“Get a load of this asshole!”
Nice. I used to think it was blasphemy to do Shakespeare in modern English translation, but linguist John McWhorter convinced me otherwise in a book about 15 years ago, with the same arguments Sampiro elucidated in this thread, in his long posts from ten years ago.
When I lived in Mexico in the late 1990s and learned to speak Spanish at about 80% fluency, I realized a side benefit was getting to enjoy Shakespeare in an ideal fashion: hearing the original words, but getting simultaneous clarification (via Spanish subtitles) on the meanings when necessary, without the distraction or feeling of “dilution” I might have gotten with modern English subtitles.
You know, there’s something to be said for brevity. I think some famous writer made it a metaphor, or a simile, I can never keep them straight.
People don’t talk like that, with long winded insults, anymore. It sticks out, like having homeless people speak in iambic pentameter in a movie about gay street hustlers.
Don’t most films have subtitles these days?
And yeah i know you meant “translated.” But Shakespearean English is modern English. And the poetry–the words–is the point.