The Real Shakespeare is Studying English at WVU

Part 1: The Creation

For our soundscape, Martina and I used my cell phone to record some of our students (who were provided two extra credit points) and several GTAs (who were coaxed unabashedly by us) reading two of Shakespeare's more famous sonnets—“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day” and “My Mistress's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun.” For each person we recorded, we asked him/her to read the sonnet directly from a piece of paper in his/her “best” British accent. Strangely enough, quite a few of our students had difficulty calling to mind exactly what a British accent sounds like, but since they were being rewarded with extra credit, they were more than willing to give it a shot. The GTAs, on the other hand, had no trouble understanding what the accent “should” sound like, yet they were all reluctant to try it when being recorded.

Once we had the recordings, Martina mixed “Shall I Compare Thee,” and I mixed “My Mistress's Eyes.” In the mixing process, we took individual lines from the poems out of the recordings and put them together so that a different person was reading a different line throughout. Then I sent my mixed poem to Martina, who put the two together into one file. The results can be found on Martina's blog: http://bloggershewrote.blogspot.com/.

Part 2: The “Readings”

There were several questions we set out to answer with our soundscape, and in truth, we didn't really answer any of them. When we started, I wanted to do something with a multi-vocal poem, Martina wanted to do something with British accents, and we both wanted to do something that would make a statement about authenticity. In the end, as the following discussion shows, we really came up with more questions than definitive answers. For this reason, I'd like to narrow my close listening down to just two problems: authenticity and ownership.

The biggest question we both wanted to answer was that of authenticity. What exactly is an “authentic” Shakespearean reading? (In actuality, we didn't set out to answer this question. We just picked Shakespeare's sonnets because they're easily recognizable and definable as British. Even so, this is where the soundscape led us.) Several of the scholars we've read (though none more so than Maria Damon in her defense of slam poetry) seem to want to argue that authenticity stems from authorship; in other words, for a reading to be authentic, the author has to read it in his/her authorial voice. Well, Shakespeare's dead, and sound recording was invented well after his life, so there's no possible way to have an “authentic” recording of his sonnets. So what exactly would be authentic here? As I mentioned above, one of the major concerns for the people we recorded was getting the British accent “right.” And as you'll notice in our soundscape, a lot of people failed miserably. But even if we went to England and found people who had been living there their entire lives to read for us, would it still be authentically Shakespearean? Probably not. In fact, it's entirely likely that the only “correct” sounding Shakespearean reading would likely have to come from a classically trained Shakespearean actor—one who's accent has been carefully tweaked to sound most British. (In my head, this sounds like a blend of the guy from Masterpiece Theatre, a BBC newscaster, and John Lovitz's “Aaacting” skit from SNL.)

Clearly, though, no one we asked to read for us is a classically trained Shakespearean actor. So what have we got? There are several readers who sound more British than others, particularly in the lines with soft “r”s. Take, for example, the first two lines in the soundscape. “Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day” sounds nasally, and the pronunciation of “Summer's day” sounds like “Summah's Day.” These are, arguably, the most recognizable characteristics of British accents. The second, though, is not only read by a male, instead of a female, but the reader also doesn't capture the soft “r” as clearly as the first. If we just take into consideration these differences in pronunciation, we might say the first is more authentic than the second. However, the female voice is gendered differently from what we'd expect William Shakespeare—as a man—to sound like. So how authentic can a woman reading Shakespeare be?

Let's take a male voice, then. The line “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see” was read by one of my students. He doesn't use the characteristic soft “r,” but the deep timbre of his voice can automatically be read as male, and as soon as I hear it, I think, “That's Jeffrey,” because it sounds exactly how Jeffrey does when he reads in class. So would it be less authentically Jeffrey if he were speaking in a British accent? Or would it just be more authentically Shakespearean? Is one preferable over the other?

This brings me, then, to the question of the work itself in terms of ownership and authenticity. What happens to a creative piece when multiple people, none of whom are the authors, appropriate the piece through a recorded reading? Shakespeare's works are now entirely free access; weirdly enough, though, we're still drawn as a culture to cite him as the author. Because of this, if Martina and I had billed our soundscape as “Two original poems written by us and read by various people we know,” the whole class would've gone nuts, someone would've turned us in for plagiarism, and our lives as scholars would be over. So who owns our soundscape? Again, Shakespeare's dead, so he can't really own anything. But I own the phone that recorded it; Martina and I own the software that mixed it; the people who read for us own the voices they used to deliver the poems; and the recording itself is posted on Martina's blog, which is accessible for free to anyone who wants it. I also own at least 5 different books with those two poems printed in them, although for the actual recording, we used a piece of paper Martina had created by copying and pasting the poems from a website she'd found into a Word document. But none of us owns the poems themselves. We merely took it and made it our own, though I'd argue not quite in Lethem's “second use” way. Yes, we recontextualized it, but we also tried to make it as “authentic” as possible.

So where does this leave the poems themselves? Have we taken two of the most beautiful poems ever written in the English language and horribly, disgustingly, defaced them by composing a mixed recording? In other words, we've come to the “vs.” part of any authenticity discussion: “good vs. bad,” “accurate vs. inaccurate,” “authentic vs. inauthentic.” In a technical sense, the poems are accurate, since every word written is accordingly spoken. And I, personally, think the soundscape is good—bordering on awesome—simply because I recognize all the voices, some of which make me laugh, and I had a good time putting it together. As for whether it's authentic, I argue yes, though not in the same way other people would. It's authentic in that it really is a collection of voices we took from people and mixed together to make two poems, right down to the clatter I purposefully left in during the line “Music hath a far more pleasing sound.” (Get it? Sound? Clatter?) On the other hand, if I were Shakespeare, I'd probably be shocked and horrified at what two reckless graduate students had done to my work. There's no regular emotion, nor even real emotion, unless you count the frantic student reaction, “I need extra credit so I don't fail my English class!!” Instead, there's a trace of identifiable voices, some of whom are better at faking a British accent than others. So I'm left with one last unanswerable question: does this trace count for authenticity if you can't trace it back to the author, and if the trace does lead us to the author, as he exists in the minds of the readers, what other form of authenticity could possibly exist?