before we hear scurrilous Thersites call her that outright, and if there is monosemic ambiguity (that is, “whore/our” is taken in the way I have described), we may choose to explore Cressida’s speech as a moment of pity. She has no choice in the matter, being at least as beholden to the figuration of desire, disease, and death as the men are, and, as the warring factions agree, ultimately culpable for the spread of disease, simply because she is desirable. Such a reading alongside Traub renders “my mind is now turned our” into a multifaceted reflection. It would not be likely for an actor playing Thersites to get the meaning of the pun across with his pronunciation of the word itself in any form but OP. However, that is no reason to throw out considerations like that from the mediation of a text as difficult to perform and understand as Troilus and Cressida.

In the spirit of conjecture, I will move to act 1, scene 2, wherein Cressida’s taunting banter with her uncle Pandarus shows a great deal of wit and worldly knowledge. In disagreeing with Pandarus that Troilus is the better man than Hector to Pandarus’s questioning whether she knows a man when she sees one, Cressida immediately throws a saucy barb into her uncle’s pandering, “Ay, if ever I saw him before and knew him” (1.2.58-60). The one lead I find in this scene is Cressida’s rejoinder to Pandarus’s “One knows not at what ward you lie.” Cressida tells him, “Upon my back to defend my belly, upon my wit to defend my wiles, upon my secrecy to defend mine honesty, my mask to defend my beauty, and you to defend all these. And at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches” (1.2.240-43). Cressida puns on “lie” and credits Pandarus with maintaining her lies, a pun suggesting that Pandarus may have set up clandestine encounters for his niece before. The Norton Shakespeare’s reasoning for that pun’s meaning are double entendres like “secrecy” for genitals, or the reading of “vagina” for “belly” (n.8, p.2003). In Shakespeare’s Words, David and Ben Crystal’s glossary of Shakespearean words and their meanings and usages throughout all the plays, “belly” is defined as “womb, uterus” (39). If “belly” is taken to mean womb, Cressida is also making a reference to pregnancy. Not that that is the likeliest of readings, but it is playable. In 1.2 she is referring to warding herself against pregnancy, but her station is totally altered by act 5, scene 2. By the time she is among the Greeks, an actor could play Cressida as struggling with the choice of getting a Greek child, or having her belly starved and abused, facing further ill treatment at the hands of Troy’s enemies. The safety of Troy that allowed her to treat matters of sexual exchange humorously are gone.

If we take that absence to be the case, what of the possible monoseme pun “poor whore sex” in her speech of 5.2? It could be that she is grieving the helpless state of women in the war, after her exchange from the relative safety of the yet-unbreached Trojan walls to immediate sexual peril in the Greek camp, and what she must make of the situation to survive. I think that Cressida’s touch-and-go reactions to Diomedes’s insistent pursuit of getting her bed that night are not a simple show of Cressida’s indecision in desire, but one of the few emotional moments of the play where the traditional tragic element of pity is almost tangible. Though the language of the scene may bury that element with Thersites’s bawdy, the reading of his line as a figure that comments both on the traditional, patriarchal view of Cressida as traitorous wanton and agent of disease and on her acceptance in that moment of the inevitability of her ultimate devaluation, turning her mind to “our [homosocially paranoid] mind” (see Traub 82, 84). This reading would allow directors and actors to make stronger choices in the processes of discussing, editing, and staging the play.

In conclusion, I turn to Crystal’s section on using OP from the introduction to the Oxford Dictionary. He lists two aspects to OP: the discovery procedure and the application. Once a plausible system has been established, with all its variants, it can be used to indicate the phonological options available for line readings, some of which can suggest a novel (to modern ears) interpretation of a familiar text. Whether the alternative interpretation is warranted is a separate matter. But in the first instance, we need to be aware that a possible ambiguity (in the sense of William Empson [1930], in his Seven Types of Ambiguity) is present. As he put it, on the opening page of his book: ambiguity is ‘any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language’. That is what OP does: it makes room. (xxvi)

Even the most basic working knowledge of OP enriches any sort of contact, transmission, or analysis of Shakespeare’s text. That is not to say there are no right or wrong answers, but none without ambiguity attending. There must be undeniable evidence in the direction of one interpretation to definitively declare it a “correct” one. It is not that OP is incapable of providing a certainty-by-consensus of evidence, but that scholars who aim to research original practices of stagecraft, costuming, or movement face similar problems. The nature of the study forms an injunction against saying things like, “This is definitively and for all time the way that it was,” but that is not the point. The point is to carry the work across that those directing, acting, hearing, and studying it may both enjoy and profit by the experience. It is possible, however, to state with some assurance that at least some lay members of the audience of the 2005 Globe production of Troilus and Cressida in OP, immersed in the sonic world of the pronunciation as they were, heard the pun on Cressida’s poor sex, though what they made of it is difficult to know.

Works Cited

Bates, Catherine. “The Point of Puns.” Modern Philology, vol. 96, no. 4, May 1999, pp. 421-38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/439009.

Crystal, David. The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation. Oxford UP, 2016.

Crystal, David. Pronouncing Shakespeare. Cambridge UP, 2005.

Crystal, David and Ben Crystal. Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. Penguin Books, 2002.

Crystal, David. Think on My Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language. Cambridge UP, 2008.

Crystal, Ben. “Speaking the Bright and Beautiful English of Shakespeare.” YouTube, uploaded by British Council English and Exams, 4 March 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FF5K8VlcRI&t=3719s.

Hartley, A.J. The Shakespearean Dramaturg. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, Proquest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newpaltz-ebooks/detail.action?docID=308308.

Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. Yale UP, 1953.

Lodewyck, Laura A. “‘Look with Thine Ears’: Puns, Wordplay, and Original Pronunciation in Performance.” Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 31, no. 1, March 2013, pp. 41-61. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu.libdatabase.newpaltz.edu/article/505046/pdf.

Mather, Christine. “Dramaturg’s Note.” Nashville Shakespeare Festival. January 2009. www.nashvilleshakes.org/RichardIIINotes.htm.

The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 3rd ed., Norton, 2016.

The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University, 2017. oed.com.libdatabase.newpaltz.edu.

Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955.

Rot, Sandor. “On the Philological Essence of Shakespearian Humor.” Modern Language Studies,vol. 13, no. 2, Summer 1983, pp. 62-70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org.libdatabase.newpaltz.edu/stable/3194180.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Norton, pp. 1613-83.

—. Richard III. Norton, pp. 555-649.

—. Troilus and Cressida. Norton, pp. 1981-2073.

“Talking the Talk.” The New Yorker, 19 September 2005, Condé Nast, 2017.www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/19/talking-the-talk.

Traub, Valerie. Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. Routledge, 1992, pp. 71-87.