Is there an American accent that's comparable to received pronunciation in the UK?

[Aristus]

5. That's a good question. And it has been answered.

Years ago.

As part of Edwin Newman's PBS series on the history of the English language. Linguists reviewed written documents from the Elizabethan period to reverse-engineer what the accents would have sounded like. Because standardized spelling didn't exist at the time, and most people wrote phonetically based on their internal perception of a word's pronunciation, and what they heard from others, a rough idea of what particular accents sounded like can be inferred from the spelling.

In this way, for example, language scholars were able to deduce that the accent spoken by London aristocrats of the Elizabethan Era was very similar to today's working-class Cockney accent. They figures this out through the spelling of words like "chynes", meaning "chains".

It was a very interesting documentary.