Ben Crystal talks about Original Pronunciation

This is so incredibly valuable. Ben Crystal and his linguist father, accomplished geniuses that they are, have given us, not only the great gift of the original Shakespeare, but the sound, and heart (projected through the abdominal cavity), and living tempo of that golden age that he--whoever he may have been--compounded into poetry.  Several things to note:  (1) The first evidence of the validity of the Crystals' "Original Pronunciation" is that it is quicker, by at least five minutes on the hour, than the odious Received Pronunciation foisted on us by classism, snobbery and o'erweening pedantry during the 18th and 19th centuries.  Or perhaps that's the second evidence.  The very first evidence of the likely validity of "Original Pronunciation" might, rather, both more cogently and more viscerally, be that, because of the stronger and more varied stress pattern and deeper placement of the vowels in early modern English, it is louder when declaimed (as in an outdoor theater) than the pharyngeal/diaphragmatic centering of Received Pronunciation will admit of.  Simply, it is more readily heard and easier to understand.  Plus, to have back Shakespeare's puns and rhymes (both smutty and--oftenest--bizarrely metaphysical) is to have a world restored. 

Now let's turn this piercing new light on Marlowe, Sydney, Spenser, Bacon--even the Queen herself, for example, we know had an idiosyncratic and distinctively personal style, Latinate and spare, with an avoidance of the double or multiple negation and redundancy indulged in by so many of her subjects.

But think how beautiful The Tragickal History of Dr. Faustus would be in O.P.!

                      Her lips suck forth my Soul; see where it flies!