Of all the many semi-lucid critiques of Courage, New Hampshire, I find the commentary on accents the most amusing.

According to Alex Pareenee of Salon.com:

As proof of the producers’ commitment to historical accuracy, the British are all evil and speak with British accents, while the colonists are mostly good and speak with (wildly varying) American accents. (Well, one of them sort of has an Irish accent.)

Well, at the risk of a spoiler alert, he got the good-evil calculus flat wrong, but the request for accent-uniformity is just, well… odd.  Has any age in the history of man experienced anything like accent solidarity?  It’s almost as though approved Salon-speak would require casting Jeremy Irons in all the male and female roles.   I don’t want to appear ungrateful, because it’s an honor to be savaged by Salon, even if they gave the task to someone in the mailroom, but diversity-loving Salon not recognizing that accents, in any age, vary wildly?    And that’s not the half of it.  We’re talking about an age that can’t be measured on that front.  Hello?

The cast of Courage, New Hampshire is something like the original colonies themselves.   We have one Englishman playing a 5th generation colonial farmer, another Manchester born actor playing a redcoat, another Yale Drama school graduate playing a British soldier, a native Californian (me) playing a New Hampshire farmer, and a Southern boy (Basil Hoffman) playing a New England blue blood.

When the colonies were populated over the roughly five generations from Jamestown to the Lexington and Concord, people came from all over — Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Germany, Switzerland,  Africa.  (We don’t know exactly how they spoke, Sherlock, because we have no recordings.  Why this needs to be even mentioned is a bit alarming.  Is it possible some of the reviewers at Salon actually can’t imagine a world without mobile apps?)

In period pieces this has led to some very weird interpretations.   The actor who played John Dickinson in HBO’s John Adams, Zeljko Ivanek, turned in a great performance, but I’m not quite sure what that accent is, and that’s fine, because anyone who tells you they know how Dickinson spoke could serve as an ethics advisor to Bill Clinton.   Of course, in period pieces of all sorts, everyone knows that the aristocratic class of the ancient world — From Gaul to Persia and back — MUST speak BBC British.   Working class soldiers, like the centurions in HBO/BBC’s Rome can do oh, whatever, Glasgow or North Country.

The point is that various accents, then, and now, reflect the various backgrounds of the people who populated the planet.

You idiots.