In an essay exploring the ongoing fascination with authentically reproducing the Bard’s plays, Daniel Fromson highlights our hopes at finding “some corner of civilization untarnished by modernity” where “people still speak like the Elizabethans”:
Such stories clash with the wisdom of modern linguistics, which holds that Shakespeare’s English cannot be any living person’s native tongue, if only because all spoken languages are always evolving. Even a colony of 17th-century actors, stranded on a faraway island during the reign of Elizabeth I, would speak differently hundreds of years later. Still, since the 1800s, people have reported hearing Elizabethan English, or at least an “Elizabethan accent,” not only on Tangier Island but also in Appalachia, Bermuda, Cornwall, Devonshire, Northern Ireland, the Ozarks, Panama, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, Virginia’s Roanoke Island, Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and the Pitcairn Islands of the South Pacific. “Though they never heard of Shakespeare,” a newspaper once reported, “the Bourabbees of Panama speak an English that sounds as if they were characters right out of his plays.”
This last example, more than most others, encapsulates the idea’s allure. In his essay “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” the linguist Michael Montgomery argues that the notion that Shakespeare’s language lives on functions as “a myth of the noble savage”: it “satisfies our nostalgia for a simpler, purer past, which may never have existed but which we nevertheless long for because of the complexities and ambiguities of modern life.”
The Dish 