Shakespeare's Accents

Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London and has published widely on the history of the transmission of Shakespeare on the stage and on the page. Her publications include World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (2005), Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge, 2007), collections of essays on Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (2018), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (Cambridge, 2015) and critical editions of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (2011) and The Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (Cambridge, 2014).

• 1. 'Accents yet unknown': the changing soundscape of Shakespeare in contemporary performance; 2. 'Lend me your Ears': experiments with original pronunciation; 3. David Garrick's 'sonic revolution': hegemony and protest, 1737–1843; 4. 'Usual speech' and 'barbarous dialects' on the early modern stage.

'Anyone who thinks that accents in Shakespeare's scripts are limited to the likes of Fluellen, MacMorris, Jamy, the Dauphin, Princess Catherine, and country clowns will find an earful in Sonia Massai's Shakespeare's Accents. So, too, will anyone who feels dubious about original pronunciation or positive about regional and foreign accents in contemporary productions. Massai has chosen to begin with contemporary productions and work backward toward accents cued in the scripts. The result is a beautifully modulated book in every sense of the word.' Bruce Smith, University of Southern California