Back to the Drawling Board

Wish to hear Shakespeare performed with an Elizabethan accent? Hie thee to The Globe.

Giles Block, the director, believes that it adds meaning and vitality to the text, although he was sceptical at first. “I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to make Shakespeare as clear as possible,” he said. “I thought the original pronunication would get in the way. Within 20 seconds I thought, ‘I can understand it’. Within a minute, I was realising how rich the language had become. The meter, puns, verse and rhymes work again.”