Short anecdote of how a Shakespeare quote almost got me in trouble.
My daughter claims I can come up with a quote or song for any circumstance; this is not completely true, however …
On a breezy day, I witnessed an attractive lady leading her child across the parking lot into a store. She was wearing a short flounce skirt, and, due to the height of the child, was required to bend a little to hold its hand. Then an errant gust re-enacted Marilyn Monroe’s sidewalk vent scene, revealing to all observers that she had thong panties.
That’s when it slipped out. Before I could stop it. :smack: King Lear, act 3, scene II - “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!”
I had pretty much the exact same question about Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities. The answer has nothing really to do with his prose or his style – It’s about his place in literary history. He’s a milestone, and his writing changed the standards by which future writers were judged.
A lot of authors aren’t really considered to be literary heavyweights during their lifetime. Dickens wasn’t really in the Pantheon of Important Writers when my father was in high school in the 1930s, nor was Tolkein when I was in school in the 70s.
Sometimes this is absolutely arbitrary. Jerzy Kozinski was absolutely considered one of the greats during his lifetime, but not so much after his death. Jim Thompson was pulp trash when he was alive and now is considered kind of important.
I wonder if Dickens was victim of snobbery about novels? English for the most part wasn’t studied in the 19th century. Even then it was mostly poetry and classics. Shakespeare wasn’t considered worthy of study until very late in the Victorian period. That’s barely a generation before your father’s period of study.
Thanks! I’m not that into Japanese movies for some reason, but I might check those out.
Dickens also had the stigma of writing cheap serial fiction for popular magazines, and to be fair there are definitely places in his works where you can tell he’s being paid by the word.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is generally agreed by scholars to be a collaborative work by Shakespeare and another author or authors. I’ve read it several times. The first two acts are pretty standard Jacobean drama. Then Act III begins. Pericles enters, on shipboard and speaks.
Shakespeare has entered the building and it sends chills down my spine every time. The verse has rocketed into the stratosphere from the ground of the first acts.
You get a similar effect reading the play of Sir Thomas More, another collaboration, when in the handwritten manuscript the hand known as Hand D takes over. Nobody writes like Shakespeare at the top of his form. He really is unmatchable.
It’s instructive to compare this with Medea’s incantation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as translated by Sir Arthur Golding. As with all great writers Shakespeare borrows from those who went before and transforms. It’s clear he knew Golding’s translation well and remembered it. And Golding still makes good reading today, it’s certainly my favourite version of Ovid’s poem.
I don’t know if it is too late to post this. But actually, what amazes me most about Shakespeare, is just the interplay of words, that he uses. Harsh words and soft words, in just the right order, I think at least.
I sometimes wonder, what his speeches and other quotes., seems like to people who do not speak English.
Does anyone know what Shakespeare sounds like to the non-English speaker? I would really like to know.
And a follow-up question, do the lines have the same power and majesty when translated into other languages? And which languages convey the sound the best? (Not the meaning, which I’m assuming can be translated well.)
When I read the OP, all I could think of was that Romeo and Juliet was coming up soon.
A few scattered quotes from his collective works flittered at the edge of my thinking, but I coud not immediately connect them with their specific works.
I haven’t read many French translations of Shakespeare but, while some are really good, even impressive, none matches the original. A good translator will manage to make it sound majestic while sticking as close as possible to the “message”. But the interplay of words and sounds and, even worse, the puns are usually entirely lost, except when the same pun works in French (which is: almost never) or another one can be substituted without betraying the overall dialogue.
So, Shakespeare also sounds majestic in French… like many great French playwrights from that era. What makes him really special is usually gone, however.
I do know certain countries historically claim that their translation of Shakespeare is as good, if not better, than the original. This is probably where the old *Shakespeare in original Klingon *line from Star Treck derives. Notably German translators of the early 19th century made this claim. I have also read(I forget where) that Shakespeare does sound rather impressive in Russian.
They were real arrows. There was some post-production editing for the arrow that went through Mifune’s throat, but otherwise the arrows were all real. Ditto in Ran.
Kurbrick and Scorsese had nothing on Kurosawa. Kurosawa was the god of insane verisimilitude.
