I find it an interesting point of view that people want works of art dumbed down for them rather than stepping up to the work.
I’ll take my Shakespeare as it stands.
I think the problem with Shakespeare isn’t just the language (though that is a barrier), but also the classical references that aren’t common in spoken English nowadays. We can understand the words, but we can’t catch the allusions, and it is spoken in a way that is foreign to people who haven’t studied Shakespeare much. I will freely admit that when watching a play, I miss half of what’s being said, because it’s been said before my brain has had a chance to even half interpret it to something I understand. There’s a reason why textbooks for these plays devote as much space to notes on the text as to the text itself.
The plot carries itself. Everything else might as well be in Greek.
I am sure you did it on purpose, but I still love the irony when a critique uses the words (or at least a paraphrase) of the critiqued.
Casca in (Shakespeare’s) Julius Caesar: “…but for mine own part it was all Greek.”
Just as a small anecdote, I know that other posters have mentioned the fact that there are ‘modern translations’ in print, but when I was in my early teens or so, my parents took me to the Stratford theater festival in Stratford Ontario, and I’m pretty sure that one of the performances we went to was a version of ‘Henry the Fifth’ where most of the language had been updated. I wasn’t wildly blown away by how easy the storyline was to follow even so.
Which in turn is an allusion to the Hellenization of Roman culture, which goes back to Jayn’s point of how a good deal of Shakespeare’s allusions go over modern heads.
It’s bizarre to me that someone who isn’t all that crazy about Shakespeare would think it would be a useful exercise to update the language. As others have said, WS was more of a poet when writing a play, so manhandling the words would destroy it. Just pick up some decent play by a modern writer, if that’s what you want. It’s not like he’s the be all and end all.
I wouldn’t mind a link to something that agrees with what your linguist posited. Frankly, I find it hard to believe a play’s manuscript would be much of a best-seller anywhere.
What, is there no French tradition of tragic drama?
I took Shakespeare in HS, and we read a play in every English class I had (except AP English and Existentialism).
Well, somebody decided back in the day that the King James version of the bible was just not doing it for them, and now look what we have: mamby-pamby prophets, a feel good Jesus and some misguided disciples. If we are going to dumb down Shakespeare (because that is the end result) who is to decide what vocabulary is then acceptable? Shall we invoke the ghost of Bowlder? Or the writers of Dick and Jane books? How simple do you need it?
Mess with greatness at your own peril; don’t drag the rest of us down into the morass of mediocrity. Half of my motivation to see Shakespeare IS the poetry of the speeches and dialogue. I cannot bring myself to read a “modern” English bible–I do not want a Jesus that says “sup, dude?”; I feel the same way about the Bard.
Who else can we dissect and in doing so, destroy? Edgar Allen Poe? Thackeray? Tennyson? Blake? Byron? How about Gilbert and Sullivan? Zora Neal Hurston–she wrote in dialect–let’s change her masterpiece…
If you can’t understand it; if your cultural ADD makes it hard, a choice lies before you: either struggle to comprehend(and in doing so open your mind and grow) or move on to South Park. There is nothing “Puritan” about a challenge. Having to be spoon-fed says much more about you than it does the work you deplore.
Why Shakespeare should be altered to suit your tastes baffles me. I don’t understand kabuki theater, but that is my misfortune; I don’t ask that they change their stylized performance so that I may enjoy it.
Oh, is that where that’s from? I’ve only read a couple of William’s plays, and that isn’t one of them. But I do know that there’s a lot of allusions to Greco-Roman culture, which today’s readers aren’t all that familiar with on the whole.
I’ll grant that much of his plays are poetic in nature. But poetry is an art form that uses words to create pictures. For me, these plays are little more than line drawings–the base is there, but I can’t see most of the colours because of cultural references that I can’t recognise. It’s like listening to a song in a foreign language–it sounds pretty but I’ll be damned if I know what the lyrics mean.
Yeah, that statement seemed a little off to me as well - especially after having seen “La Vie en Rose” just a week or two ago.
For the OP:
eleanorigby writes:
> Well, somebody decided back in the day that the King James version of the
> bible was just not doing it for them, and now look what we have: mamby-
> pamby prophets, a feel good Jesus and some misguided disciples. If we are
> going to dumb down Shakespeare (because that is the end result) who is to
> decide what vocabulary is then acceptable? Shall we invoke the ghost of
> Bowlder? Or the writers of Dick and Jane books? How simple do you need it?
This is rather silly. The King James Version of the Bible isn’t the original language. The King James Version may or may not be, in a strictly literary sense, the best translation of the Bible into English at the moment, but it’s not the closest to the meaning of the original manuscripts of the Bible in the original Hebrew or the original Greek. We know more about the original manuscripts than we did when the King James Version was written. We’ve found additional manuscripts and we know more about the meaning of some of the words. We have better translators now too. Some of the more modern translations are better in the sense of being closer to the meaning of the original manuscripts. This doesn’t mean that we need right at the moment to quit using the King James Version. Perhaps in four hundred years English will have changed enough that it will be too difficult for most people to understand without training, but we aren’t at that point yet.
Translation is not dumbing down. Translation is what you have to do to understand material that’s not written in your native language(s) within (approximately) the past eight hundred years (unless you learn the language with some extensive training). We have to translate The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Poetic Edda, Candide, Hedda Gabler, The Ramayana, War and Peace, The Shahnameh, or anything else that’s not in English of the past eight hundred years unless we want to spend years learning each of those languages. We aren’t at that point for the King James Version of the Bible for quite a while yet. We aren’t at that point for Shakespeare yet for a while. But eventually a time will come when speakers of English can no longer understand either of them. That has absolutely nothing to do with the intelligence of English speakers of that time. It just means that, as always, language changes.
*Good * actors will give you the context by tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, etc. If Shakespeare is acted well, it’s not hard to follow and the language flows beautifully. A few years ago, a local theater company put on the best production of *Hamlet * I’ve ever seen. The director said that several audience members said that it was the first time they’d ever been able to understand Hamlet, but wondered why he’d chosen to do a modern language version. He hadn’t. They were hearing the original language, but it was done so well that it was easy to understand.
I got to see that performed on stage. It was a lot of fun. 
The Bible was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. The King James translators did not have access to many of the manuscripts we do today.
However, we’re able to read Shakespeare in the original language. I see no reason to ‘update’ it.
500 years from now? I have no idea what the English language will sound like. If Shakespeare is clearly unintelligible by that time, then we can have modern translations.
There are high schools that teach Nabokov’s Russian works in translation? Which ones?
I like Shakespeare the way it is. I can usually figure out what is going on by context when it’s being performed, and if I’m reading, it’s usually annotated. I don’t feel it is torture to have to glance down the page to learn the meaning of a phrase I didn’t understand, or even if I have to go and google it. I enjoy learning new words and phrases. I hate the trend by publishers to rip out the unfamiliar words and cultural references in works by foreign authors. Do you want to have your mind expanded or be spoon-fed tasteless, easily digestible crap?
Very well said. It’s not Venice one sees in Merchant of Venice, it’s London. Likewise, for all of Shakespeare’s plays that take place in foreign locations.
The problem I have with how Shakespeare is taught is that we’ve cut up life into segments, and they normally aren’t allowed to touch. So, you’ll have someone talking about MacBeth in one classroom, and maybe mention the new King at the time, while in another classroom someone else will talk about how and why Unification happened.
Leaving making the links between the two things as an exercise for the student. Now, some students will make that leap, but not many. And it seems to me that those students have been shortchanged. Not only for failing to properly illuminate the play, or the history, but by failing to show how it is by combining fields of study that one comes to a fuller, and more interesting, appreciation of the world around one.
I don’t think that Shakespeare can be ‘translated’ into current idiom without losing something precious. To pick one of the most banal, iambic pentameter has a presence than modern speech just can’t match. But the sort of notes or annotations that Exapno Mapcase mentions should be incorporated into the teaching, I believe.
(Of course, in the interest in honesty, I have to admit that there was very little I had to read for classes that I could enjoy or appreciate on my own. Since then, however, I’ve found many things that I enjoyed that I hated when I had to read them.)
Dudes, Shakespeare was general hospital without the commercials. It was made as entertainment to appeal to the common masses. Not overly educated Oxford Dons, not the nobility, his company originally traveled around performing in the countryside, and was considered incredibly lucky to get the money to build the Globe Theater so it didnt have to travel around any more.