“Whose head could I give you that would satisfy this fury?” asks Denzel Washington’s crafty Macrinus in the long-awaited trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. With its medley of aquatic gladiatorial games and charging battle rhinos, a vengeful Paul Mescal, a wearied Pedro Pascal, imperial Rome’s answer to Tweedledum (Joseph Quinn) and Tweedledee (Fred Hechinger), and Connie Nielsen providing an enticing link to the previous film, the trailer looks and sounds epic. So of course some viewers have come out in a fury.
A chief complaint appears to be Washington’s use of his natural New York accent, with one observer asking: “How did Ridley Scott … allow Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington to do a NY accent in a movie set in Ancient Rome?” Conversely, there seems to be little furore over the English accent of Quinn or Mescal’s loose adoption of what appears to be (from the trailer at least) received pronunciation – despite them being equally anachronistic. As it has been pointed out in the Hollywood Reporter, when combined with criticism of the music choice (Jay-Z and Kanye West’s No Church in the Wild), it “starts to look rather dog whistle-y”.
But let’s focus on the question of accents in historical drama. A century of cinema bolstered by classism and the development of received pronunciation (RP) has conditioned us to expect Hollywood historical films and TV shows to sound a certain way. It’s why we have ancient emperors, medieval knights and Tudor kings and queens all erroneously speaking with roughly the same accent.
That’s not to say there haven’t been exceptions, such as Charlton Heston’s American accent in Ben-Hur and Katharine Hepburn’s mid-Atlantic Eleanor of Aquitaine. But the expectation that pre-modern historical accents should be generally British – and received pronunciation, more specifically – has had an undeniable hold on popular culture. It’s present in Wuthering Heights (1939), Cleopatra (1963), I, Claudius (1976), Hamlet (1990), A Knight’s Tale (2001), Agora (2009), The Great (2020) – and the list goes on.
The dominance of received pronunciation as the accent of the past is all the more fascinating when we think about how recently it came into being. RP emerged in the late 18th century as the British empire was growing and British society became obsessed with codifying language and finding the “correct” way to speak English. In her seminal work Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol, the historian Prof Lynda Mugglestone has pointed out how at this crucial time “five times as many works on elocution appeared” than had done so previously. Notable figures such as Scottish biographer and diarist James Boswell took elocution lessons to speak in what was thought to be the most socially acceptable way – that is, a non-rhotic (or “r”-dropping) accent built on the norms of the court and London elites and (despite its metropolitan roots) untethered to geography.
The style was emulated on stage, with Irish theatre manager and elocutionist Thomas Sheridan arguing: “All other dialects are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic, or mechanic education, and therefore have some degree of disgrace attached to them.” Sheridan would go on to criticise the leading Shakespearean actor of the age, David Garrick, for sullying Shakespeare with his Midlands accent. In her 2020 book Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance, Prof Sonia Massai has noted how some of the earliest audio recordings from the 19th century reveal actors to be speaking Shakespeare in RP. The trend would eventually be transplanted to screen in Shakespearean plays and historical films, and work to perpetuate an accent of elitism and prestige, denying the past its variety.
Indeed, Shakespeare certainly didn’t speak in RP. His writing reveals an early modern accent that is rhotic – when the “r” is elongated before a consonant – and has since been termed original pronunciation (OP) by linguist David Crystal, who has also pointed to how contemporaries Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh had “regional” south-west accents. Even Queen Charlotte, played with an upper-class accent by Golda Rosheuvel in Bridgerton, spoke English with a German accent. And if we return to ancient Rome, we would have found a cacophony of languages spoken in different accents and dialects, from Latin and Etruscan to Oscan and Greek.
Challenges to the norm come at the actors’ own risk. Channing Tatum used an American accent to play a Roman in 2011’s The Eagle, a film about the supposedly lost ninth legion, only for a critic to declare: “Once he starts speaking, the jig is up.” Years after using his Irish accent to play Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone’s much-slated 2004 film Alexander, Colin Farrell confessed “maybe he [Alexander] shouldn’t have had an Irish accent. Only from the 7,000 reviews I read.” Interestingly, Heath Ledger’s received pronunciation being deemed only “acceptable” in A Knight’s Tale led one reviewer to remark: “There’s not much to suggest we’re in the presence of a star in the making.”
Conversely, the story goes that when Sean Bean was cast as Ned Stark in the history-adjacent Game of Thrones, he was asked to play the role using RP. He refused and instead used his own Sheffield accent, meaning most of the Starks (including the RP-speaking Kit Harington and Scottish Richard Madden) used a northern English accent. A small moment that added a layer of authenticity to the history-inspired world of Westeros.
Perhaps the next time an actor is criticised for using their natural accent in a historical drama, they might channel their inner Garrick. After being maligned for using his own Midlands accent and his pronunciation of the letter “i” as more of a “u” in the word “firm”, the 18th-century actor quipped: “Most devoutly I wish that they both have their due. And that I may be never mistaken for U.”
Rebecca Rideal is a historian, producer and the author of 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire. She writes on history, true crime and culture
