When you speak of going to a film – let’s say Hamnet, for reasons that will become apparent – do you pronounce the f-word with two syllables or with one?
Chances are if you’re well educated – or, like me, trying to pass yourself off as such – it’s the latter. You’ll squeeze the word into a single syllable, or at most a syllable and a half, lingering lightly on the “m” sound just long enough to place it on the record.
Or if you do go with the full double-syllable “fillum”, you may do so with conscious irony, using it as a sort of Irish heritage pronunciation that you know is technically incorrect.
But there is another layer of irony in that, because we have good reason to believe that if Shakespeare himself were to turn up in a Stratford cinema now to see how Paul Mescal plays him, he would be going to a “fillum”.
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Not just that, but to anyone eavesdropping on his attempts to buy a ticket, his accent in general might sound oddly Irish, stage-Oirish even.
I say this having heard some of his work performed in what’s called original pronunciation (OP), a specialist corner of Shakespeare studies that suggests he, or at least his characters, spoke with an accent somewhere between English west-country worzel and Munster.
He would probably have said “divil” rather than “devil”, for example, and “wesht” instead of “west”. He would have given “raisons”, not “reasons”, when making a decision. And if such a thing had been available in England in his lifetime, he would have drunk “tay” rather than “tea”.
Linguistic detectives rely on three main kinds of evidence to work out what OP Shakespeare sounded like. The first is recorded comment on the spoken language of his time, as when Ben Jonson, who knew him personally, tells us the Bard rolled his Rs in a way suggestive of a dog growling.
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The second is rhyme. Shakespeare was highly adept at finding rhymes where they were needed: at the end of sonnet lines, and so on. Where his lines don’t rhyme now, there are grounds to suspect the pronunciation has changed, not that he was stuck for a word that day and just gave up.
Changed pronunciation also explains puns that have been rendered meaningless by modern speech. The preamble to Romeo and Juliet has a classic example.
“From forth the fatal loins” is, OP experts argue, a typically Shakespearean pun that depends on the words “loin” and “line” having the same pronunciation: something they do now, in England, only when the natives are mimicking the way they think Irish people speak.
The third kind of OP evidence is spelling. And this is where we can perhaps clinch the argument that Shakespeare was a “fillum” man.
Modern versions of Romeo and Juliet have a line from Mercutio in which, speaking of the fairy queen Mab, he describes her “whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film”. In the earliest versions of the text, however, the f-word was spelt “philome”, reflecting not just the flexible spellings of the Elizabethan era but the extra syllable Shakespeare would have used.
Getting back to the subject of irony, there is a big and – to me at least – amusing one in Hamnet, namely the fact that Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway are played (brilliantly) by Irish actors, but with English accents the protagonists themselves might have struggled to recognise. If Jessie Buckley had performed the part in the mellifluous tones of her native Kerry – now increasingly famous from her many award-acceptance speeches – it would have been closer to the original.
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Which brings us back to probably the main reason why OP Shakespeare sounds Irish: because this country was much slower to adopt the “great vowel shift” that changed the sound of English several centuries ago.
People here continued to say “mate” instead of “meat”, “say” instead of “sea”, “daycent” instead of “decent”, and so on. Many of the old pronunciations persisted, without irony, well into the 20th century. “Vulgar speech” it used to be called.
Hence a story from Kerry in PW Joyce’s English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910), of an occasion when he was travelling “in the long car from Macroom to Killarney” with passengers including a young man of dandified appearance and superior airs.
When the latter reached his stop, he was greeted by a dignified old gentleman who directed him to a hostelry where he would get a “nice refreshing cup of tay”. The dandy thanked him with a supercilious correction: “I shall be very glad to get a cup of tee”.
And, whatever about the old man, Joyce was appalled. “I confess I felt a shrinking for our humanity,” he lamented, adding a rhetorical question: “Now which of these two was the vulgarian?”
