Shakespeare as he is spoke

At some point in my Oxford career I latched on to the notion of the great vowel shift , that is the change in pronunciation of the long vowel sounds in English, sometime between Shakespeare's day and ours. I got the idea that the Birmingham accent still used the old pronunciations. So I would regale my colleagues with Hamlet's "To, be or not to be" as pronounced by the members of Slade. How we laughed. The Brummie accent (like American southern accent or the Australian ocker accent) is commonly parodied badly and my attempt – "tu bay oor nat tu bay" – was no better.

A father (linguist) and son (actor) present an attempt to reconstruct the pronunciation (pronun-tsee-ay-tsee-on) of Shakespeare's period.

The change of the year

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memoriam Canto 105, published in 1850.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
     The flying cloud, the frosty light;
     The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
     Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
     The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
     For those that here we see no more,
     Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
     And ancient forms of party strife;
     Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
     The faithless coldness of the times;
     Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
     The civic slander and the spite;
     Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
     Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
     Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
     The larger heart the kindlier hand;
     Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Msgr Ronald Knox – using the methods that proved somebody else wrote Shakespeare – once proved that In Memoriam was in fact written by Queen Victoria in memory of Lord Melbourne. It is published in his Essays in Satire (1928).