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Practitioners on Practice... On Shakespeare and Original Practice: An interview with Ben Crystal
Having studied English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, Ben has written extensively on Shakespearean language and recently staged the first reading of Macbeth in original pronunciation for four centuries, with his Shakespeare Ensemble.
Ben explains the context in which actors and audiences would have encountered Shakespeare's plays, considers how one can decipher intended accent in a text, and discusses the possibility that the canon's mother tongue has been lost over time.