As has been noted, Shakespeare has been “translated” into modetn English many times. I recall a series that came out circa 1980 – and I dearly wish I’d bought a copy, because it made you realize that, despite the archaic English, it was artful and good, and that a bad translation can ruin anything. It was that bad.
From the play “Angles and Ministers of Grace Defend us!”* becomes:
“Help!”
I’ll take the original anyday.
*So distinctive that McCoy quotes it in Star Trek IV. Who could ask for higher praise?
I find the opposite to be true. I have little trouble reading Shakespeare, since one can go at one’s own pace. But watching a performance, when the actors may be speaking very quickly, it’s sometimes hard to follow.
This is wrong both in the general and the specific. Shakespeare was a creature of London and spent his life in theaters there except for times when the theaters were all closed down. That’s when his troupe had to go outside London. But that was a short-lived exception only. (He had a home in Stratford, but that’s a separate part of his life.)
That Wiki quote additionally clarifies the nonsense that Shakespeare intended his plays for commoners. Sure the groundlings were numerous and noisy at London performances. But any theatrical company of the day was backed by the aristocracy and totally dependent on their money, their patronage, their attendance, and their good will. The plays were performed for them first and for the commoners second.
One odd proof of this is the delightful idiocy of the Oxfordians, those who think the Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true writer behind Shakespeare’s name. They use a plethora of allusions and references that are supposedly beyond the capacity of the hick from Stratford. Were these intended for commoners?
It’s become popular to claim Shakespeare for the masses, but it’s a half-truth at best and contrary to everything we know about the London of the era at worst.
I agree with this. When you’re reading it, you can stop and look things up in the margins, go back and reread, whatever. Watching a play (and remember, these are performance pieces, not novels) you have to go at the pace of the actors, which is going to be too fast for many people who are not overly familiar with the material.
Regardless of what ‘class’ these are meant for, they are entertainment pieces that are meant to be acted out. And personally I feel that as they are, the average viewer will be left behind, unable to follow anything more than the general flow of things. I don’t get much entertainment value from watching something that I can only half-understand.
I did not say and I am aware that the KJV is not in the original language. Nor is Shakespeare in “original” English. You missed my point. KJV is known (and rightly so) for its poetry and phrasing. I completely agree with you re us having more knowledge as to ancient Aramaic etc. I also agree that KJV is not always the best (ie the most accurate) translation. But it is by far the most beautiful. The Revised Standard Version is not horrible, but have you read a contemporary translation of the bible? They’re godawful and the language is dumbed down.
Thank you for the dictionary definition of translation. If you read the “translated” bits of Shakespeare offered in this thread, you will see that this “translating” is indeed a dumbing down. Again, I agree with you–I really don’t want to have to learn Greek to read the Odyssey–but those works are in languages other than English.
But if you notice the grammar, the vocabulary, the syntax of today’s English–it is indeed dumbed down. We are losing words faster than we are gaining them (no data for this because I’m not going looking); we are also losing (more important, IMO) the ability to reach and the desire to stretch ourselves culturally.
I don’t know what people will do to Shakespeare 300 years from now. I don’t want to know. I do know that he has lasted 400+ years just fine and I don’t want him to be lessened in my lifetime.
Dude, you seem to believe that appeal to the hoi polloi and the hoity toity are mutually exclusive. I’m not even going to begin to list the nearly endless numbers of artists, across the ages, who have achieved just as varied a following–I’d never approach the middle of such a list, let alone the end. You seem to think that proving he had devoted fans in the upper echelons of society somehow suggests that he was limited as an artist, when in fact it’s evidence of just the opposite.
Really? I think that there is excellence in all aspects of culture; there is good rap and bad, just like there is good opera and bad etc. Some popular literature is as well written as supposedly great lit, but has not yet endured the test of time. Illustrators such as A. C. Wyeth were fantastic artists, never really given their due because they illustrated–they weren’t taken seriously by the powers that decide such things.
But that does not mean that established more traditional cultural achievements are not sometimes greater (or lesser) than such things today. Where is the contemporary playwright that can match Shakespeare? (is he even ever match-able?). WS has endured the test of time, in fact he has reigned supreme for 4 centuries.
English loses words every day. It also gains them. (This is what I actually meant–I did not phrase my post correctly. sorry!) But word usage has changed, and not for the better or the more “difficult” over my lifetime. There was a time when ads in magazines had full sentences in them–noun, verb and direct object. Sometimes, if they wanted to go wild, they even had indirect objects! Now most ads are sentence fragments. That’s one example I’ve noticed. (TV ads have done the same–old 50s commercials were incredibly wordy and long or so it seems now. I am glad of that change at least!)
Spelling errors, grammar errors, paucity of vocabulary abound here and in RL. No doubt they always have, but now the attitude of those corrected has changed from sheepishness to an odd sort of pride. Not everyone, not everywhere, but it is there. This is a well worn topic here at the Dope. Anecdotes are not evidence, but when college educated people cannot understand the prose of Jane Austen (whose clarity is legend and deservedly so), something has happened. I do not say I want us to speak as Austen did or as Shakespeare did. Nor do I want us to write that way.
But we can recognize and appreciate the beauty of their(Austen’s and Shakespeare’s) usage. We can use proper words in our descriptions and our writings so as to slow the loss. And we can embrace the new, and use them well. English is almost an embarrassment of riches–I hate to see it neglected or (as in the case of this thread’s topic) robbed of its breadth and depth. If that is ignorance, so be it. I’ll keep it.
The argument about how everything was better in the past - language, culture, writing, geniuses, anything you name - existed in Shakespeare’s day. I mean that quite literally, not as metaphor. It has reappeared in every single generation since. Again, I mean that literally. Do some reading.
It is nonsense. It is meaningless. It is wrong.
The only way you can believe this atrocity for a second is to sincerely, absolutely believe that every aspect of life has been continually going downhill since the Greeks.
This is not an argument. It truly is a cry of ignorance.
> . . . this “translating” is indeed a dumbing down . . .
Bad translations are sometimes a dumbing down. It’s easy to rewrite any English-language writer into stupid slang which completely misses the point of the passage being rewritten. So what? Of course translating a great author is very difficult. It will have to be done eventually for Shakespeare. Of course it won’t be as good as reading the original text. We’re very lucky now. We can still read Shakespeare in the original with just some annotation. English-language speakers five hundred years from now won’t be able to do that. The speakers of other languages now can’t do that.
> We are losing words faster than we are gaining them (no data for this because
> I’m not going looking); we are also losing (more important, IMO) the ability to
> reach and the desire to stretch ourselves culturally.
You have no proof for any of this. This is a typical case of “it was so much better in old days” complaining. In so far as any of this can be checked, it’s simply wrong. We are gaining words.
So . . . that’s your theme from here on out, huh? Misquotes? Because, dude, no one has said that “everything was better in the past.”
99% of everything is crap. I have zero doubt that this has always been the case, and that it will always be so.
The only benefit of aging, in this context, is that over time some works pass the test of time and rise above the crap that fades with the ages. So again, no one has suggested that age itself confers value on art. But hindsight is a great critic.
You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?
London had a thriving professional theatre district in Shakespeare’s time which consisted of regular performances at outdoor theatres like the Globe, the Theatre (that’s where we get the word from), the Rose, the Swan, and the Fortune, as well as indoor performances more in line with modern “black box” stages (small, intimate spaces where the audience is quite close to the performance) at the Blackfriars, the Whitefriars, and the Cockpit. Many plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries are still read and performed today, including those by Ben Jonson, Noah Webster and Christopher Marlowe.
I’ll grant you that some of Shakespeare’s scenes and his clowns and bawdy characters are written with an eye to the unwashed masses (Sir Toby Belch, Sgt. Dogberry), but income from groundlings (the unwashed masses who stood in the center of the courtyard) wasn’t anywhere near enough to support a theatre. Each theatre company didn’t actually have a name of their own; they were simply “Lord Chamberlain’s Men” or the “King’s Men” or the “Admiral’s Men” with regard to whoever sponsored them. They had to appeal to these nobility or lose their funding.
Some of Shakespeare’s phrasing may have been lost to the shifts of language, but much of it isn’t intended as everyday, easily-understandable speech, but rather as poetry and subtle wordplay that takes more than a glance to get at. Try reading Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta for comparison. He’s much clearer and easier to read, but there isn’t as much depth to the poetry (hardly any, in fact).
Just this morning, there was an interview on local TV with one of the actors from The Maori Merchant of Venice.
He was saying that it was wonderful to translate Shakespeare into Te Reo (maori) because both used poetry and metaphor far more than is common in today’s usage.
I have no other dog in this fight - it would only get eaten.
Except that my ongoing love of Shakespeare’s plays was inspired by the study we did in high school. If I have difficulty with the written play, I’ll watch the movie and then go back to the book.
And Robert Lindsay was a better Benedick than Kenneth Branagh, but Branagh was a better Henry V than anybody.
The critical factor differentiating the pace of change in English between Chaucer and Shakespeare, and Shakespeare and now, is the invention of the printing press. Come Shakespeare’s time and such things as grammar and spelling were still settling down, but with the spread of printed matter in the vernacular the language had to and did settle on a commonality in order to fulfil its function (and sell!). The first English dictionary appeared in 1604, precisely in Shakespeare’s time. The changes in the 300 years between Chaucer and Shakespeare are huge - cavernous - compared to those in the 400 years since then, which are remarkably small all things considered.
