What Did Shakespeare-Marlowe Sound Like When He Spoke?
This is a really interesting speculative deduction on what Shakespeare-Marlowe probably sounded like when he spoke his own name out loud.
It's a really complicated argument, but an interesting one.
It's my original research and deduction. It's speculative but quite reasonable.
If you're too busy to follow the entire argument below, then here's what he sounded like..
When he said his surname aloud it sounded much like this:
MO - AY.
Say it out loud, it's fun.
Sound it close to Mo - A.
See how it makes you soften/drop the RL sound, and therefore gives you a thick regional English accent?
Here's the reasoned argument for it all:
Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5, Modern text.
Twelfth Night is a play with a plot revolving around extremely confused mistaken identity
As the plot develops, a name written in a letter must be correctly deciphered by a group of people in order to further a romantic subplot. (Note the literary allusion.). The name is indicated only by the letters M, O,A,I. These letters are separated by commas in the First Folio.
The modern text states: in Act 2, Scene 5, L1115:
MALVOLIO: With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore, M,O,A,I. doth sway my life.
FABIAN: (Aside): A fustian riddle.
Some discussion ensues regarding each letter, one by one, until L1145 at which Malvolio states:
MALVOLIO: M,O,A, I. This simulation is not as the former:
and yet to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name.
Malvolio is intended to be a figure of fun and so it’s appropriate that the crushing of these letters will not produce anything resembling his name.
What is particularly interesting is that when these same letters, MOAI are pronounced aloud as a single word, they do sound like a name crushed. The name MORLEY. (Pronounced MO’AY)
One should realize here that it is characteristic of many regional English accents to drop soft sounding letters in pronunciation for rapidity of speech, including the letter R. And also to soften the L sound.
Therefore Marlowe probably pronounced the RL sound of his surname softly if at all, as if swallowing it, as is common in English regional accents.
In his only extant signature Marlowe spells his name Christofer Marley, giving a clear indication that he pronounced the final syllable of his name with an ‘I or Y’ sound, and not an ‘O’ sound, as we do today.
The different spellings of Marlowe’s name appearing in the historical record give an indication of how the name was generally pronounced by people at the time, since spelling was normally phonetic then. Among others, these pronunciations range from MORLEY – MORLI – MARLY - MARLIN – MARLEN – MARLEY.
All of these spellings, which necessarily must have been transposed from speech, place the accent on the first syllable MOR/MAR, allowing the final syllable to tail off indeterminately into a clear ‘I’ or ‘Y’ sound.
Often in regional English pronunciation the sounds MOR and MAR are pronounced similarly, with an actual vowel sound lying somewhere between ‘O’ and ‘A’. As if the actual spelling was MOARLY.
This vowel sound would be understood differently by people of different English regional accents, as sometimes signifying MOR and sometimes MAR. Just as is still true today.
This is what accounts for the varying spellings of the first syllable MOR and MAR in the recorded documentations of his name. People transposed his name as their particular regional ear caught it.
It should be noted that even though the pronunciations would have varied by local accent, all of the documented spellings indicate an ‘I or Y’ sound ending the name, rather than the ‘O’ sound of today.
(This is also true of the Cambridge University use of the word as MARLIN – an N sound following a strong I or Y sound is so soft and subtle as to be easily subject to mishearing or imagining.)
Since Marlowe himself spells his name MARLEY, and it appears to have been heard and spelled by people as beginning with both MOR and MAR, it seems quite likely that he himself pronounced his name in an indeterminate manner, as MOARLI, causing the confusion of spelling.
The names Marley and Marlowe are still commonly pronounced in this way to this day in regional England. Furthermore, in Elizabethan times regional accents were generally thicker than they are today, due to the local isolation of populations.
Therefore there is quite some likelihood that Marlowe in fact pronounced his own name quite similarly to MOAI, as if it was spelled MOARLY, and was sounded very close to MO’AY, when he was speaking in his normal Canterbury accent.
In light of this subtextual interpretation, the actual dialogue in this Twelfth Night scene makes a great deal more sense than it does as it stands in the play text.
Marlowe appears to deliberately have his own name verbally stated aloud on the stage in this scene as the one who ‘sways the life’ of the characters.
