A single-page ‘Preface’ begins: ‘This dictionary has been over ten years in the making’. Crystal's declared ‘single aim’ (p. ix) is to help ‘anyone interested in mounting a production’ of any of the plays using OP’, which is his conveniently short abbreviation for original, that is Early Modern English, pronunciation. He set out ‘to include all the data on rhymes and spelling variations that provide a great deal of the evidence for phonological reconstruction, so that those interested could evaluate my decisions for themselves’.
This very substantial volume of practically 700 large pages is provided with a forty-page ‘Introduction’ to his ‘artistic-scientific endeavour’. The description of how OP sounded begins by declaring that the differences from present English ‘are not so great as to make it unintelligible to a modern ear: most of the consonants and almost half of the vowels haven't changed noticeably over the past 400 years, and the stress pattern on most words has stayed the same . . . But the consonants, vowels, and stresses that have changed are enough to produce a way of speaking that’, he feels, ‘is distinctive, fresh and intriguing’ (p. ix). Actors, he believes, ‘should find it learnable with no greater difficulty than they would experience in acquiring any other accent’ (p. x). The benefits, he says, are ‘the way it enables couplets to rhyme that fail to do so in Modern English’ and the ‘bringing to light of wordplay that is obscured by present-day pronunciation’ (p. x).
Who can believe that a genius like Shakespeare would have been content to publish a collection of sonnets mostly concluded with neatly clinching final rhyming couplets, if any of them ended so feebly as this:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved
meaning as we hear it read aloud today. Crystal assures us that this was a perfect rhyme in OP, both final words being commonly heard with a short vowel slightly closer than, and back from, dead central, which he represents with [ɤ]. The fact is that – though we have a few words today, such as again and either, with two perfectly common pronunciations – in the sixteenth century the language had far more such words than it has it now.
The book also shows us that Shakespeare's scansion was more satisfying than various spellings may suggest. For example, at one time, feeling suspicious of a metrical irregularity in the Sonnet 12 line ‘When lofty trees I see barren of leaves’, I looked up the problem word in the OED and was pleased to find the earlier spellings barain, bareyn, barane, barayne, etc. Sure enough, one finds that Crystal recommends /baˈren/ for speaking this sonnet.
Some of his judgments on how educated people of the era spoke will surprise many readers. He judges that no words spelt with initial aitch were most usually heard with it sounded: Hamlet was usually /ˈamlɪt/. Words ending in -ing didn't usually have final /ŋ/, and longing and hanging kept an internal /g/, the way anger does today, so that hanging is listed as commonly heard as /ˈaŋgɪn/.
Crystal's materials were a single electronic edition of the 36 plays of First Folio plus Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen along with all stage directions, the Sonnets and such other verses of the Shakespeare canon as contain rhymes. At the same time, ‘[n]o OP judgement was made without taking into account the information provided by the OED entries’ (p. xiii). Each headword is given an IPA transcription but ‘only where different from RP’ (p. xiv). Otherwise words are ‘simply marked with an identity symbol (=) . . . A total of 4,239 entries required this symbol i.e. ‘around a fifth of all word-forms’ (p. xv). By ‘RP’ he seems to mean sometimes a distinctly conservative type of the accent and sometimes something so much less so as to equate with what Cruttenden in his 2014 reworking of Gimson's Pronunciation of English has referred to by his new term ‘Regional General British’ (Cruttenden Reference Cruttenden2014).
The Dictionary’s large pages all have three columns. Entries give the headword in bold type with its word class. Each second line contains the ‘broad’ phonetic transcription (with non-IPA colons for length marks). Below them come inflections and variant spellings for all of which ‘superscript numerals show the number of occurrences of each form in the First Folio’ (p. xvii). Lastly rhymes, with their locations noted, are indicated by a bold ‘rh’. ‘The dictionary contains 20,672 headwords’ (p. xv).
Crystal acknowledges that, in a field where so much is open to conjecture, his work may no more escape criticism from subsequent scholars than did that of Wilhelm Viëtor (Viëtor Reference Viëtor1906), Helge Kökeritz (Kökeritz Reference Kökeritz1953), Fausto Cercignani (Cercignani Reference Cercignani1981) and others.
This meticulous reconstruction of how Shakespeare's works were spoken in his own era, in addition to being of great value to actors, producers and others preparing performances of Shakespeare's works, will ultimately benefit not only the limited audiences curious to hear how they might have sounded in the Elizabethan era but also the vast numbers who enjoy his legacy through the medium of present-day English speech of one accent or another. As a work of ‘applied historical phonology’ it must also surely be one of the most significant contributions to the description of Early Modern English in a generation.
