I was reading Mary Beard’s Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old (Profile Books, London, 2026) through curiosity about why learn the classics and as an exercise in reading. I did Latin at school many years ago and have forgotten a fair amount. However, she discusses the use of diacritics in the production of Greek and its history. In honesty, I had never thought about it as I get translations, but I have seen them.
It did get me thinking about the notation in Joshua Steele’s notation (Emsley et al., 2019). It was a notational form to allow readers to reconstruct Garrick’s performances that relied on his ear. However, it is also reliant on one knowing both the notation and the practice from which it is derived. It enforces a model of listening onto the reader that affects their spoken utterance. One person’s listening becomes a standard model and a barrier to how the play was performed.
If I ever come back to this work, then I will go down this route as it comes from an Eighteenth Century practice of notation and pronunciation.
Iain Emsley, David de Roure, Pip Willcox, and Alan Chamberlain. 2019. Performing Shakespeare: From Symbolic Notation to Sonification. In Proceedings of the 14th International Audio Mostly Conference: A Journey in Sound (AM ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 154–159. https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356614
