ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the topic of Shakespeare's treatment of regional and/or foreign accents by examining how the plays signal the presence of a “foreign” (i.e., from outside of England) accent at particular moments. The Quarto and First Folio playtexts, along with what we have been able to determine (in particular from city comedies wherein foreigners, immigrants, and provincials are carefully distinguished by their peculiar accents) about the early modern English practices, provide the majority of evidence as to what the Shakespeare's plays would have sounded like in their Elizabethan and Jacobean performances. This chapter focuses on the depiction of French accents in Henry V and 1 Henry VI as well as on Welsh accent in 1 Henry IV and the trio of accents from the Celtic periphery spoken by the three Captains in Henry V. By comparing both the textual and contextual clues for the rendition of specific lines in a foreign accent, a new methodology for identifying and classifying foreign-accented speech in Shakespeare's scripts is outlined.
