TonySinclair, it may well be true that modern audiences miss a fair bit of Shakespeare’s references. But I suspect that the same is true for Shakespeare’s own contemporary audiences, and that he took that into account in writing them. Yes, much of the idiom is now out of date, but on the other hand, modern audiences are also much better educated than most Elizabethans. That’s why he has the habit of saying everything twice, so that even those who miss out when he says something in a fancy way will still catch it when he repeats it more plainly: In a way, Shakespeare himself provided annotation to his plays.
Or put a Cue Card Pause in the middle.
Knave, what thinkest thou to make an ass out of mineself and thineself?
The cultural changes that cause us to regard Shakespeare’s work as highbrow aren’t the fault of Shakespeare. I’m not even sure I’d say they’re the fault of academia.
My 14 year-old self never would have made the connection to Hamlet. I just remember Max von Sydow being awesome.
For those for whom Elizabethan English is a foreign dialect it offers a version that can be understood. Yes, remarkably enough not everyone is intimately familiar with archaic dialects, which is really what Shakespeare is written in.
No, it’s not. Or more accurately, it’s no longer a standard dialect of English. Most Americans never experience it outside of the theater or a book. Somehow no one is puzzled when a person has trouble with a contemporary dialect from another continent they have little exposure to, but somehow we’re all supposed to just magically know Elizabethan English.
For some people it really is the dialect.
So, clearly, we should absolutely outlaw translating it into any other language ever. If those Italian or Chinese people want to know about Shakespeare they’ll just have to learn Elizabethan English, dammmit!
^ This. Studying Shakespeare’s dialect is important because it has had an impact on current English, but for a lot of people these days the foreignness of that dialect gets in the way.
I stuck it out until I could understand it in the original language, but then I had mother who used to read us Chaucer in the original dialect and after that Shakespeare wasn’t nearly so hard. Basically, I had the good fortune to be exposed to multiple dialects of English, including archaic ones, quite early in life and therefore acquired comprehension with less effort than some of my peers. Not everyone gets that exposure, and if you don’t then a typical American will find Shakespeare’s dialect as baffling as Old Scots or [insert obscure dialect of your choice].
No, they don’t. When I was working as a cobbler I’d say about 3-4 out of 5 people I ran into around here had no clue what “cobbler” meant, either in the sense of “bakery creation” or “shoe repair”. I was gobsmacked, but there it is. I’m not counting those for whom English is a second language, these were native speakers who were clueless. Nor were these all high school drop-outs.
It’s been 400 years since Shakespeare wrote his plays. Yes, that really is enough time to make it very difficult for a lot of people to understand.
By that reasoning the only reason to watch Hollywood movies or TV is for the language - same problems.
Except most people don’t want to do that, or don’t have the time. So they don’t read it at all.
Yeah, I get that some people are in love with the dialect, but when you get down to it, it’s just another dialect and one that is becoming progressively more opaque with time. The ivory tower crowd can either tolerate it being “translated” into dialects that others find easier to understand or resign themselves to becoming more and more marginalized with each generation.
Well played, old chap.
It was never a standard dialect of English. Shakespeare’s vocabulary and verbal fireworks were always well above average. And no, the standard person in Elizabethan English didn’t speak in iambic pentameter. But yes, it’s just as much Modern English as Morte d’Arthur. This is inarguable.
Here’s another link about Early Modern English and it’s relation to contemporary English and Middle English.
Nobody in this thread said it would be easy to pick up Shakespeare’s poetic language. All we’re saying is that it’s not a foreign langauge, like Middle and Old English.
Bottom line is, if you’re not going to make the effort to develop an appreciation for Shakespeare’s writing, then there’s no real point to getting a stripped down plot summary. Just read up on it at Wiki.
Oh, go for the cheap joke, I say… But, seriously, here’s a bit of what they did to Milton…
Original: “1. Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
2.Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
3.Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
4.With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
5.Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
6.Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
7.Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire.”
Simplified: “Tell me about man’s first sin, when he tasted the forbidden fruit and caused all our troubles, until Jesus came and saved us.
Inspire me with this knowledge. You are the heavenly spirit who inspired Moses in his teachings.”
Emetic, innit?
I have a copy of Lamb’s Tales. I love Shakespeare, but my ex-wife had little exposure to it. We got Lamb’s Tales as a way for her to understand the stories of the plays when we went to see them performed. I guess I didn’t do a great job of explaining what she would see, and the book helped a great deal.
Although Lamb’s Tales was originally written in 1807, it is readable and understandable to speakers of today’s English. The stories are just that–stories–written in prose, in the third person. They lack the poetry of the original, and the puns, and the wordplay; but if my ex-wife’s experience is anything to go by, they do give the person who is unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s English the general gist of the stories that he is presenting.
There’s a reason most productions cut the Fortinbras stuff.
Oh, and if anyone believes Shakespeare didn’t write his plays I will personally take a bare bodkin to them.
And the point is that such an opinion is elitist and thus inherently wrong. A translation into modern idiom would not be a stripped down plot summary. For one thing, it wouldn’t be a summary, since it would by definition have to be at least as long as the original. Furthermore, a well-made translation does everything it can to get the wordplay of the original, so it wouldn’t just be plot.
Yes, watching a play version helps with understanding, but it has the same drawbacks of watching a video instead of reading an article. What helps is that the actors understand what they are saying and act it out. But what hurts is that you can’t vary the speed of the language based on how easy it is to understand.
I watched a play version of Much To Do About Nothing, and I can barely tell you what happened. I didn’t get any of the wordplay at all, for sure, and I’m sure I missed a lot of the dialog. What made it entertaining was all the acting, none of which was actually something written by Shakespeare. (Especially in my version, since it was performed in a Comedia dell’Arte style.) Watching it performed is not the be-all-end-all solution.
Ultimately, the prose will have to be translated. The only question is whether you will do it in your head to make sense of it–perhaps with help from annotations–or whether it will be done for you.
I mean, think about it. Would you say reading a plot summary of the Iliad is the equivalent of reading a translation? That argument is just as silly about Shakespeare. Maybe reading the original is better, but a translation is still better than any plot summary.
I agree. But that’s because it’s not a translation. They didn’t even try to keep the poetry. I’m no poet, but even I can do better on a first draft.
Sing, o heavenly muse,
When man first disobeyed, when he tasted
The fruit of the forbidden tree. The taste
that brought death and sorrow into the world.
The one man who lost Eden, until a greater man
Restored the glory of all creation
And took his seat beside the Father.
Sing, o heavenly muse,
Of what you did inspire, when on the top
Of mount Horeb or Sinai, the secrets you told.
But, if I do that, then you’d probably criticize how it’s nothing like the original, so I can understand some not even trying. And, yes, I’d agree that I’d rather hear the original. But I could see the version above being used for subtitles.
And that, I wonder, might be the best way to see Shakespeare. You’d have the immediate understanding of the subtitles, but also the beauty of the language would still be there.
But I just hate the KJV-only style worship of Shakespeare.
Baz Luhrmann’s *Romeo + Juliet *begins as a TV news broadcast–talking heads backed by captioned videos identifying the players; then the words are repeated–like an incantation. You can see the beginning in this “fan made trailer”–with a few later scenes included toward the end. As a Lurhmann film, the art direction was eye-popping, the musical numbers were modern & ear-busting–but the language was pure Shakespeare. With a few cuts–because there are always cuts. I first saw the film just after it opened, in a theater packed with a very young crowd. We were all sucked right in.
Julian Fellowes did his own version recently–with “traditional” production values. But he rewrote it because we poor peons lack his Public School education, doncha know. I haven’t seen it but it was not well received.
Shakespeare is meant to be seen, not read. A long-ago college professor/failed poet tried to make me hate Shakespeare by dryly intoning his Freudian theories from his yellowed notebook. Utterly tone deaf about the language–no wonder his one slender volume of verse was a fixture in used-book sections throughout town for so long.
Films will do but live performances are better. Every summer since 1975, dumbass Houstonians have braved the heat, humidity & mosquitoes to catch the Houston Shakespeare Festival. Two plays for free! All in Early Modern English. (No, it’s not a “dialect.”)
Milton in a paragraph, not verse. A little clarification of what was being talked about at the moment. Spelling updated and some archaicisms dropped because “heav’nly” is pronounced the same as “heavenly” these days and “didst inspire,” even updated to “did inspire,” is still awkward and archaic and pointlessly flowery compared with “inspired.” Even by Milton’s time the Saxon “do” was being phased out. The first sentence could be less awkward, but I wanted to keep as much of the original as I could. And no more numbered lines, which are just stupid and interrupt the scan, even though you don’t say them.
“Sing, Heavenly Muse, of Man’s first disobedience, and of the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the world. Sing of our woe with the loss of Eden, until one greater Man restored us, and we regained the blissful Seat. Sing of that which the secret top of Oreb, or of Sinai, inspired.”
So, who wants to do the lolcat version? The one I found isn’t as advertised.
lolcat Milton?
And a Lego version of Pilgrim’s Progress!
(Well, why not… Disney comics did a pretty good version of Dante’s Inferno…with Mickey Mouse as Dante. The writer even kept the terza rima!)
(Donald Duck, in the circle of the wrathful, was hilarious!)
You’ve seen the plots put into modern plays and movies many times, and most of Shakespeare’s plots were retreads of traditional plots. What sets them apart is the depth he gives to the characters and the language he uses. He is as good a writer as any that ever lived, and he wrote in our language. It will take a few hours to get used to, and you have to give it your whole attention, but definitely see it put on. DVDs are plentiful.
Yes, it is. All English is one dialect or another of English, it’s just that some dialects are more prestigious than others. It’s like people who declare they don’t have an accent - bullcrap, everyone has an accent when they speak.
The elitists can whine all they want, or sneer at the unwashed masses and go hur, hur, they’re too dumb to understand! but the fact is that to people who haven’t been exposed to that particular type of English before it is impenetrable. The more you insist on some arbitrary purity the fewer people will bother with the works. Which would be a shame.
Really, it’s like people who get twitchy over sub-titles for operas. It’s so much more enjoyable if the audience can actually understand what’s going on. Having to look up annotations every other sentence really degrades the entire experience.
And don’t get me started on edited Shakespeare - if you can’t bear the thought of 14 year olds reading/performing something with sex or bathroom humor in it don’t make reading the thing a requirement, then chop out the bits you find offensive. I was rather shocked to note the differences between my school’s officially issued text of Romeo and Juliet and the unexpurgated version on my mother’s bookshelf. Frankly, that’s worse than putting it into modern idiom.
Someone who’s more into the theater scene can correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Shakespeare still the single most frequently performed playwright in the world? If his language is so impenetrable, how does he pack so many people into theaters around the world? Is it just elitists who go? I had no idea the elite were so common!