Of course, since there was no recording technology in Shakespeare’s time, we can never really know what the bard and his contemporaries sounded like. But using linguistic principles, we can guess. Shakespeare almost certainly didn’t sound like John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, or any of the other great interpreters of his work. Instead, he very likely sounded somewhat more like a speaker of mid-Atlantic American English, particularly in areas where Irish settlement was prominent, than he did a speaker of the English now associated with his native Thames River valley of southern England.
So how can we divine how Shakespeare’s players might have sounded on the stage of the Globe Theatre? One clue is the words that he rhymed, as in these lines from one of his sonnets:
If this be error and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Clearly “proved” and “loved” are meant to be rhymed. How to do so, however, remains a source of debate. Apart from direct rhymes, one can also extrapolate from the evolution of present British dialects, looking at original contemporary texts such as John Aubrey’s Brief Lives as well as Shakespeare’s own plays.
We know as well that Shakespeare lived at the time when what linguists call the Great Vowel Shift, an aspect of the transition from Middle English to Modern English, was still under way, so that the length of the vowels in his words was distinctly different from our own. It is also believed that the English of the time was rhotic—that is, that the “r” sound was prominent.
By all those lights, as these excerpts from the British Library Board suggest, Shakespeare’s English might have sounded something like a cross between the English of Thomas Hardy and that of James Joyce—not terribly American, that is, but recognizably different from the standard dialect of London today. Research conducted by Paul Meier, a dialect and theater specialist at the University of Kansas, moves the sound a shade closer to American shores, but the lilt we associate with Ireland is very much present in his reconstruction as well.
Thus we can be reasonably sure—reasonably, but not entirely, sure—that Hamlet sounded something like this:
To bay, oar naught to bay.
Sorry, Laurence Olivier.