Strong with you, the bitterness is.
Shakespeare can be a little tough to read, but all the performances I’ve seen have been easy to follow.
I dunno about “p.r.'s” but “zip guns” are improvised handguns, generally made by miscreants in shop class (until they discover pot, at which point they start making pipes and bongs).
I don’t think there’s a serious argument to be made that modern audiences can fully appreciate Shakespeare. They get half-Shakespeare at best. Plots come through enough to carry the scenes, good actors can flesh out characters that the words may not elucidate, some famous lines are useful indicators and signposts to drag the audience along with.
Real Shakespeare is a creature of his time. When I’m in an argument about science fiction I always need to remind people, usually futilely, that science fiction is about the present and not about the future. Shakespeare is similarly tied to his time. A scholarly examination reveals overwhelming evidence of this.
Shakespeare coined about 15,000 words and was among the first users of thousands of others. A third, a half, maybe more of these words did not survive past his use and maybe an imitator or two. They are the blank sounds in the blank verse. Other words are used in their then current usage, a usage that is lost to ordinary speech. And the jokes, and the puns, and the wordplay are woven through the plays like leaden threads that drag down the joyous gaiety of the words and leave them dull because their points have been dulled by nonuse and time. Nor does it stop. How much direct history does a modern audience have to understand and be able to follow past name changes and shifting titles just to make the past reasonably comprehensible? The indirect references, the allusions to current people, players, royals, rogues, priests, and whores, and their actions, feuds, fights, resentments and revenges are there, but only if you have a graduate level education in Elizabethan English and the restoration play and Shakespeare’s rivals and compatriots.
Huge hunks of all the plays are internally rotted by the boreholes of time. The Histories probably most of all, although the comedies depended on the audience laughing at moments we hear nothing unfold.
I don’t agree that modern language Shakespeare could rectify these gaps while keeping the flavor of the original. Unless a true immensely knowledgeable, deeply immersed actor/scholar genius came to the rescue, putting in years of a life into the project.
Assuming that doesn’t happen, we need to keep the original language and fix the audience. I haven’t studied the Cliff Notes or Sparks Guide but I don’t think they would do what I would like to see.
What I want is an hour’s worth of annotation, but not in dictionary fashion. Go through and tell us that character S is probably Y in real life, who was an enemy of K and that’s why he’s angry and D and F want to fight. Tell us that the word X had the connotation of V and that’s it’s an insult. Let us laugh at the metaphor C and the pun R because early audiences got that they were saying A and Q in a really dirty way. Warn us that if we don’t get scene 2, subscene i, that we won’t get Scene 3 at all in Act 4. Not every single change has to be explained away; just enough to hold our hands across the gaps and barriers.
I would put in some extra time to get an Acting Guide to Shakespeare. I think others would as well. I’d bet that far more students would pay attention during a performance. Not going to happen in real life, sadly. Doing nothing on the grounds that I suffered through it, now you have to suffer through it, which is basically what I’m seeing here is no improvement, though. It’s slow death.
I enjoy Shakespeare. I enjoy it a lot. Much Ado About Nothing is pretty damned funny. I know a lot of people who enjoy Shakespeare, too. True enjoyment, not pretentious, head-up-the-butt poser-y.
Just because you apparently hated your exposure to Shakespeare doesn’t mean that everyone else loathes it as intensely or that it doesn’t have merit, Malienation. I cannot stand The Grapes of Wrath, but I understand why it’s taught.
Here’s an example of a Shakespeare play with modern dialogue.. :dubious:
Eh, I’ve enjoyed most works of Shakespeare I’ve read, and the only thing I really recall having to have explained to me is the whole “Wherefor/Why” thing (also, I had to find out what exactly “Biting your thumb” consisted of, though it was plain from what was going on that it was like flipping the bird).
Also, if you translate Romeo And Juliet, you ruin such awesome bits such as:
“You shall not stir one foot to seek thy foe!”
“Hold me not, Let me go!” 
Anyhow, Shakespeare does get adapted into modern presentations, sometimes very well. Go see “10 Things I Hate About You” for what I’m told is an adaptation of “Taming of the Shrew”, I freaking love that movie just for the marching band. Also worth checking out is The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s presentation of "The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged), where they take everything Shakespeare has ever written, and condense it into 90 minutes with three guys performing on stage.
Along those lines, we have MacHomer. You can hear snippets from the play and interview with the creator here.
Precisely. When you lose the language, you lose much of the context. You can make do with this by substituting a new context (as with Kurosawa’s Ran), but to just parse the dialogue of Lear or Richard III into the modern lexicon would lose the power of the oratory. And to “translate” a play like Hamlet, As You Like It, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where much of the context is built into the wordplay, into common XXI Century grammar would leave little appeal. Hamlet’s famous double entendres:HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA
No, my lord.
HAMLET
I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA
Ay, my lord.
HAMLET
Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA
I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET
That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Or even Romeo and Juliet (one of my least favorite), this bit of wordsmithing is brilliance itself:JULIET
How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art,
If any of my kinsmen find thee here.
ROMEO
With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do that dares love attempt;
Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.
JULIET
If they do see thee, they will murder thee.
ROMEO
Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye
Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet,
And I am proof against their enmity.
JULIET
I would not for the world they saw thee here.
ROMEO
I have night’s cloak to hide me from their sight;
And but thou love me, let them find me here:
My life were better ended by their hate,
Than death prorogued, wanting of thy love.
How you would “translate” that into modern speech and not lose the essential flavor, I do not know. You might as well force David Mamet to have his characters stop repeating each other, or make Jim Thompson not punch out dialogue like he’s beating a slab of beef with baseball bat.
Well, yeah. It’s a play. If you find that tough to read, try getting any joy out or movie or television screenplays; it is the rare writer that can make a readable story out of filmable dialogue. Shakespeare wasn’t just a writer; he was a producer of his own plays. He wrote them to be acted out, not just imagined.
Stranger
Too bad you don’t realize that studying art of older cultures does exactly that, “expand your mind.”
Do you have any idea how wrong you are? If you were correct, Shakespeare would have been long since abandoned.
In case you missed it, a lot of people still really love Shakespeare.
And I mean, a lot. Myself included. I know I don’t “get” everything, but what I do get is substantial, and I love it.
You abandoned Shakespeare. Your loss. Don’t project. (I’m assuming you’re an adult; it’s not really clear that this is the case.)
:rolleyes: right back at you.
Actually, teachers (and parents who have a clue) believe in that “expand your mind,” “thinking,” and “divergent viewpoint” stuff. Which, apparently unbeknownst to you, includes studying the art of older times.
Why don’t you do some actual research instead of assume? Be a man, show some integrity–instead of assuming everyone is like you and shares your lack of taste–and get back to us when you have a measure of actual fact behind your argument.
Memorization has its uses. Too bad you apparently never figured that out. Good luck on your driver’s test.
P.S. I didn’t suffer reading Shakespeare in school, and a lot of us didn’t. I recall very little memorization (just a few notable speeches), certainly nothing the least bit fatiguing, much less approaching “endless.”
Aw, simmer down and drink your Brawndo. It’s got electrolytes!
If that isn’t a typo, and “gleam” is really the word you thought you should have used there, then I have to think Shakespeare isn’t the only writer you have trouble with.
Modern English? Modern English? As in, “Forsooth, I shall stop the world, and melt with thee.”
Sir Rhosis, stretching
I’m still thankful our teachers thought we should study Shakespeare and gave me the opportunity to watch good and enjoyable productions of his work. Let’s see, in school I did a Shakespeare play every year for four years, from ages 12 -16. It was my favourite bit of English classes ( as opposed to dreary things like “the Red Pony”, Of Mice and Men", “Animal Farm” and “The Mill on the Floss”, which I hated).
We started with A Midsummer Night’s dream, then Romeo and Juliet, then Macbeth and finally Hamlet. Working up from the easy to the more complex. Other classes did Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing. Every year we watched Shakespeare movies, attended any local productions and my school did an annual production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the year 9 class, which was always enjoyable.
I watched a lot of Shakespeare movies at school. It was the usual treat, at the end of term or when the teacher was bored, to watch a movie or two, each over a couple of 1 hour English classes.
Because of that, I’ve seen:
Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli and Luhrmann)
Hamlet (Olivier and Branagh)
Much Ado About Nothing (Branagh)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (RSC, directed by Adrien Noble)
Macbeth (Polanski)
Twelfth Night (Trevor Nunn)
The Taming of the Shrew (Zeffirelli)
Richard III (Olivier and Loncraine)
Othello (Parker)
Henry V (Branagh)
As well as a whole bunch of modern adaptations, musicals like Kiss Me Kate and Westside Story and animated versions of Shakeseare plays.
Without exception, any version which tried to modernise the language was less successful than the version which kept it. Any play we studied was annotated and the teacher was always there to help us understand the tricky bits. The only memorisation was for the soliloquies so that we could quote them in closed-book exams, and our lines for the play, and I only remember bits and pieces of them now.
As was briefly mentioned upthread there are at least two/three series of Shakespeare books that have his original words on one page and ‘modern’/current English on the opposite.
I loved Shakespeare in High School and looked forward to every book (except for Richard III, couldn’t get into Richard III). It was because of the language that I loved reading his plays and poems, not despite it. The language is evocative and sets the right tone and mood.
But, for those do not love reading Shakespeare, the best way to appreciate Shakespeare is to watch his plays rather than a more modern translation. I’ve been taking my kids to Shakespeare festivals since they were small and they love it- especially the comedies!
They’re what plants crave.
I was about ready to ask “You mean that song was based on a Shakespeare quote?”
Forsooth, I hath been totally whooshed!
Don’t you mean woosh`ed? 
(Note: I will not use the word “modern” in this post, since it’s a technical term in English linguistics. Modern English means the English spoken between approximately the years 1500 and 2008. It will presumably mean the English spoken for a few years more, but who knows? Perhaps they will choose some other term for the English of the future, like Hypermodern English. Generally, the period is further split into Early Modern English of 1500 to 1700 and Late Modern English of 1700 to 2008. I will call the English spoken in any given year the contemporary English of that year.)
Let’s go back to the question in the OP. How soon will it be absolutely necessary to have contemporary translations of Shakespeare for students, since the plays themselves will be so difficult to understand that anyone who is not extensively trained in the English of Shakespeare’s time will be unable to understand nearly all of them? I would guess sometime within the next three hundred years, since Chaucer is less than three hundred years older than Shakespeare and his works are very hard to understand. Language continues to change no matter what you want to do about it. (Acuallly, Chaucer is slightly easier to understand than it looks at first. If the words are put into contemporary spellings, it gets somewhat easier to read.)
Shakespeare’s language isn’t mostly that difficult to understand in 2008. Look at this translation into contemporary English of the beginning of Hamlet:
http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_6.epl
This scene isn’t that difficult to understand. Yes, there are scenes that are more difficult to understand in Shakespeare, but they are ones where Shakespeare was trying to be poetic. In some sense, they were supposed to be difficult.
So what has to happen in the next three hundred years is that someone will have to write a translation of Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary English (of the year when the translation is made). Will it be difficult to write such a tranlation that will be anywhere near in literary quality to the plays themselves? Of course it will. That just makes it more of a challenge for a great translator. It’s the same for any translator who has translated Shakespeare into any contemporary foreign language. The translations did not get all of the literary qualities of Shakespeare, but they did get some of them. The complaints that someone will be unable to read a given great author in his original language are pretty silly. It’s true for everybody that they are only able to read in the original language works written in their native language(s) within the past (approximately) eight hundred years (unless they spend a long time learning the language). You can’t read every piece of literature written over all of recorded history in its original language. Get over it. You have to settle for translations of it.
Of course this translation into contemporary English in the future won’t be as great as Shakespeare’s plays themselves. Of course some people will continue to read the plays in Shakespeare’s language (with some training), just as some people today continue to read the works of Chaucer (with some training). English speakers of, say, the year 2500 will be in the same situation as speakers of contempory foreign languages. They will have to appreciate Shakespeare in translation unless they get extensive training in the English of Shakespeare’s time).