The End of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", read in Early Modern Pronunciation @a.z.foreman74

A.Z. Foreman | The End of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", read in Early Modern Pronunciation @a.z.foreman74 | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated 2 hours ago
I decided maybe my next Shakespeare project should involve The Tempest, since I'm kind of sick of Macbeth and Hamlet at this point. This video includes Prospero's epilogue and the tail end of the final scene. The epilogue has often been thought of as Shakespeare's farewell to the theater, since it comes at the end of his last solo-play.

This is yet another passage by Shakespeare in the so-called "original pronunciation" i.e. a reconstruction of how (one variety of) London English was pronounced in the early 1600s, from your friendly neighborhood historical linguist and poetry nerd.

I gave Prospero a fairly conservative accent based on the dialect recorded by Shakespeare's contemporary Alexander Gil the Elder. Alonso speaks a more innovative lect with a raised MATE vowel as would have been fairly common by then.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, wherein I read texts in dead accents, consider making a pledge at my patreon.

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There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to my public recordings as well. (This video in particular, for example, was released two months early to subscribers.)

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$Lament for his People by Abid b. Al-Abras read in Arabic and English In which I read yet another a Jāhilī poem in Arabic and then in English. This time it is a poem attributed to ʿAbīd b. al-Abraṣ. Fortunately for the modern reader of Early Arabic (or, at least, fortunately for me) ʿAbīds language is often as moving as it is difficult, the more so thanks to his most frequent subject: the disaster that befell his tribe, the Banū Asad. The nature of the disaster remains unspecified in the poems and therefore unknown to us, but judging by the evidence from the poems it would have involved some sort of attack by superior forces (presumably one of the sedentary Arab kingdoms) which left many of the Banū Asad dead, and forced most of the rest to flee much of their former territory. The historical reality underlying the poetry is murky and probably will never be cleared up, barring an extraordinary fortuitous discovery by Arabian archaeologists. The information on ʿAbīds life accompanying the poetry in Islamic literary compendia does not help much, as it has every sign of being based more on the poems than anything else, though it may contain some refraction of general truth about conflict with Kindite royalty. Even admitting the qualifications which must attend any corpus which has gone through centuries of oral transmission, I see no substantive reason not to read the body of material attributed to ʿAbīd as (more or less) genuine pre-Islamic poetry. That does not definitively prove, of course, that all (or any) such early work attributed to ʿAbīd is necessarily by him. In pre-Islamic poetry, proving a positive is often much harder than proving a negative. It may well be that only a few poems are genuinely his, and that ʿAbīd as we know him is a half-archetypal figure around whose name various early poems of disparate authorship, containing a particular species of tribal lamentation, coagulated. If true, this would account for some the toponymic discrepancies that perplexed the commentators. Erratum: the on-screen text has يحبون where I read يمشون. Didnt check to see that I had the correct MS variant when copypasted the text onto the screen.$

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