Professor David Crystal - The Tongue that Shakespeare Spoke

Professor David Crystal will be visiting the University of Wolverhampton to deliver a public lecture on Thursday 16th May 2019.

'The Tongue that Shakespeare Spoke' covers the movement to present Shakespeare in 'original pronunciation' (OP) - a linguistic reconstruction of the accents used in his day - has gathered pace since 2004, when OP productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida took place at Shakespeare's Globe in London.

This talk describes the OP events that have taken place during the past decade, explains the nature of the evidence that led to the reconstruction, and illustrates some of the literary and theatrical discoveries that have been made.

David works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in 1941, he spent his early years in Holyhead. His family moved to Liverpool in 1951, and he received his secondary schooling at St Mary’s College. He read English at University College London (1959-62), specialised in English language studies, did some research there at the Survey of English Usage under Randolph Quirk (1962-3), then joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor, then at Reading. He published the first of his 100 or so books in 1964, and became known chiefly for his research work in English language studies, in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational and clinical contexts, notably in the development of a range of linguistic profiling techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. He held a chair at the University of Reading for 10 years, and is now Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.

The event will take place 14:00-16:00 at City Campus, Wolverhampton, in room MC001 (Millennium City Building).