Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance

Abstract

Sonia Massai’s Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance takes a historical approach to artfully chart the reception and treatment of accents, both regional and national, in Shakespearean performance and their evolution over the last 400 years. The book is the first critical study of its kind that engages with the impact of ‘marked voices on the production and reception of Shakespeare in performance’ in order to ‘activate a different interpretation of the fictive worlds of the plays and to challenge a traditional alignment of Shakespeare with cultural elitism’ (3). Massai masterfully takes the reader on a journey through time, starting with twenty-first century contemporary attitudes and drawing on contemporary case studies, before skillfully working back to the early modern period. This structure works well as Massai is able to offer a thorough grounding in the cultural and political baggages attached to accents before exploring how Shakespeare’s plays sounded to contemporary audiences. This in turn allows her to evaluate how differently some of his characters and plays could have been interpreted by those original audiences. It also enables Massai to foreground in specific terms how this important work speaks loudly to our contemporary moment when the power of accents is beginning to be questioned on English stages. Each of the four chapters gives focus to a different time period in order to examine and challenge ‘the social and cultural biases that have informed those ingrained assumptions about what sounded acceptable and what sounded unacceptable’ on the Shakespearean stage (13–14). As such, Massai explores critical moments when ‘accents took on urgently political and fiercely local connotations’ at times of extreme social and political pressure and reform, and how those dynamic shifts have affected, and continue to affect, the reception of Shakespearean productions (14). By giving focus to the ‘local’, Massai is able to provide a rich cultural specificity to her ‘alternative stage history’ which interrogates the acoustic rather than the visual or textual elements of production (14). Throughout, the relationship between Shakespeare, accents, and cultural elitism and legitimacy is interrogated. In doing so, Massai consistently and rightly reminds the reader of the importance of challenging these long-held prejudices and stigmas, and thus ensures that her work is more than an academic study but a vital, urgent, and powerful call-to-arms for theatre-makers and academics alike: ‘maybe the time has come for us to look at and listen to Shakespeare, and each other, as if “we had eyes [and ear] again”’ (206).