When will Shakespeare be translated into Modern English?

Cafe Society
81

It’s not just the plots. It’s not just the poetry. It’s not just the allusion.

Shakespeare uses English in a way very few other authors do, and this in itself makes him a great way to learn about close reading. Admittedly, handing him to someone who hasn’t done much of it is like teaching a person to cook by giving them a recipe for a very delicate souffle.

When I took Shakespeare in college, we had to analyze every blasted word in every blasted play we read. And at the beginning I thought this was pointless and cruel. We had to spend hours daily poring over these plays, noting down repetition of different words, of phrases, of imagery, colors, numbers. Our professor knew she could not give us an entire classical education in one class, but she gave us the foundations to learn more. Those who worked and tried found amazing rewards at the end. That one class changed the way I read, the way I watch movies, the way I listen to other people. I can catch the clues in cadence and in repetition almost without thinking now.

That doesn’t mean Shakespeare became easy. I was in a theater troupe that did A Comedy of Errors last year. Some of the language was obscure, the plot was contrived and twisted, and there were scenes we had a hard time figuring out how to handle. And while our first and our last shows were in general for crowds that are more likely to be “in to” this kind of thing (the first was for friends and family, the last for a big event for the Society for Creative Anachronism), the second show was incredibly well received. People were howling with laughter.

Take this, for example. General idea of what’s going on – Antipholus and Dromio are suffering from a case of mistaken identity. Luciana has just about had enough of Dromio pretending he’s not the family slave. Luciana is also supposed to be smokin’:

It took a few readings of Dromio’s last lines there to get the double entendres, and the actor made it a lot clearer by doing a nice little air-hump. This is nothing to the scene with this same Antipholus and Dromio when the latter meets the cook who thinks she’s his fiancee. People were spewing their drinks and falling out laughing. This was, incidentally, a crowd full of Texans… :wink: The play’s basically a big long list of dick and fart jokes (especially how we did it – a LOT of visual humor and wackiness going on in the background).

It’s not that there’s some Puritanical (the irony of using THAT word to relate to Shakespeare is entertainingly ironic, let me tell you) love of pain when it comes to this stuff. It’s more that as hard as it can be to wade through his language, there are some amazing rewards at the end unparalleled by nearly every modern author. Few others even come close. And if it’s not your thing… well, you’re missing out, but I’m sure I’m missing out on how awesome Heroes is, the subtleties of football, and the intricacies of indie rock.

82

The premise of this thread confuses me.

When I was in high school, the whole Lit class couldn’t wait to get to Shakespeare. He was already everyone’s favorite writer when all they had read was Romeo & Juliet and a few sonnets. The idea that modern English-speakers are all struggling to grasp the difficult and convoluted writings of some ancient nobody, all to please a few elite pedants, strikes me completely off-guard.

It seems that modern translations of Shakespeare aren’t selling (or being taught) because nobody likes them. Modern English speakers, in my experience, love Shakespeare.

I’ve even heard it argued (though I take it with plenty of salt) that the whole reason English has changed remarkably little since the 1600s is precisely because we love Shakespeare and won’t let his work slip too far into obscurity.

83

Checking IMDb…, yep - same guy.
He did a few of the plays (only thing that made Cymbeline bearable) and yes, he’s quite, quite awesome. :stuck_out_tongue:

84

Yah, his speech in the first Hornblower movie makes me want to go fight the French Revolutionaries too. :smiley:

85

Askance writes:

> 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.

This is greatly exaggerated. Language is constantly changing. It may change somewhat faster at some times than others, but there isn’t that much difference in the speed of change.

appleciders writes:

> Many plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries are still read and
> performed today, including those by Ben Jonson, Noah Webster and
> Christopher Marlowe.

You mean John Webster.

86

Yeah, but how many people still read John Webster’s Dictionary? :slight_smile:

Measuring the speed of change of a language is difficult because there are so many different pieces to a language and they each tend to change at a different rate.

English has added many more words in the interval from Shakespeare to today than from Chaucer to Shakespeare (eleanorigby was off by a factor of, say 100 to 1, in saying that more words leave: it wasn’t that she didn’t phrase her post properly - she made a huge mistake and tried frantically to backpedal), and existing words have taken on huge additional numbers of meanings, far more than the number of new words. Grammar has been remarkably stable. Spelling did tend to become standardized after the introduction of dictionaries. A higher percentage of the public became functionally literate and a much higher percentage became fully literate. The mere invention of the printing press gave the language a stability that was never conceivable earlier.

Comparing like to like as much as possible, I’d say that Chaucer and his contemporaries were less understandable to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than Shakespeare and his contemporaries are to fully literate readers today.

87

I am dismayed at this. I did not expect such ill grace from you. I did make a mistake in my post and when it was pointed out, I went back and reread what I had written and realized that I had made a mistake. I am sorry I did not write: I made a colossal error that will provide food for laughter and derision for all here; I abase myself. Would that have done? I meant what I said the second time-that English is spoiled for choice and yet we tend to not bother with the riches. I think that is one reason Shakespeare has endured. Not only is his language and use of it marvelous, but by reading or seeing his plays performed, the audience learns to appreciate language. That luxury is not recognized or appreciated today (as much as it should be), IMO.

Who is this directed at? Me? You go back and do some rereading–I do not believe this and did not write this. I do not hold this position. You have misunderstood my posts and now I am wondering if your misconstruction is not deliberate.

88

Great thread so far, and I mean that. Although I didn’t enjoy being told that I actually hate Shakespeare. That’s a lot of time I’ve wasted reading and watching the work of someone I can’t actually be enjoying.

Being challenged by a work of art is not a bad thing at all. That’s one of the qualities that encourages people to review and think about what they’ve seen, and it’s a wonderful thing. It becomes a waste of time for people who don’t enjoy it, but that doesn’t mean nobody should have to experience that challenge. I’m pretty sure we read Julius Caesar in class when I was in fifth grade (I know I read it and I doubt I bought it on my own), and I’m glad we did.

Shakespeare came up with very few of his stories - he usually added interesting wrinkles to the plot, but the stories he used were well known even in his own time, and they’ve been remade over and over again since then. So in that sense, there isn’t much need to rewrite the dialogue in Hamlet while keeping everything else the same.

But unlike some of the other Shakespeare lovers here, I’m not opposed to what the OP is suggesting. That Macbeth scene was nails on the chalkboard of my soul, but if someone made the effort to modernize the language while preserving its spirit - which would involve inventing new language and not just updating “angels and ministers of grace defend us!” into “help!” - I think that could be a worthwhile resource to get younger readers interested in Shakespeare. Some people find the idea of Shakespeare intimidating, I think, and there are plenty of things that can be discouraging - the analogies, the outdated words, and a lot of the prose fooling (stuff that may have been improvised) really doesn’t translate at all. And the poetry itself can be confusing at first. People sometimes are by Shakespeare’s syntax thrown for a loop.

89

The part that I disagree with in your last paragraph, Marley, is that the response to people finding Shakespeare intimidating is to rewrite it so they don’t. Part of teaching Shakespeare is teaching strategies for approaching the text – how to make sense of what appears to be nonsense. Once people get it out of their heads that Shakespeare was writing in Middle English (or Old English) and that Shakespeare is too difficult to understand, you’re halfway to showing them that it isn’t insurmountable. They’re just words, you know?

I just can’t see teaching a text made palatable for a modern audience over the original. (And, no, I don’t mean teaching something taken verbatim from the First Folio; I’m in favor of standardized spelling.) If a modernized text is used, then it should be in conjunction with the original, since I’ve never seen one that matched the original.

90

Maybe you need to consider the possibility, the shocking possibility even, that there are other opinions besides yours?

There’s nothing wrong with the language of Shakespeare. Anybody over the age of 10 with an IQ above room temperature in Fahrenheit can understand it.

91

In the original Klingon then? :wink:

92

While I’m not in essence disagreeing with you, the fact that so much time is spent teaching kids how to read the text shows that it is not easily understood. If you threw a Shakespeare play at me, I could read it and ultimately understand it–but it would take some time as I’m not that familiar with his style of writing.

There is a benefit to studying the text to learn how to interpret Shakespeare and other authors. For me though, for performance purposes I’d like to see a more modernized version–something that I can understand on the fly, because all that poetry and prose, while beautiful and rich in meaning, is dreadfully boring if I don’t have time to digest it.

93

Maybe I’m old (okay - I am old) and genius-like (opinion remains divided on this one, there’s me on one side and everyone else on the other) but I simply don’t remember any struggle with Shakespeare. Chaucer took a bit more work but we did Julius Caesar at Primary School without too much bloodshed.

94

It’s a tough call and I had conflicting thoughts about the idea. But for one thing, not everybody encounters Shakespeare in a classroom setting. What about people who want to try it later in life, or for that matters, before they start reading it in the classroom? I know there are annotated texts out there, and those are helpful. But I think the largest barrier to Shakespeare is psychological, and that barrier probably pops up before most people read any of his plays in school. I can imagine texts like these making that into a smaller problem.

95

My mom is currently into a series of modern translations of Shakespeare called “No Fear Shakespeare”.

Me, I think the plays are better watched than read, or at least watched and only then read after watching them. I’m not much into poetry, so I don’t read the sonnets. I think high school English classes on Shakespeare would be vastly improved by showing the movie of a play first in class, or taking a field trip to see a live production, and then reading it. My high school classes in Shakespeare, if they showed the movie, only showed part of it, and that only after we’d read it.

Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (yes, written by that Asimov). It has pretty much what you want.

96

Shakespeare is not modern English, but he is Modern English. (Note nitpicky capitalization. I.e. you’re wrong, but so is the thread title.) Kinda like: I, having been born and raised in this country, am a native American, but I am not a Native American.
The OP has a halfway-decent point: Those whose native language is something other than English and who read an up-to-date translation into their own language have both gained and lost something compared to those of us who read Shakespeare in the original [del]Klingon[/del] English. Any “translation” or updating of Shakespeare’s language into that spoken today would inevitably lose something, but a really good one would likely gain enough so as to be worthwhile to those for whom Shakespeare’s archaic language is a barrier.

97

I hate it when theads like this start when I am away from my computer for a long while, I miss the start of the conversation and all I am left with is a seething rage of artistic/theatrical rightousness. It really makes me feel like a dick. :smiley:

But I really do love Shakespeare, I have both produced and directed his works professionally, and much of my theatre training was done while working with his texts. So when I see the below, writted by a Shakespeare lover no less, I have something to say.

Here is the thing, you negate your own argument earlier in your post.

The important thing to remember is that Shakespeare’s language is everything. The stories were, for the most part, cribbed from others. His characters have an unusual amount of depth, but that depth only comes accross through the language. The rythm, syntax and word choice are all so deliberate, and intertwined, that if an actor screws any part of it up in a production it is blindingly obvious and sticks out like a sore thumb.

If we need to alter the text for high school students, so we can get them started on Shakespeare and then give them the real text later, I can almost understand that. But I am not sure why Shakespeare is even worth the bother if you lose his language. It would be like taking Joyce and translating it into “normal” language. It’s doable, but it more or less misses the point. And I will go so far as to say that teaching Shakespeare as a text without retaining the language is completely pointless.

Bah, I have more to say on the subject, but it all takes me back into that zone of being a dick, so I will stay quiet for now. But I will add to the OP that I started directing Shakespeare at 16, and reading it before that. I have enjoyed seeing good productions of it for many years. I really do like it.

98

I prefer Shakespeare as is. I don’t think the language is overly difficult and part the enjoyment is the challenge for me when I don’t understand a word- it’s fairly simple to look it up. also for education purposes I think its a good exercise in analytical thinking skills to have to understand the context clues to comprehend the language.

99

As I noted in my second post, I’ve got mixed feelings on the subject. Maybe this will make sense of it: the OP seemed to think the plays should be updated because they’re hopelessly outdated, incomprehensible and boring. I don’t agree with that at all. I’m a very big fan.
But because I enjoy it, I’m open to finding ways to make it accessible to more people. I don’t want the plays dumbed down and performed only in 21st-century English, but if putting out updated texts lowers that intimidation barrier - especially for young students (I was thinking elementary school) and for adults who are thinking about giving him another try - then I’m all in favor of that. I tell people that it’s closer to today’s English than a lot of people believe, and maybe stuff like this gets people over the hump. I’ve heard of No Fear Shakespeare and I’ve seen actors reading it, so I haven’t used it myself, so I don’t know if it fills that gap.

100

Your second post wasn’t there when I started writing, and I don’t preview enough. :smack:

I see where you are coming from, and from the perspective of teaching people I almost agree. I think there has to be a better way, and that better way probably has to do with actually showing people good performances rather than dry texts that aren’t intended to be read.

But that leads us into a whole different debate.