"Being a working actor can be a lonely business: the preparation, the hours of digging to find your character — his soul, his voice. But your comprehensive book linked to the resources on your Website and IDEA now make the job seem less isolated. Your meticulous and comprehensive study has given us an invaluable tool with which to tackle our craft. When I was presented with seven characters in 'Catch 22,' I was initially daunted. I am a Brit, and here were seven Americans to be presented in their own country. I was lost and overwhelmed, … and then I found your book, and through your calm and clear guidance, I found their voices. Thank you, Paul."
Richard Sheridan Willis, Actor, Toronto, Canada
Paul Meier Dialect Services
2017-10-21T15:38:21+00:00
Richard Sheridan Willis, Actor, Toronto, Canada
"Being a working actor can be a lonely business: the preparation, the hours of digging to find your character — his soul, his voice. But your comprehensive book linked to the resources on your Website and IDEA now make the job seem less isolated. Your meticulous and comprehensive study has given us an invaluable tool with which to tackle our craft. When I was presented with seven characters in 'Catch 22,' I was initially daunted. I am a Brit, and here were seven Americans to be presented in their own country. I was lost and overwhelmed, … and then I found your book, and through your calm and clear guidance, I found their voices. Thank you, Paul."
https://www.paulmeier.com/testimonials/11306/
February marks the beginning of Paul’s new (free) monthly podcast. Titled In a Manner of Speaking, it will address just about any topic related to the spoken word and will often feature special guests talking with Paul about the subject of the month. This month’s edition features a brief introduction to the podcast itself, followed by a discussion of Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation (the dialect of English spoken in the late 1500s and early 1600s). Check it out here and subscribe to our RSS feed!
Oh, how exciting. Is there an RSS feed available for the podcast so one may subscribe to it in a podcatcher app?
Scot, not yet. But we’re working on that. We should definitely have an RSS feed before next month’s podcast.
Hello Paul! This is quite exciting to hear, and quite timely for me too. I am also in the midst of coaching original pronunciation Shakespeare with my theater company The Underlings Theatre Co. up in Boston! It’s delightful to work in, but I am still finding the best ways to teach some of the more unusual vowel shapes (at least relative to the baseline speech in my cast). Your resources were some of my first guides to learning dialects (including OP) as I was finishing undergrad. I still turn to them when I am starting a new project! Is there a place online where us OP enthusiasts congregate? I’d love to be in touch with the wider community.
Thanks for the kind words, Daniel. Perhaps you should start a listserv for OP enthusiasts! I would join! At the moment David Crystal’s site, http://originalpronunciation.com/, is the only clearing house for OP news that I know of. Go to http://originalpronunciation.com/forthcoming-events/ to let David know about the work you are doing with The Underlings Theatre. I will ask David if he has interest in a listserv or some other forum for him to host. I will copy you on my letter to him if you email me at paulmeier@paulmeier.com. Cheers, Paul
Hi, Paul and Daniel. I started http://www.originalpronunciation.com to do just what Daniel is asking for, and indeed, over the years, it has become something of a forum for OP queries. But so far it’s been almost entirely one-way, i.e. someone raises a query and I reply. Or someone sends info about a production or concert and I post it. There hasn’t been much inter-person discussion, and I think this would be a very good thing, as it’s the experience that comes from individual practitioners that is so important when it comes to developing OP. And of course the views of different historical linguists about the choices I’ve made myself (there’s been very little debate so far.) With only 15 or so Shakespeare plays having been done in OP, to my knowledge, and hardly any of the other Elizabethan dramatists, the scope for exploration and discovery (of new puns, readings, phonaesthetic effects, etc) is very wide. It would be great to have a more dynamic forum, but I think it would need to be hosted by someone a tad younger than me!