My computer is acting really weird - please delete all of my posts above this one.
Wow, this post actually worked. Let’s see if I can paste in my original post.
Why would you want to read Henry James with a British accent? He’s an American writer.
Me, I read almost everything in English with my native Norcal accent, whatever the speech of the original writer The only exception I can think of is G.B. Shaw, but that’s because he’s so obsessed with dialect/accent it makes the reader concious too. Of course, I might also be jarred occasionally by a locution which is peculiar to the dialect of the writer (or the dialect the writer is trying to use) into adjusting the accent of the words as they sound in my head for about a page.
I read that at times americans cannot follow a Shakespearean play just by ear (let alone Chaucer), much of what is said sounds foreign.
This is as true for British English speakers as American English speakers. After all, there are practically no dialects of English which still use the word ‘puling’ (a word plucked from Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II, Scene 1). But to be quite frank, Shakespeare’s English is not terribly different from most Modern English. The main reason which Shakespeare is incomprehensible when it is recited/performed is that the actors/reciters are not doing their job properly, and I have seen enough productions of Shakespare to know. When Shakespeare is performed well, he is very easy to understand with my American ears, I assure you. It is particularly easy to gauge acting skill in a Shakespeare play because the audience will understand the good actors better than the bad actors. In a production of Lear that I saw a few months ago, they got a superb actor to play Lear (of course, that is a requirement for any self-respecting production of Lear), and Goneril and Reagan also gave excellent performances. 60% of the cast were able to hold their own weight, though their performances were not memorable. Some of the actors, though, seemed to be drowning under the weight of the words.
I don’t know what was going on with the actress playing Cordelia, but it was definitely the weirdest performance in the production, and it made her difficult to understand. Anyway, it was odd to see a production of Lear where a) Lear was the character whose speech was most easily understood and b) where Goneril and Reagan were much easier to understand than Cordelia, which warped the relationship between the sisters in a way which I do not think the director intended.
In fact, most experienced/educated theatre people, on both sides of the Atlantic, believe that American speech is closer to Shakespeare’s speech than contemporary British speech. Some British theatre people even claim that the clipped nature of British speech clips out the soul of Shakespeare’s words, though Americans are too polite to say the same 
Of course, British productions of Shakespeare are still predominantly in contemporary British English, but that’s so they can access their audiencce better. I have heard that the closest contemporary speech to Shakespeare’s is either a) an Appalachian dialect or b) an Irish dialect. I know for sure that there is some Appalachian dialect which is remarkably close to Chaucer’s English - so much so that an Appalachian found Chaucer much easier to read than most modern English works.
TO BRING THIS DISCUSSION BACK TO GREEK -
I myself tend to use a blend of American/French accent (not on purpose, but I think it’s the blasted continental vowels which make my tongue want to transition into a semi-French accent) when reading Ancient Greek with a reconstructed pronounciation a l’ Allen, but I rarely deal with Koine. I do not necessarily recommend this specific system (certainly not the French bit) to anybody else, though I do recommend using a system which makes the meter scan right.
I wonder, how would one treat the work of Lucian, which is Attic but written in Koine times?
