Well, thanks for the recommendation, and I guess I do see what you and pseudotriton (and, on preview WhyNot) are trying to say, but I thought your original point was that modern audiences could understand Shakespeare as-is - without adaptation, which was why you found a contemporary version redundant.
That’s still what I’m saying. I’m not saying it doesn’t take a little bit of effort, and re-reading, but Shakespeare isn’t so far removed (like Chaucer, for example) that he needs an intermediary.
Understood. Thanks for clearing that up.
Are you suggesting that if I read a Shakespeare play that I cannot appreciate or understand it unless I have the help of a genius? Because that’s just silly.
Maybe you need the help of a genius to understand the word “probably” in my post.
Yep, bad choice of words on Tracy’s part this time. Branagh’s “adaptations” leave Sheakespeare’s text pretty well intact. Entirely intact in the case of *Hamlet *- which is what makes it so unique. No one does the full three to four hour *Hamlet *these days, everyone cuts it down to a more manageable two hours. Except Branagh did the whole thing - in the first movie I ever went to that had an intermission at the movie theater! His other movies trimmed some dialogue and scenes, but what remains is the real thing.
“Direction” or “directorial choices” would have been a better choice of words in Tracy’s text, although from the Screen Writer’s Guild technicality standpoint, Branagh did indeed so an “adaptation” of Shakespeare. But it wasn’t a translation into contemporary speech at all.
Although since I’m feeling rambuctious this morning, I’ll posit that those same phenomenal actors could indeed present Chaucer in the original or even Star Trek in entirely Klingon and we’d still “get it.” Great acting is universal, as well as exceedingly rare.
I said what I meant. He didn’t adapt Hamlet, but he did Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and Love’s Labour’s Lost by shifting lines and scenes around and cutting dialogue so that the storyline, and a lot of extraneous dialogue, was simplified. He wasn’t functioning as a director when he did that, he was functioning as (if anything) a dramaturg.
If you have the chance to see the BBC’s versions of Shakespeare’s plays, then I highly recommend them. Well, Macbeth was a real snoozer, but Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida were both fabulous productions. I don’t know how easy they are to find–I get my weekly fix from my library.
“Shakespeare’s” text??? From what: First Quarto? Second Quarto? First Folio? Or perhaps you’re referring to some 19th Century “rewrite” of Hamlet? Some versions of Hamlet are 50% longer than others. . .
And, of course, what of the text is really Shakespeare and not his co-authors?
Tracy –
I was going to comment earlier that some international students have no concept of plagiarism, though it seemed mildly off-topic as it appears your colleague is probably is an American. Many schools outside the developed countries rely on rote memorization of facts and copying of information is irrelevant.
BTW, you might find Marjorie Garber’s book “Shakespeare After All” interesting. It consolidates information that she’s used in lectures on the bard. It’s kind of a heavy tome (906 pages) but has very interesting comments on how the text has changed over the years.
Best regards,
Mooney252
As someone who’s taught Shakespeare, I’d disagree with that. (Agreed, of course, that it’s no comparison to Chaucer.)
Firstly, it’s not just spellings that have changed, but also meanings. So if one reads “nice”, for example, without knowing the word’s history, there’s bound to be misunderstanding.
Pronunciations have also changed, so a US audience is likely to miss delicious puns and banter (reason/raisin is a commonly known “lost pun”).
Also, there are certain conventions of Elizabethan culture and drama that have to be learned if one wants to get all the juice, or even understand some of the basics in certain cases.
In some cases, especially the triple-puns, there is no contemporary rendition that will suffice to convey the full meaning to modern ears.
I would never have my students read Shakespeare without decent annotations.
It is a bit of hyperbole, but I do agree with pseudo’s underlying sentiment. Even though I 've read (and since forgotten) a lot of Shakespeare, it wasn’t until seeing it performed on stage that the plays really gelled for me. Shakespeare really needs to be seen and not simply read, to be fully appreciated.
Furthermore, I too would never read a Shakespeare play without a running commentary or good footnoting. It’s not so much the language that is difficult, it’s the allusions, the puns, the history, the shift in word meanings, etc… While I’m certainly not saying that Shakespeare needs to be read with footnotes and historical perspective to be appreciated, it does in order to be fully understood.
But no one can get the full meaning of anything written that far back without annotations. I’ve just read Tristram Shandy, and they were helpful there also. But that’s different from Shakespeare being incomprehensible. Yes, the rhythm is different, but when I was rereading all the plays a while back, I was able to read it almost as fast as modern English - with less comprehension, I’ll admit. I was even dreaming in blank verse. I think the point is that someone can appreciate Henry V, for instance, by themselves.
Tracy was the assignment to “translate” that particular piece, or any piece at the choosing of the student?
This may be true at your school, but it’s far from the standard. At the university where I do research and the college where I teach, letting another student see your work is plagiarism. There is no reason another student should need to see your work in its entirety. If he was having problems, he could have talked about it with Tracy, but he shouldn’t ask to see her final product.
Tracy, you have very good reason to be worried. I just had an identical situation in a class that I taught. Both students ended up getting an F in the course. Once student A admitted giving the work to B, student A’s fate was sealed. Essentially, it was viewed as aiding and abetting a plagiarist and very much a violation of the honesty code.
I wish I had better news for you; I believe that you didn’t mean any harm. Unfortunately, I think the response from your prof is quite unpredictable. He/she might agree with you and let you off with a warning. However, if the university is cracking down on plagiarism, he/she might feel that the incident must be reported (to protect his/her job).