Draws the book to its conclusion, considering the main themes in light of the history of research into language and religion, and offering suggestions for several main streams of research going forward.

… with Globe Education. There was a small celebration taking place at 5 that afternoon in honour of Robert Dodsley, bookseller, writer, and Dr Johnson's publisher (amongst many other things), the 300th anniversary of whose birth had occurred with hardly anyone knowing about it. I must admit to not having noticed it myself. And it was the desire to rectify such ignorance that lay behind the invitation from Patrick Spottiswoode, the director of the Education department, to join him and a few friends for a glass or two of wine after I had finished my meeting with Tim Carroll. It was a delightful idea, for Dodsley was indeed a remarkable man – but that is another story – and we all learned a great deal, as we shared knowledge-fragments about him.

I left the theatre, several hours later, feeling that I could have played Juliet myself without any difficulty whatsoever, if only directors could see my potential. Globe Education parties are a bit like that. And I recalled three of the conversations I had had since 4 o'clock that afternoon.

Conversation 1 took place at 4.15 as I was passing the top of the stairs leading down to the Globe foyer. I bumped into one of the Practitioners – one of the team of professional actors who take part in Globe Education's outreach and on-site programmes for teachers, students, pupils, and others. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. I told him about the OP idea. There was a silence. Original pronunciation? ‘But how do you know?’ I gave him a potted version of the next few pages. As it was the first time I had been put on the spot like that, it was not entirely coherent, and it took ten minutes.

Conversation 2 took place at around 4.40 as I was meandering around the Globe bookshop, always a pleasant place to spend a spare quarter of an hour – and I mean, spend. I was in the process of paying for Peter Hall's new book when I realized I was standing next to someone who, out of context, I couldn't immediately place – but it turned out she had helped to steward my Sam Wanamaker talk a few months before.

At the time, I knew none of this. The first inkling I had that something was in the offing was an email in December from Debs Callan, Head of Continuing Education. The message mentioned that the Globe was planning an OP weekend for the last weekend in June, and that Globe Education wanted to support and help inform the work of the Theatre Department by setting up a study weekend ahead of the performances, at the beginning of that month. The aim was to provide a forum for discussion between theatre practitioners and scholars about the nature of Elizabethan pronunciation. What did I think?

I wasn't surprised to get such a message. My links with the Globe had become steadily stronger since 1997, when Nick Robins, the editor of the membership magazine Around the Globe, had asked me to write a regular piece on Shakespeare's neologisms – or Williamisms, as I went on to call them – for his magazine. As part of the Globe Education seasons, I had presented a few performance lectures on Shakespeare's language – a mixture of academic commentary and theatrical presentation, supported by actor son Ben. In 2003 I had the privilege of becoming the Sam Wanamaker Fellow for that year, and towards the end of the year I found myself working with Globe Education as a consultant for Wordplay, one of their schools outreach programmes. So I suppose I fell into the category of ‘tame linguist’, as far as the Globe was concerned. And no linguist could have been tamer and more ready to collaborate. I think the Globe is the most exciting theatrical project of modern times.

But the message made me think. It was a fine idea, but a difficult one to implement. In our book on Shakespeare's vocabulary, Shakespeare's Words, which had appeared in 2002, Ben and I had avoided representing Elizabethan pronunciation – or Early Modern English (EME), as it is more technically known – in all but a few very difficult cases (such as ‘oeillade’). We felt most readers would have difficulty with a technical representation of the sounds – a phonetic transcription.

Would actors be any different? I remember Ben telling me that phonetic transcription was not routinely a part of actor training. It was not immediately obvious how to get round this problem.

Well, almost over … I was driving back to Holyhead the next day when the mobile phone rang. It was a message from the Globe asking me to ring the Richard and Judy show. They were interested in doing a piece on OP. Was I in London? Well no, actually, Hilary told the researcher. We are on theM6 heading north-west. Could we be in London tomorrow? Not possible … meetings at home already planned. What about Wednesday?

Richard and Judy is a UK television chat-show that has made something of a mark for itself in recent times – an hour-long programme airing daily at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. It is produced in London by Cactus TV for Channel 4, and in 2004 was attracting an audience approaching 3 million. It has a reputation for dealing with serious topics in an intelligent way. If I wanted the OP project to come to the attention of a large number of people, this was a proposal I could hardly ignore! And I was impressed that a popular programme like this should have shown an interest.

That is why I found myself on a train from Holyhead to London on the Wednesday morning. Not the best day to be in London, as it happened. There was a 24-hour tube strike. But if anything, the traffic was lighter between Euston and the CactusTV studios, just round the corner from the Oval cricket ground on the South Bank, and I arrived in good time.

The day before I had had a couple of conversations with Anne Stone, the researcher assigned to the item, and we had worked out how to proceed. They were going to film Kananu and Tom doing a piece of the dialogue for the balcony scene, and they were proposing to show this in contrast with an extract from the same scene from Shakespeare in Love, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes. It was a brilliant idea. Seeing the two versions side by side made the contrast between RP and OP stand out more clearly than any amount of linguistic description could have achieved.