# Did ordinary Elizabethans understand Shakespeare's plays? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 2, 2011, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671 "2011-11-02T19:33:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![appleciders](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85f322/32.png) [@appleciders](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/appleciders)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/61 "2011-11-04T02:53:18Z")
> [@Kiyoshi](#): > > Thank you everyone for your answers and comments so far. > > I should point out that this _Hamlet_ wasn’t my first stab at Shakespeare. I studied three plays at school: - > > _Romeo & Juliet_, which we saw performed live. That was easy enough to follow, even if the dialogue didn’t make much sense to me. > > _Macbeth_, for which we watched the Roman Polanski film. This one was pretty confusing, and I really hated having to study it. > > _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, which we didn’t see performed. It didn’t make any sense to me at all; I couldn’t tell you what it was about. > > I wasn’t aware that Shakespeare wrote any comedies. Could anyone recommend a good film version that I could watch? _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ is one of the most famous and most frequently performed comedies. It’s the single comedy that I would most recommend to a Shakespeare novice. However, R&J is probably the single most accessible Shakespeare play; everyone already knows the story, and the language in tragedies and histories isn’t quite as obtuse as it is in comedies because Shakespeare isn’t spending as much time making clever puns. I would recommend the 1968 Zefferelli version for you; it’s not the best version I’ve ever seen artistically, but it’s extremely understandable. **Kiyoshi** , is English your first language? Your writing is technically perfect but a smidge formal, so I wondered. If it’s not, I understand perfectly well that Shakespeare may be entirely unintelligible. I have family members who’ve lived in the States for decades and speak excellent English but don’t enjoy Shakespeare because understanding it in a learned language isn’t always possible. > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > That’s okay; I also recently characterize _Gilligan’s Island_ as being the American equivilent of McGoohan’s _The Prisoner_. And my position on _Casablanca_ as being not the bittersweet romance that it is commonly held as but rather a cynical film noir of deception and deceit matching anything written by Mamet has endured through much criticism. I maintain that _Hamlet_ is a farce of an ineffectual young prince who is utterly incapable of carrying out the simple assassination of his father’s murderer despite the support that would have doubtless emerged from the court that justice was being served (including by Gertrude, who at least tacitly acknowledged the strong possibility that the “uncle-father” murdered his brother), and instead allowing Denmark to fall into the hands of Fortinbras of Norway, whose father was honorably defeated by King Hamlet. The Marx Brothers couldn’t come up with more absuridty. > > Stranger In a similar vein, I urge you to consider _Titus Andronicus_ as a Quentin Taratino film, or possible _South Park_– it’s bloody, crude, and filled with offensive racial stereotypes. I mean, when a young girl has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and is then forced to explain what happened to her by writing a message in the dirt with a stick held in her mouth and stumps, it’s black humor at its finest, and treating it as a serious piece really does it a disservice. I have seen it produced as a bloody, bloody farce by half-drunk college students with a rowdy audience, and it was one of the finest productions of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/62 "2011-11-04T03:17:05Z")
I really enjoyed this [Australian film version of Macbeth](http://www.amazon.com/Macbeth-Gary-Sweet/dp/B000SIWH0U/). It retains the original dialogue/language, but updates the setting to a power struggle within a modern criminal gang\*. That’s actually something I’ve noticed about the Shakespeare tragedies I’m familiar with - if you place them in a modern setting, you pretty much have to make the characters criminals, ala R&J/West Side Story, rather than royalty/nobility. \*Depicting the witches as nubile, naked young Wiccans was a nice touch, too 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Kiyoshi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e19adc/32.png) [@Kiyoshi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiyoshi)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/63 "2011-11-04T10:45:08Z")
> [@appleciders](#): > > **Kiyoshi** , is English your first language?. Yes. I think the formal writing is just a by-product of working in legal, sorry! I think the point about exposure to poetry is a good one. I also don’t get poetry (both the meaning of a lot of it, and what the point of it is). I suppose if Elizabethan plays and stories only used poetic language, rather than more natural speech, then the audience would be a lot more used to it than we are. I don’t really know if watching something with a modern setting, but the same script, would help me. The problem is that I don’t understand any of what is being said, so I have to rely entirely on the visuals. It’s like watching a foreign film without subtitles. I don’t know if its just a case of needing more exposure..? ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/64 "2011-11-04T10:52:21Z")
> [@Kiyoshi](#): > > I don’t really know if watching something with a modern setting, but the same script, would help me. The problem is that I don’t understand any of what is being said, so I have to rely entirely on the visuals. It’s like watching a foreign film without subtitles. I don’t know if its just a case of needing more exposure..? Well, easy to find out: watch West Side Story! ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/65 "2011-11-04T10:52:47Z")
Linguist John McWhorter, in one of his books, makes a persuasive case for promoting Shakespeare in translation – that is, translated from Early Modern English to Modern Modern English. He insists that, if the translation is skillful, not much of mellifluous poetry need be sacrificed, and the whole experience is just so much fuller and more enjoyable. He points out that, even when we think we’re understanding a line of Shakespeare, often we are not, because the meanings of many words have shifted. Perhaps even a better option would be to have the actors speak in the original, but add Modern Modern English subtitles (if on TV or film) or supertitles (if live on stage). I actually sort of experienced the pleasure of this by accident, when I saw a filmed version of a Shakespeare play (with original dialogue) in a Mexican cinema, with Spanish subtitles (as with any English language film in Mexico, except for kiddie flicks, which they dub). Even though the subtitped Spanish was deliberately a tad archaic (to better mimic the flavor of the original, to modern ears), and even though my Spanish is far from perfect, I could still understand the subtitled Spanish better than the Shakesperean English abot 80 percent of the time. Thus, I was able to “get” the play, yet enjoy the original sounds of the mellifluous poetry at the same time. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/66 "2011-11-04T13:04:49Z")
Or you can expend just a little effort & learn to love a slightly older version of Modern English. (Of course, dumbing-down Shakespeare would provide lots of work for out-of-work linguists & English majors!) [Enjoy playing with our language!](http://stratfordonhellmouth.tumblr.com/) (Inspired by a recently announced [film](http://muchadothemovie.com/).) ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/67 "2011-11-04T13:13:02Z")
> [@Bridget\_Burke](#): > > Or you can expend just a little effort & learn to love a slightly older version of Modern English. (Of course, dumbing-down Shakespeare would provide lots of work for out-of-work linguists & English majors!) > > [Learn to play with our language!](http://stratfordonhellmouth.tumblr.com/) (Inspired by a recently announced [film](http://muchadothemovie.com/).) Well, call it what you’d like, but McWhorter (no dummy he!) makes a good case for why this is NOT “dumbing down”, but rather translation, plain and simple. Unless you understand Russian, I doubt you’ve read _Anna Karenina_ (say) in the original. Does that mean you’ve read a “dumbed down” version of the book? Unless the translator is inept, I’d say you hadn’t. (Sure, something will be lost. Something always is, in any translation.) Look, languages evolve over time. There’s no definitive way to say exactly how far back you have to go, in the history of any language, and still say it’s the “same” language. In the case of English, 400 years is just a bit beyond being readily understandable by most people. I agree with you that some preperation oin the language and customs of Shakespeare’s day would enhance the experience for anyone, just as it would for better enjoying, say, Tennessee Williams. But there’s no reason to make people work TOO much, just for work’s sake, when there are other solutions. Your mileage may vary, of course. McWhorter himself emphasizes that we should still sometimes put on the plays in their original language, in part so people who DO choose to put in a great effort to understand them (like you, it seems) can reap the benefits of that effort. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/68 "2011-11-04T13:29:30Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > …Your mileage may vary, of course. McWhorter himself emphasizes that we should still sometimes put on the plays in their original language, in part so people who DO choose to put in a great effort to understand them (like you, it seems) can reap the benefits of that effort. Oh, so he’d pretty much replace the original Shakespeare plays with his own Early 21st Century Versions but would allow rare exceptions. How big of him! Sure, add subtitles/surtitles if people really need them. But Shakespeare really isn’t that hard for most of us. When some local players announced a Shakespeare series in an old downtown warehouse, I invested in a couple of Cliff’s notes editions with annotated full text. They replaced my crummy SF paperbacks for a week or so’s worth of Reading On The Bus & were lots of fun. Hardly academic torture! (The productions were excellent & sold many tickets; so does the yearly [Shakespeare Festival](http://houstonfestivalscompany.com/)here in Redneckville On The Bayou.) Hey–the translations would be in Copywrite! So broke warehouse players & budget starved academics might have to stick with The Old Stuff… ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/69 "2011-11-04T13:57:07Z")
What “great effort?” Shakespeare is easy. Beowulf, OTOH… ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/70 "2011-11-04T14:14:20Z")
> [@Bridget\_Burke](#): > > Sure, add subtitles/surtitles if people really need them. But Shakespeare really isn’t that hard for most of us. … I sort of agree with this. But, again, translation is not “replacement” (or if is, there’s nothing wrong with that). Translating from, say, Latin to Spanish is just a difference in degree from translating from EME to MME. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Excellent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f19dbf/32.png) [@Mr.Excellent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Excellent)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/71 "2011-11-04T14:25:47Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > _Richard III_ could be easily set in any high school with the class geek as the titular character. In fact, I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t done just that. I very badly want to see this. > [@SciFiSam](#): > > I want Alan Rickman to play Richard. I even checked IMDB, because that casting is so perfect that it could not have gone by-the-by, but it seems it has. He’d have exactly the right amount of sudden bile, dark humour, resigned cynicism and potential underlying goodness for Richard, and he even looks a bit like the portraits. And this as well, though Ian McKellan did a damn fine job as well. As did Ian Richardson - come on, Urqhart _is_ Richard Gloucester. 🙂 I’m a bit surprised you refer to Richard’s “potential underlying goodness,” though -care to elaborate? I mean, I suppose the man might have turned out decently had circumstances been different - but the character we see in the play is a pretty horrible human being, and not especially conflicted about it. > [@appleciders](#): > > \*In a similar vein, I urge you to consider _Titus Andronicus_ as a Quentin Taratino film, or possible _South Park_– it’s bloody, crude, and filled with offensive racial stereotypes. I mean, when a young girl has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and is then forced to explain what happened to her by writing a message in the dirt with a stick held in her mouth and stumps, it’s black humor at its finest, and treating it as a serious piece really does it a disservice. I have seen it produced as a bloody, bloody farce by half-drunk college students with a rowdy audience, and it was one of the finest productions of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen. Oh, man - that’s another production I’d love to see. 😃 BTW, Julie Taymor’s adaptation, “Titus,” does a very good job of bringing out the bloody-farce character of the play. I quite like it, and was saddened by the failure of his Spider-man play - I want more _good_ stuff from Taymor. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/72 "2011-11-04T14:37:10Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > BTW, Julie Taymor’s adaptation, “Titus,” does a very good job of bringing out the bloody-farce character of the play. It also has a good deal of silliness, but I agree it brings out the blood and guts and dark comedy of the play rather than treating it as a tragedy on par with Julius Caesar. And yes, that sounds like an excellent adaptation of Richard III. It hasn’t been done as far as I know. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/73 "2011-11-04T15:08:35Z")
> [@Mister\_Rik](#): > > I really enjoyed this [Australian film version of Macbeth](http://www.amazon.com/Macbeth-Gary-Sweet/dp/B000SIWH0U/). It retains the original dialogue/language, but updates the setting to a power struggle within a modern criminal gang\*. That’s actually something I’ve noticed about the Shakespeare tragedies I’m familiar with - if you place them in a modern setting, you pretty much have to make the characters criminals, ala R&J/West Side Story, rather than royalty/nobility. > > \*Depicting the witches as nubile, naked young Wiccans was a nice touch, too 😛 Yes, see another _Macbeth_ adaptation, [_Men of Respect._](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Respect) But, be careful generalizing. In [this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(2000_film)) modern-setting version of _Hamlet,_ OTOH, the royals are not (common) criminals, they are biz tycoons. And in [this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_(film)) _Othello_-inspired thing, everybody is a high-school student. Likewise with [this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Things_I_Hate_About_You) _Taming-of-the-Shrew_ thing. Actually, except for the Histories, you can probably update almost any Shakespeare play, without losing the essence, by setting it in a high school. The Elizabethan Age was, from a modern perspective, an . . . adolescent time. ---
**Author:** ![Kiyoshi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e19adc/32.png) [@Kiyoshi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiyoshi)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/74 "2011-11-04T15:11:10Z")
I don’t understand why it’s fine to translate Chaucer into modern English, but it’s heresy to touch Shakespeare, when they’re only 200 years apart. I know Shakespeare is technically “Modern English,” but what’s in a name? 😉 It’s a different language from today’s English. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/75 "2011-11-04T15:19:30Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > I’m a bit surprised you refer to Richard’s “potential underlying goodness,” though -care to elaborate? I mean, I suppose the man might have turned out decently had circumstances been different - but the character we see in the play is a pretty horrible human being, and not especially conflicted about it. Every human character has to have some potential underlying goodness, or at least goodness by their own standards. It makes them more complex and more interesting to watch. I quite like the occasional unabashed villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever (Voldemort, for example), but they don’t make for complex characters who have interesting lines and can relate to people well enough to manipulate them. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/76 "2011-11-04T15:20:56Z")
> [@Kiyoshi](#): > > I don’t understand why it’s fine to translate Chaucer into modern English, but it’s heresy to touch Shakespeare, when they’re only 200 years apart. I know Shakespeare is technically “Modern English,” but what’s in a name? 😉 It’s a different language from today’s English. It is? I’ve only ever seen original versions for sale. Chaucer is actually a bit easier than Shakespeare, too. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/77 "2011-11-04T15:37:47Z")
> [@Kiyoshi](#): > > It’s a different language from today’s English. No, it isn’t. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s not that different. And Chaucer was writing something like 200 years before Shakespeare. I don’t mean to be critical but maybe you would understand the Shakespeare better if you watched the clips to the end and maybe gave them a second look to figure out what you were missing instead of writing off the language as gibberish. People do write “simplified” versions of Shakespeare for students and they also write side-by-side translations. From what I’ve seen, the simplified stuff has a bad reputation because it dumbs the stuff down too much: I remember someone on this board talking about an edition of Hamlet where “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” was written as “Help!” What Shakespeare was writing often takes a backseat to how he wrote it. You could make “To be or not to be” “To live or to die” instead, but when you make too many changes like that, you lose a lot of the point in reading it in the first place. And arguably this helps encourage the idea that you just can’t understand Shakespeare today, which isn’t true. There are some words you’re unlikely to know and not all of the reference to mythology or Elizabethan politics, but the language itself is not a total mystery. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/78 "2011-11-04T16:22:04Z")
Hell, I can’t understand half of what Sheldon spouts about physics on _Big Bang Theory_, or any of the technobabble on _CSI:Elevator Inspectors_, or the medical mumbo-jumbo on _House_. Doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of these shows in the least. I miss the odd joke or reference, but the majority of the language is perfectly comprehensible. ---
**Author:** ![Kiyoshi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e19adc/32.png) [@Kiyoshi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiyoshi)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/79 "2011-11-04T17:06:04Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#): > > It is? I’ve only ever seen original versions for sale. Chaucer is actually a bit easier than Shakespeare, too. The versions of Canterbury Tales I’ve seen have given the original text on one page and a translation on the opposite page. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2011, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671/80 "2011-11-04T17:54:21Z")
We don’t translate Shakespeare into modern English because it’s already in modern English. We do translate Chaucer into modern English because it isn’t already in modern English. Here’s a quick test for you: How often do people quote Shakespeare in every day speech? Quite frequently, often even without realizing that they’re quoting him. That would be impossible, if it were a different language. But now think, how often do people quote Chaucer? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-ordinary-elizabethans-understand-shakespeares-plays/601671.md?page=5)