The Thrill of Hamlet in Southern Accents

Tonight, some friends and I gathered together to, of all things, read Shakespeare's Hamlet in Southern accents.

It was a revelation.

It had no right to come off as well as it did--I mean, goodness, who on earth gathers friends together to do readings of Hamlet in Southern accents?! Didn't we have lives? And indeed, if my friend Lili hadn't helped organize it, I doubt it would've come off at all. We even both confessed after words that we were afraid the whole enterprise was going to suck. None of us were trained actors, and I was the only English major there. It was a wonder the reading came together at all.

Nevertheless, in Southern accents, the play opened up to us and came alive, in ways none of us had expected. Even the inexperienced Shakespeare readers found themselves reading the lines much more easily, as the words suddenly flowed naturally and rhythmically. To our delighted surprise, we were actually getting and laughing at the jokes; the innuendo became more obvious; and the insults were far more stinging.

Even some new internal rhymes opened up to us; for example, my roommate who's actually from Florida pointed out that "Contagion" in the South easily rhymes with "yawn" in Act III.iii, l. 380-1: "When the Churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out/Contagion to this world." Seriously, that blew my frickin' mind.

The selection of a Southern accent was not capricious; studies have shown that isolated regions of the Ozarks have actually most closely preserved the original Elizabethan English accent. That is, the people of Shakespeare's age talked with what we would nowadays term a Southern drawl. Queen Elizabeth I sounded much more like an American Southerner than she would have Elizabeth II. And boy oh boy, do I tell you, does that come through in the text! In other words, Hamlet was meant to be read in a Southern accent!

We even intuitively matched more aristocratic Southern accents to the monarchy, and more hillbilly accents to the lower-class characters, it was marvelous! (I should also add that the other revelation of this exercise is that I realized that I've made the right kind of friends!)

I myself claimed Hamlet's part myself, and I gotta say, the famed "To be or not to be" soliloquy trips off the tongue far more intensely and naturally when read in one's best Tennesse-Willliams-Cat-on-a-Hot-Tin-Roof accent. Just try it! Try it right now! Subvocalize in your mind the following in your best drawl: "To be or not be, that is the question/for whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer/the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them!" I found myself actually being carried away by the words themselves, and speaking more intensely, climaxing to a shout then hushing to a near whisper, not because I was trying to ham it up for my friends, but because the words actually demanded it!

In short, I thrilled to Shakespeare! That was the great revelation for me--I'd long learned to appreciate, enjoy, even admire Shakespeare, but I'd never thrilled to his words before. Now, I've read enough English literature to know that men are supposed to positively thrill (that's always the word) to read the Bard, that that's somehow supposed to be the archetypal experience of reading him, but I'd never had that experience myself. At some level, I guess I'd just come to assume that that thrilling was now an anachronistic experience, something foreign to our modern mind.

But tonight I did it. I understood at last. I thrilled to the words of Shakespeare. I read him as he was meant to be read. I'm still on a high, I'm still buzzed from the Bard, as I type right now. We all were after the reading finished; we gave each other a round of applause and a cheering ovation at the end, and that not even ironically. My only regret is that I may never be able to enjoy another production of Hamlet again, now that I've heard it as it was meant to be read!

So here's my call-out, to any within the reach of my meager voice: I will pay real money to see a Tennesse-Williams style production of Hamlet in straight-up Southern accents, put on the by trained actors in a full-on production. Serious. It will be a revelation to all, I promise.