"Carol V. Kaske" wrote:
> Dear Barry and Sidspens,
> We've had an interesting thread about how Busyrane's name
> was pronounced. Can anyone give me some recent
> bibliography on how the total outputs of major Renaissance
> poets were pronounced? Is anyone out there working on
> this? Is everything we are likely to know already known?
> Is it unknowable? This last would seem to be a counsel of
> despair since the medievalists have held meetings on the
> pronunciation of Chaucer and of Malory.
> When I say recent, I know about Helge Ko"keritz,
> Shakespeare's Pronunciation and Wilde, (Wylde?) English
> Rhymes from Surrey to Pope
I asked a colleague (a linguist by the name of Felicia
Steele) about this, and here is her response:
The typical resources for Renaissance pronunciation are the
following:
Hart (1570)
Gill (1619) [why not start with the orthoepists?]
Barber (1976)
Davies (1970)
Dobson (1968)
Prins (1972)
Gorlach (1978; trans. & rpt 1991) has transcriptions of
model passages from different dialects, full charts, and
descriptions of types of phonological change active during
the period
DEMEP (1976) English Pronunciation 1500-1800
Ekwall (1976)
Kokeritz (1953) Shakespeare's pronunciation
Peters (1996)
Wray (1999) [in Transactions of the Philological Society]
writes about efforts to recreate EME pronunciation that is
very interesting
I can't find anything specific about individual authors. If
one wanted to recreate an "authentic" pronunciation, what
one would do would be to go to the McIntosh atlas of Late
Medieval English and then work forward in time to the Upton
atlas based on the area/county of residence for the poet.
--
Glenn A. Steinberg
Director of Comparative Literature
English Department
The College of New Jersey
Ewing, NJ 08628-0718
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