The assertion that accents function as material signifiers of ethnic, regional or class identity is hardly novel. The eminent Shakespeare scholar Sonia Massai's new book Shakespeare's Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance, however, deviates from such generic appraisal of accents sounded on the Shakespearean stage. Instead, she argues that stage accents might be more productively understood ‘as dynamic acts of identity, that is as a speaker's conscious selection of specific variants from a wider pool of other available variants’ (p. 14). Juxtaposing the production history of Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ plays with the ever-shifting proprieties of spoken English on- and offstage, Shakespeare's Accents highlights four historical periods from the early modern to contemporary England, during which these phonetic norms – especially the alleged ‘standard English pronunciation’ (hereafter StP) – were contested. Significantly, this book adopts a unique mode of narration that begins with present theatrical productions and then makes its way back to Shakespeare's own time. Thus along the way the readers can first hear living voices that are more familiar to them before being attuned to the dead ones of the distant past.

Drawing on a broad array of performance reviews and personal theatre-going experiences, the opening chapter goes through an increasing heteroglossia in contemporary English Shakespearean performances with a fine-tooth comb. As Massai puts it, productions featuring English accents other than StP started to win favour in the early 2010s because a diet of foreign-language Shakespeare productions in the past few decades had already defamiliarized English-speaking audiences from acoustic normativity. Three in-depth case studies speak volumes about the creative merits of such acoustic diversity on the Shakespearean stage, since actors could use regionally or ethnically inflected accents to address important issues of social ostracism and cultural assimilation. The second chapter pits BBC radio producer Mary Hope Allen's pre-war ‘original pronunciation’ (hereafter OP) radio programmes against other OP Shakespeare productions with philological overtones. Massai points out that Allen's experimental broadcasts – as opposed to the scholarly enterprise of reconstructing the sound system of early modern English – coaxed their listeners to appreciate the sonic alterity of OP. In doing so, Allen's programmes unmoored Shakespeare from ‘high culture and the speech of elitism’ (p. 70).

In chapter 3, Massai reassesses the role of stage accents in promoting theatre reform from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Contextualizing the bad notices that David Garrick received for cacoepy (the issue of the Licensing Act of 1737 and its attendant decorum of enunciation), Massai posits that the so-called ‘sonic revolution’ initiated by Garrick and his followers consists in its challenge to the euphony rules of licensed theatres, as the prevailing yet blatant act of ‘spouting’ in provincial venues attests. Chapter 4 is a revisionist reading of the national and regional accents employed by early modern actors as effective tactics for creating nuanced roles and evocative dramatic situations. Tellingly, her analysis is based on the sporadic use of Welsh or southern English dialects in the early modern script as cues about the connotations of voice modulation. What is more, against the common assumption that by Shakespeare's time any normative rules of diction were absent on the stage, Massai contends that actually an emergent standard of articulation called ‘usual speech’ was informing an actor's pronunciation then; otherwise contemporary anti-theatrical critics would not have seen the actor's appropriation of usual speech as its deplorable debasement. The concluding chapter comes full circle, adjusting the focus back to the theatrical milieu of the twenty-first century. Lamenting the rather conventional offerings in terms of acoustic inclusiveness on the state-subsidized Shakespearean stage, Massai speaks highly of those independent Shakespeare-related projects, among which The Moors (2018) by Two Gents Production is the most prominent.

Shakespeare's Accents is a magisterial study that spans over four hundred years. A daunting scholarly undertaking notwithstanding, it is deftly woven from scintillating close reading and painstaking archival research, is beautifully written and has a direct bearing on the burning issue of cultural pluralism. It is thus a pity that the book contains two typos: the English Dialect Society was founded in 1873 rather than 1973 (p. 11), and in the context of on- and offstage interaction, The Moors should be interpreted not so much a ‘co-creation between actor and performer’ (p. 206) as one between actor and audience members. That said, Sonia Massai's monograph is expected to be as classic a work on acoustic archaeology as Bruce Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, Gina Bloom's Voice in Motion, or Judith Pascoe's The Sarah Siddons Audio Files.