1. mark m Said,

   english language

   Cockney

2. kat Said,

   english language

   English obviousliy. try posh English. upper class, royal accent. so imitate he queen’s accent. lol

3. meggurpanda Said,

   Kansieo.com

   There is strong speculation that the way Americans speak is the true way of that time period and Brits changed their way of pronounciation. So, I think the way Americans talk.

4. goldenret35 Said,

   english language

   I am American and I am studying Shakespeare right now in English, and there is no way that Shakespeare’s accent would have been in any American accent. I’m betting it was an extremely heavy British English accent.

5. SoCerebral Said,

   Caffeinated Content – Members-Only Content for WordPress

   Shakespeare was from Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire in England. The Midlands, that central part of England, has a couple of distinctive accents, and while it is probably not identical to the way Shakespeare would have sounded, the British Midlands accent would have to be the closest accent in existence to Shakespeare’s.

6. Teariinui Said,

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   In general, American English is the older form of English, while British English (at least that spoken on the BBC) is the more modern form. This happens with any language that has a “mother country” and a “colony.” (Compare the French spoken in Quebec vs. Paris.) Since the early English settlers to North America tended to move around quite a bit, and were joined by later waves of settlers from other parts of England and other countries, American English tended to blend together all the different English dialects from over 200 years ago. The Queen’s English, on the other hand, especially the habit of not pronouncing the final “r” in words, is more recent and has its origins in the speech of the lower classes in London.

   So American / Canadian English would be the closest in speech to that of Shakespeare.

7. Billy C Said,

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   When I took a Shakespeare survey course several years ago, my professor said that the closest accent to Shakespeare’s is Ocracoke English, which is the dialect spoken on the Outer Banks. Your question made me wonder how he knew that, so I went looking.

   Turns out there are a variety of opinions on the original accent, from my professor’s claim of Outer Banks English to Appalachian English, to “somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire.” There are experts on the subject, like John Barton and David Crystal, who try to reconstruct the dialect based on rhymes and puns.

   A couple of years ago, Crystal’s research was put to the stage in an “original dialect” performance of Troilus and Cressida. Below I’ve included a link to an interview with Peter Forbes, who played Pandarus in that production.

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