I read a book by a linguist recently that posited that Shakespeare is wildly popular in other non-English speaking countries (e.g., in Japan, recent translations have been best-sellers) because his plays are necessarily translated into modern versions of the languages spoken in those countries. English speaking countries? No such luck. Shakespeare’s plays were “sponsored” by the upper class, but written such that they could be enjoyed by all. As a result, in his day he was easy to understand; alas, his Middle English vocabulary and diction is only barely recognizable as English. Some things seem easy, but aren’t (e.g., “wherefore” doesn’t mean “where”, it means “why”, so “wherefore art thou Romeo” means “why are you who you are”). Because it’s close enough, though, countless numbers of high schoolers have to suffer through his work. You wouldn’t dream of asking them to read, say, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Nabokov in their native Russian. You’d expect them to read the English translations (Nabokov was fluent in English, and thus did his own). So why don’t educators view his prose as a different language, and translate his works into Modern English? Eventually, this will need to be done as English evolves yet further from Shakespeare’s English. How long will this take? 100 years? 500 years?
Shakespeare is modern English.
Not modern enough.
Exactly.
*Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the great vowel shift, completed in roughly 1550.
Despite some differences in vocabulary, material from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, is considered to be in Modern English, or more specifically, they are referred to as Early Modern English, and most people who are fluent in the English of the early 21st century can read these books with little difficulty.*
From the wikipedia entry on the subject.
I like Shakespeare as written and I did as a teen in English classes as well.
I suppose the plays could be translated into English as it’s spoken today, but it would be like any other translation. A lot of the flavor would be lost, the poetry wouldn’t come through.
C.S. Lewis complained in one of his essays that famous sermons as little as a hundred years old were failing to deliver their intended messages because modern audiences were misinterpreting the vocabulary. Shakespeare is unintelligable without a dictionary; 95% of the puns and jokes get whooshed for example.
As other have said, it is modern English.
And many of the plays have been “translated” in 20/21th English.
You can read them for free online:
Here is the opening of Macbeth:
Ew. Just get a good annotated version. The modern translation removes all the poetry.
I also think Chaucer’s work should be read as written, but not as much as Shakespeare.
“Little difficulty”? You’ve gotta be kidding. Now, if you mean that most people can recognize some of the vocabulary, yeah, okay. But that’s not reading, that’s word recognition. There’s no context. They can’t gleam the true meaning of what’s going on, since there’s lots of words that meant something else back then, lots of words that seem similar to modern words but aren’t, etc.
I reiterate: it’s not modern enough.
Not to perpetuate the nitpicking about Shakespeare being Modern English (he is, no question), but he is definitely not Middle English. Here, for example, are the first few Middle English lines from the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…
Definitely more difficult than the language Shakespeare used!
(The excerpt above comes from this site, where a side-by-side modern English translation of Chaucer’s work can also be found.)
Big Bill is not wildly popular in the non-English-speaking world.
The French simply do not ‘get’ tragedy. I seem to recall Romeo & Juliet was not performed in its entirety in French until 1950-something. Comedy rarely translates outside its home culture.
(What would Arabs make of Midsummer’s Night Dream? Almost worth translating it just to see.)
I have never encountered Shakespeare in Spanish.
I suppose some smart Turkish guy has stolen Bill’s plot devices* and made them into a modern telenovela, but Shakespeare is not widely known. (In my experience, YMMV.)
*And why not? Bill stole them too.
When my high school drama department put on “Romeo and Juliet”, the version we used had a modern-er translation of the play beside the modern English. So, you’d have one page with the original text and then a page next to that in contemporary language that teens today use. And the contemporary language version really, really sucked. Like a long spiel praising someone’s beauty would be condensed to, “I think you’re really cool and really pretty. Let’s screw!” OK, not the last part, but I do remember “really cool” being used.
The language Shakespeare uses isn’t so much different than that used by Victorian poets and authors, or even contemporary poets and authors. The vast majority of the words are in use today, and there are only a handful of terms that aren’t. That’s what a good annotated copy is for. Understanding Shakespeare isn’t out of the reach of any high schooler of average intelligence. I don’t think the vocabulary is such a stumbling block as the verse is – nobody ever talked in rhymed couplets naturally.
If we stopped teaching it as written because it’s difficult to understand, where do we stop rewriting literature? Is the concept extended to other classes, as well? Do we stop teaching trigonometry because it’s not as easy to understand as geometry?
Shakespeare was a poet. It’s not so much the archaism of his language–as has been pointed out, it is in fact Modern English–as the style.
To “translate” the style of a poet to make it easier to swallow for people who can’t be cheesed to pay the kind of attention the poetry requires strikes me as definitive evidence that we are living in end times.
You don’t like Shakespeare’s style? Read The DaVinci Code again.
We make students read the original texts of Shakespeare precisely because it is challenging. The whole point of an education is that it begins when the brain is barely capable of anything. By giving the brain demanding tasks, we force it to develop and grow. The task of reading Shakespeare is one of those. By adopting to Shakespeare’s language, students increase their understanding of the English language, expand their vocabulary, and devise mental tools for approaching difficult texts.
Look, the whole point of ‘Shakespeare’ is the language. It isn’t the great plots.
It’s how he used the language to tell the stories and to define the characters.
If done properly, a modern audience has little difficulty with understanding it. Actually, changing it, usually makes it more difficult.
It’s not for everyone. If you don’t get it, it does not need to change.
I don’t see the need to put his works into more modern English. I’ve read many essays written by ESL 10th graders that make it quite plain that, despite the fact that their command of English is as of yet far from complete, the students are easily able to follow Romeo and Juliet (and Miller’s the Crucible, which is another challenging work. My favorite comments on it ever being “Abigail, she sick crazy” and “Abby had John Proctor procreate her in the barn.”). If they can understand his plays, just any native English speaker that age or older ought to be able to.
At this point, West Side Story needs to be translated into modern English. I mean “p.r.'s”, “zip guns”…? What the heck…?
Sigh. The Puritan’s view of education. Learning entails suffering…endless, endless suffering. More suffering = better education. These people are the sorts of people that still insist a solid education has to include multiple years of Latin classes. This is nonsense. Education is supposed to entail thinking and reconciling divergent viewpoints, not endless suffering and memorization (don’t kid yourself, that’s all you do when studying Shakespeare in high school). Increase their understanding of the English language? How? By learning old, archaic words no one uses anymore? By decoding sentence structure long outdated? How in hell does this stimulate the student to “devise mental tools for approaching difficult tasks?” Education is supposed to genuinely expand your mind, not punish it for being bad.
I was an excellent student in high school. I read a lot. Still do, although not much fiction or literature. I remember little of Shakespeare. Mostly, I remember hating it. So does everyone else. That’s why adults abandon Shakespeare the first chance they get. Why don’t they insist to educators that their kids don’t need it? I dunno, I guess they figure that they suffered when they were kids, now it’s their kids’ turns.
How many people really enjoy going to one of Shakespeare’s plays? I mean, 15 minutes and you’re checking your watch every 5 minutes after that. AFAICT, going to one of Shakespeare’s plays makes people feel virtuous, somehow, like they just did a good deed or something. It’s that “suffering is good for you” thing. :rolleyes:
You understand that this statement invalidates pretty much anything you’d have to say on the subject?