The accented voice in audiovisual Shakespeare

The reflections contained in this chapter take the cue from the evidence, sustained with various nuances by more than one author, that, in Elizabethan times, there was not a dialect literature so understood and that “dialects, for Renaissance authors, have nothing to do with ‘home’” (Blank 1996, 3). The lack of connection between dialectal features and regionality arguably applies also to the plays of William Shakespeare: the voices of his non-standard characters are mainly portrayed in terms of class dialects rather than regional dialects (Delabastita 2002, 305) and draw on stereotypes as means to construe individual characterisations and create humorous situations. As Blank goes on to state, “juxtaposing a peasant dialect with the King’s English was, often enough, played for laughs” (Blank 1996, 3). In a way which is perhaps counter-intuitive, given the premises, this chapter will not be concerned with the comparatively few examples of non-standard varieties included in Shakespeare’s plays. This is rather the starting point of an investigation which involves some of the plays’ contemporary afterlives – namely film and television adaptations – and which could be summarised in the following research query: what happens when Shakespearean texts are adapted into audiovisual narratives in which accents and dialects are consistently and sometimes unexpectedly used? Audiovisual adaptations, not only of Shakespeare’s plays, but of the classics in general, often showcase characters speaking with marked accents and/or in dialect even when in the original texts these same characters are not identified by any distinct regional trait. In this chapter I will consider some significant adaptations from both cinema and television in order to highlight some relevant typecastings and understand the function of a given variety in the audiovisual texts, even when, as is generally the case, there is no indication of regionality in the respective Shakespeare’s plays. The latter ‘originals’ have in fact been chosen as a privileged site for investigation exactly because of their comparative lack of non-standard varieties with respect to other more diatopically varied examples in English literature. The addition of regional voices in the relative audiovisual adaptations, conspicuous as it is, renders their function arguably more revealing to the scholar’s eye. Conversely, the use of dialects has rarely been foregrounded in the analysis of these Shakespearean afterlives, neither in relation to the source text nor to their contemporary import. The adoption of this viewpoint will hopefully add facets and further problematise the topic of multilingualism in Shakespeare.