Crystal and Silver in a Shakespearean accent, with Ben Crystal

The Sword Guy Podcast

For transcriptions and more detailed shownotes, please go to: https://swordschool.shop/blogs/podcast/episode-190-crystal-and-silver-in-a-shakespearean-accent-with-ben-crystal

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In today’s episode we have another audiobook/interview mashup!

The Paradoxes of Defence Audiobook Project involved me hiring two narrators to record George Silver’s 1599 book, Paradoxes of Defence. Ben Crystal is a Shakespearean actor, specialising in original pronunciation, and Jonathan Hartman is a modern dramatic actor who narrates in modern English. Renowned historical harpist Andrew Lawrence-King provides the musical punctuation.

George Silver, an English gentleman, was appalled at the influx of Italian rapier fencing into England, and set out his arguments in favour of the traditional English weapons. He rails against the fashionable new style on the grounds that it is both dangerous to the practitioners, and of no use in warfare.

Whether he was right or wrong, history was against him and the fashionable Italian rapier took over. But his work offers a vital window into the theory and practice of martial arts in England in Tudor times, and ironically provides much of what we know about several Italian rapier masters: Rocco Bonetti, Vincentio Saviolo, and Jeronimo Saviolo.

This podcast episode contains a couple of sample chapters of the audiobook read in original pronunciation by Ben Crystal, which is then followed by my interview with Ben, from episode 58. Here’s a bit more information about the interview:

Ben Crystal is an actor, author, producer, and explorer of original practices in Shakespeare rehearsal and production. In this episode we talk about Ben’s work in exploring how actors would have rehearsed, staged, and performed Shakespeare’s plays in the 16th century, and how the original rhymes and pronunciation would have sounded. It makes for a completely different experience to what we think of as “Shakespearean” in modern times. Even if you aren’t into Shakespeare this is a fascinating conversation about theatre, memory, language, and of course, swords.

Which leads us on to George Silver. Find out what Ben thinks of Silver and whether he would have wanted to go to the pub with him. For those of you unaware of our project, in 1599 George Silver published his Paradoxes of Defence, offering a window into the Tudor and medieval martial arts as practiced in England.

You can find the audiobook at guywindsor.net/silver