ENDPAPERS
Another Part of the 'Forest
By STR1X In King Lear, Act IV, Scene VI, Oswald is about to murder the eyeless Gloucester when Edgar intervenes. He has already been com- pelled by the exigencies of the plot to alter his manner of speaking three times, and now—in deference presumably to the stage direction which describes him as 'dressed like a peasant'—' he alters it again. There is absolutely no point in this imposture, since he proceeds with little more ado to slay Oswald; but from their brief slanging match we get a clear phonetic indica- of how Shakespeare expected an actor to speak when portraying a yokel.
'Chill not let go, zir, without vurther 'casiori . . . Keep out, che vor ye, or chill try whether your costard or my bat be the harder'; and so on.
Short though it is, the passage does provide proof that Shakespeare made use of dialect at need. How widely he encouraged or even pre- scribed its use by his rude mechanicals—apart from exotic characters like Fluellen—is any- body's guess. But I doubt very much whether he insisted-that the Porter in Macbeth should essay a Scottish accent (with which few Londoners in those days can have been familiar) and I bet he' didn't forbid Bottom to talk like a native of Loamshire on the grounds that he was sup- posed to be a Greek.
Id on Parle
Last Saturday I listened (talking of accents) to M. Bernard Pierre, the distinguished French mountaineer, making a speech in English at the annual dinner of the Climbers' Club. He dis- charged this difficult task—it's hard enough to make a passable after-dinner speech in one's own language—with style, humour and assur- ance; but I couldn't help feeling that a part, however small, of his success was due to his French accent. Afterwards we tried inconclusively to reason why, whereas English spoken with a French accent always has a certain charm for the English, French spoken with an English accent has none for the French. Nobody could think of any counterparts in the world of enter- tainment for Maurice Chevalier or Yvonne Arnaud; and we had a vague impression that, while in France an Englishman speaking fluent French is respected for his command of the language and forgiven for minor errors of pro- nunciation, in England a Frenchman's command of the language is taken for granted and it is
his idiosyncrasies of diction that make the main, beguiling impact on his hearers.
Is there, in fact, any language to which a slight English accent is an acceptable garnish? No one can tell. All we know from our own side of the fence is that a German accent sits on our language heavily and unsympathetically, that Scandinavian- accents, though lovable, are vaguely- comic, that Peter Sellers has made it difficult to take the Indians seriously, and that the Japanese always seem to be trying too hard. I strongly suspect that similar or kindred ob- jections apply, all over the world, to an English accent: less so, perhaps, to an American one.
Gem Corner I am indebted to the Governor General of New Zealand for this inscription on• a grave- stone in India:
TO THE MEMORY OF COLONEL MACLEOD, WHO FELL ASLEEP WHILE IN COMMAND OF THE 42nd HIGHLANDERS.
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