Stage English (was The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said "Mary")

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

The purpose of performance English is verisimilitude. I doubt that audiences expect Hamlet to sound like Tony Blair, but if the director thinks that that is what her audience expects, then she probably knows her audience better than I do. In any case, I have never heard Shakespeare performed with anything other than American accents (except in England).

I was once asked to coach Sissy Spacek on the speech of Thomas Jefferson's wife. I told her to go to the local Anglican church and listen to the speech of rich local Charlottesville white ladies of breeding and culture. The result may have been more e-dropping than some  purists would have liked, but the audience and director had no complaints. The actor Danny Glover, by the way, refused his director's request that he meet with me, reportedly observing very sensibly, "I don't need a white professor to tell me how to sound like Jefferson's black house slave."

I am puzzled by the assertions that r-loss among English middle classes was not firmly established until the late 19th century. Shouldn't this be 18th century? Note also that r-loss in the coastal American South is often attributed in part to the influence of slave language, and the preservation of /r/ in Appalachia is attributed to the settlement of people from the North of Em gland. At the very least, the dating of r-dropping in the coastal American South to the later nineteenth century seems dubious.

Is "Sherdan" the playwright?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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