Rarely does anyone get the chance to see some spectacular entertainment, for free, during your working day, but that was exactly what happened to me last week. A well-known and much respected Shakespearean actor and scholar, Ben Crystal, came along to give a talk on the way in which Shakespeare’s plays would have been spoken to the original audience.

The work that Ben and his father, David Crystal, have done in the area of original pronunciation is startling. To hear familiar lines of Shakespeare delivered in a way I had never heard before was beguiling, and to have them delivered by such a consummate actor was sublime: the absolute silence in the hall as every audience member leaned forward to hear was testimony to the power of the acting, the brilliance of the language and the strangeness of the original pronunciation. A remarkable experience.

For me, it was bittersweet. Ben delivered two speeches that I had taught this term and his new exposition of them revealed to me several rhymes which it is easy to miss in modern pronunciation, and a subtle shift of power and meaning in the opening sonnet of Romeo and Juliet. That is one of the frustrations of the life of a lecturer. Now I will have to wait a whole year to pass this exciting new knowledge onto my students. Or maybe I could just email them now….