Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

http://elizabethandrama.org/

by lordleft • 2 years ago

104 162 2 years ago

elizabethandrama.org

dwighttk2• 2 years ago

I think it’s already been hugged to death and no one has even started talking about it

IndySun2• 2 years ago

I think it's already been hugged to death...

FWIW, I upvoted your benign and completely true comment. Why on earth should it be downvoted? I consider anyone that downvoted your comment as petty and small minded. But I am outnumbered. The fact is it happens here as often as any online public forum. So despite it's apparently admiral lofty ideals of mature debate, this public forum is overrun, like every online public forum, and detrimentally so, by what can mildly be described as immature, petty, and small minded white males, eager to be the first to remark, eager to 'score' more points, and be admired in this narrow arena. I am certain of this stance (as I am on occasion one of those immatures, though I would never sink to down vote such a benign remark).

dwighttk2• 2 years ago

Thanks… I was mildly confused but I guessed it was just that I didn’t add anything to the discussion

But I couldn’t! Because I couldn’t see the site!

I guess I could have directly asked anyone who could see it to post any alternate links they found.

pvg• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240519050125/http://elizabetha...

mordechai90002• 2 years ago

I wonder, what is a good free CDN service for hobby sites like this? A quick web search shows a lot of them have a free tier. The only one I am familiar with is Cloudflare.

hprotagonist• 2 years ago

"OP" (original pronounciation) can help bring out some of the original bawdiness; it makes the puns pop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQc5ZpAoU4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2QYGEwM1Sk

Staging, blocking, and competent acting can make the jokes a lot more explicit (and also, explicit!) Our ancestors, on the whole, weren't highfalutin capital-A Art people, and certainly not where common entertainment is concerned!

Beyond that: being a reasonably educated viewer helps; certainly about word use. Knowing that "much ado about nothing" is a sexual triple entendre really helps! The political jokes are going to whiff, though; there's really not too much to be done about that level of extremely tightly scoped reference, it doesn't age amazingly well.

Not a play, but https://pepysdiary.com is a wealth of information and context.

aidenn0• 2 years ago

That As You Like It pun on hours/whores ripe/rape and rot/rut was new to me; thanks for sharing.

joshstrange2• 2 years ago

The explanation in that first video is more interesting to me than all of the Shakespeare I was ever taught in school.

arduanika2• 2 years ago

Cool project!

I'm conflicted about this sort of thing. It seems like the goal of someone approaching early modern English -- the earliest iteration that's roughly intelligible to us today -- should be to learn how to read it comfortably, and that with effort, that it should be feasible. Like, that's one major point of reading Shakespeare in school: so that you can get used to the feel of the language (and become a well-cultured, lifelong, paying audience member). On the other hand, there's so much "should" already around reading at all, much less reading difficult old texts, that I suppose that helper notes are a public service -- and even after reading & seeing lots of Shakespeare, I still need notes for some of the obscure idioms and references. And I suppose there's no real reason why someone has to start with Shakespeare, particularly if you're coming to this era in midlife after dozing off in English class.

It's a weird thing about the canon that we pick out one or two authors from every period, and completely forget about all the others. Like, what's the chance that the bottom 10th percentile of Shakespeare's plays are better than the top 10th of Marlowe, or of this guy Chapman who I'd never heard of? And it makes you wonder, who are the artists today who will be idolized through the ages, and who will be totally forgotten?

Like, it's cool to study the compleat works of an exemplary figure like Shakespeare, but maybe if we learn to study his contemporaries and cultural context, we'll gain a better understanding of the life and times, and be less prone to wild theories about how he couldn't have possibly written the plays, how it must have been some other figure with a fancier education, or even a group effort. The group effort was the whole flourishing Elizabethan playwriting scene, and he was merely the best among them.

mordechai90002• 2 years ago

If the annotations help explain the cultural context and references to current events and recent history, this is the kind of resource I've wished for when reading pre-modern literature. Even just explaining the classical allusions will go a long way to making the modern reader more comfortable with the text.

arduanika2• 2 years ago

Yes, absolutely -- I think that was my point?

And looking at some of their pdfs, it looks like their notes have similar quality to the better annotated Shakespeare editions, all for free, and with more breadth in terms of authors. This is the sort of passion project that renews my faith in the internet.

recursive15• 2 years ago

Link is down.

Reading Shakespeare in high school put me off it for life. I had to look it up just now to check if he's "Elizabethan". I knew what most of the words meant, just not in that order. I couldn't make sense of what was happening in the plot, or even the smaller scale of individual lines. I never thought I was particularly bad (or good) at English, but all my classmates seemed to understand it. I just could not.

People rave about Shakespeare, so I'm sure there is something there. I wish I could have been able to get that.

zug_zug• 2 years ago

Yeah it's an interesting question. Of course these days since it's public domain you could have chat GPT give you every sentence with a modern translation alongside.

It's sometimes hard to tell when people advocate for something esoteric if they are being hipster (e.g "Goldplated audiocables on a record player") [i.e. advocating for something monetarily/intellectually inaccessible as a form of flaunting wealth/intellect] or if it's a genuine recommendation.

I bet a clever person could come up with some ways to test each hypothesis.

onemoresoop• 2 years ago

I was the same as you. Now I think I didn't care enough about it to put in the effort.

recursive15• 2 years ago

This definitely describes me as well. I'm not sure how much effort it would actually take. I never managed to gain so much as a foothold on anything. So I guess I have some idea of a lower bound. But probably, I would not consider it to be worth the effort.

It's interesting to me thinking back on high school from decades ago. I remember so few of the details. But I distinctly remember trying and failing to read Shakespeare. I remember my sense of resentment for being asked to read such an incomprehensible word salad.

But yeah, at this point, I have a lot of other stuff going on. It's not a priority for me. I would need to have it spoon-fed to me, and quickly. That's probably not even possible.

HelloMcFly• 2 years ago

Here's what I'd say to you and others who feel the same way: personally, I think Shakespeare really only comes alive in a live performance where characters have additional context to help you understand what's happening. I think Much Ado About Nothing is one of the most enjoyable performances I've ever seen, but reading Much Ado About Nothing several years earlier only made me resent Shakespeare as it does for so many. Shakespeare's works weren't intended to be read by audiences, yet for some reason that is the primary way we ask young people to experience with it.

The above is not an argument against translating Shakespeare to modern English, which I also support.

gadders• 2 years ago

I think the old language gets in the way, but the genius it has (IMO) is in the characters. You could completely believe that a person would act they way that they do in the play.

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

Not much to add, but my experience mirrors yours.

at_a_remove• 2 years ago

A few bits:

1) I think only a few of his plays are really at the level for high-schoolers, so you're not entirely wrong.

2) When I was a private tutor, I had a methodology for teaching these plays, which was a little vocabulary first for a scene, then reading it out loud. It has to be out loud. I usually had extra copies and you bet I would grab a parent and have them do a third part.

I would read in meter and with the appropriate tone, do all of facial expressions, mime any relevant action, and generally ham it up. I would typically pick the most difficult part. After each scene, we'd talk about it, the culture and history of the time, and so forth.

You are not to blame for not getting into it, it's just on the edge of high school appropriate and tends to be taught poorly.

recursive15• 2 years ago

Oh wow, very different from my experience. I was just given the book, and deadlines for reading certain parts.

ycombinete• 2 years ago

I had a similar experience, even though I loved poetry in school.

Two things made me completely adore Shakespeare in recent times.

I wrote a Shakespearean sonnet. Once you’ve tried to compose in iambic pentameter the magic of the form really jumps out at you when you see it done so exquisitely in his work.

The other is reading Shakespeare as an adult. Like philosophy, I think a lot of Shakespeare is too foreign to the life experience of the average school student. They can understand the themes in an abstract way, but not really feel them.

It helps to get a good edition with footnotes for the more anachronistic references. That you couldn’t get just by thinking about it. After a while the language should start to feel more normal, and flow.

beardyw• 2 years ago

If you extend this to Restoration, Pepys went to the theatre several times a week. About 50% he was unimpressed by.

kens• 2 years ago

The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak.

"Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak."

"'But translated Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare!' one might object. To which the answer is, to an extent, yes. However, we would never complain a translation of Beowulf 'isn’t Beowulf'—of course it isn’t, in the strict sense, but we know that without translation, we would not have access to Beowulf at all."

His full discussion is here, and is worth reading: https://www.americantheatre.org/2010/01/01/its-time-to-trans...

lordleft• 2 years ago

I can see his point. That being said, part of what is fun about reading Elizabethan literature in a relatively original style (with helpful annotations) is that I can see configurations of English I’ve never encountered before, configurations that are alien and yet familiar because they are the ancestor of the very words and phrases I use today.

comex• 2 years ago

Yep. To me it feels like foreign language learning on easy mode.

To be clear, I'm not good at foreign languages. I've never become fluent in one. But I studied Latin back in high school, and Japanese more recently, enough to slowly read some works written in those languages. When doing so, there's a real thrill in seeing a familiar idea expressed in a way that's grammatically totally alien. Using sentence structures that aren't allowed in English. Using a vocabulary that marks out a different lattice in the space of possible meanings, connecting some ideas that are disconnected in English, or splitting apart ideas that English connects. Or just using idioms or cultural references that don't exist in English. Meanwhile, in the case of Latin, the vocabulary is full of words that are the ancestors of English words, with meanings that are sometimes the same, sometimes subtly different, and sometimes seemingly totally unrelated, making it feel mind-expanding just to consider the series of semantic shifts that let one meaning evolve into the other.

Reading Shakespeare is like that, just… less so. Grammar, vocabulary, and idioms are all familiar enough that you can understand their meaning with just some helpful glosses, yet foreign enough to reproduce some of the same thrill. Sometimes they're more thrilling because they're familiar – because they could be plopped right into modern English and fit into the existing scaffolding, filling in what can now be recognized as a gap.

So in a way I agree with John McWhorter. When I read Shakespeare's plays, the foreignness of the language does distract me from the content. But it's in a good way, a fun way. To have an experience that's more about the content, in contrast, I can watch performances of the plays. When performed, the dialogue usually goes by too fast for me to understand the unfamiliar bits, but the way the actors speak it helps get the meaning across. There does still tend to be a risk that I miss out on part of the meaning and get confused about a plot point… but it's not the end of the world.

Still, I'm sympathetic to people who find it hard to get into Shakespeare because of this. Not everyone has to share my interest in language. Some may find it difficult; some may just dislike the tradeoff of language distracting from content. If translation helps those people, I'm in favor of that being an option. But reading poems in translation has its own massive cost. A translation of Beowulf isn't Beowulf; it's something related but new and different. Same goes for the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey, the Bible, et cetera. That's just the bitter truth.

jimbob452• 2 years ago

Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English

I've been running through the works of Shakespeare translated into modern English[0]. The original text is next to the new stuff and annotations are present when translations are weird or questionable. I'd highly recommend this for anyone who wants to read his stuff but doesn't have the time to look up every third word.

https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati...

garof2• 2 years ago

I always thought that I should do the translation myself to current colloquial English, for my own better understanding.

I didn't know about that link, thanks! Anyone know if there is a printed version that is similar? And, extending that request to other classic works too?

AlbertCory10• 2 years ago

Well, he's wrong, and that's why there are so few "modern English" productions put on. And also why Shakespeare plays in the original language continue to live. When you see it performed live, you still get the gist.

The language is still beautiful. That's the point. More to the point, the audiences would not increase at all if they were translated into modern terms.

On the other hand, no one in the theater minds if you adapt the plot into something else entirely.

Ran (King Lear)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_3...

10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

shortrounddev2• 2 years ago

and that's why there are so few "modern English" productions put on

Modern productions of shakespeare or even victorian era stories constantly make their way into Hollywood. "Clueless" is just a modernized version of "Emma"

commodoreboxer2• 2 years ago

Shakespeare is best appreciated in the original pronunciation (OP). I'm a little disappointed that OP Shakespeare continues to be a little niche, given that it's necessary for many of the rhymes and puns. Personally, I think it just sounds better than received pronunciation (RP).

I think that's one of the strongest arguments against modernizing the language. Shakespeare has a flow, and much verse, that is lost in any translation, or has to be creatively and intelligently reproduced across a language barrier.

retrac• 2 years ago

There's a certain reluctance to translate when you almost-know the language. But here's a question: how many more centuries until we will have to translate? I figure less than the 400 years now separating us from Shakespeare. Rabelais is probably more like modern French than Shakespeare is like modern English. But maybe because those are novels, and closer to typical prose overall, there are translations of his works into modern French, which are more readily accepted.

We do usually modernize Shakespeare's spelling. The gap without that is even larger: "...borne before an euerlaſting Iudge, from whence no paſſenger euer retur'nd, the vndiſcouered country, at whoſe ſight the happy smile, and the accurſed damn'd". Changing that maybe makes it seem more like modern English than it was. How much can you update spelling and such, before it starts becoming a translation?

Also, am I the only one whose Shakespeare textbooks in high school, had more footnotes than actual Shakespeare on some pages? It kind of sucks the fun out of it when even the dirty jokes need to be explained.

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

The language is still beautiful. That's the point. More to the point, the audiences would not increase at all if they were translated into modern terms.

But would student comprehension?

We read Shakespeare's plays in high school. I'm willing to accept that maybe I just didn't have a good grasp of any language then, or had a poor theory of mind or undiagnosed autism, but they were completely opaque to me. I just followed the place on the page with my pencil, and read out my lines that were assigned to me with very little understanding.

When I read Patrick Stewart's autobiography, I was impressed with what he got out of theatre and Shakespeare's plays, but it was a glimpse into an utterly alien world.

scientator3• 2 years ago

I saw a production of Twelfth Night without ever having read it. Also didn't know the plot. And unfortunately I didn't ever get the gist of what was happening. I have a hard time imagining how other people are able to get the gist of the plays if they haven't read them beforehand.

It's not just the Shakespearean language. It's also the constant references to Greek and Roman mythology, via Ovid, that presents a real barrier. That mythology is no longer part of mainstream culture.

graemep3• 2 years ago

Shakespeare is modern English and perfectly comprehensible. Beowulf is not.

Yes, there are some words that have changed (like his example of "character") but those are few. There are always difficulties. There are lots of words that have different meanings in British, American and other forms of English ("bum", "fag", etc.), or that are offensive in some places but not others, different usages.....

The way to make Shakespeare is and fun is to watch it (on stage, or film). I have been to several Shakespeare plays in the last year and there were none where I felt I was just "catching the basic gist". The jokes worked for a start.

recursive15• 2 years ago

Shakespeare is modern English and perfectly comprehensible

My personal experience is inconsistent with this. I'm not an English expert, but I'm a native speaker. I generally am able to communicate with people using the language.

Despite these qualifications, I was hard-pressed to find any lines that I could make sense of in Shakespeare. This is not a criticism of the material. Also it's not really a self-criticism either. I believe that there is a large group of alleged "English speakers" that would have the same experience as me.

You can't claim that it's "perfectly comprehensible" without acknowledging that many (most?) are not able to comprehend the material.

carterdmorgan• 2 years ago

You can argue that Shakespeare is comprehensible to a modern English speaker, but I don't think you can argue that it's modern English. The different "you" forms alone are enough to make it difficult to understand for most modern speakers.

qntty• 2 years ago

Shakespeare’s plays are already in modern English

rtkwe• 2 years ago

In terms of the words they use sure but the grammar/sentence construction is quite different and hard to parse for modern readers. That's their point the translations make decisions to make the language more understandable for their target audience so it's more accessible to them in some ways than it is to English speaking audiences who are usually expected to read it in the original without modification.

jfengel8• 2 years ago

Shakespeare is modern English. Linguists describe it as "Early Modern English". It's contemporaneous with the King James Bible, which is still widely read, without translation.

The difficulty with Shakespeare isn't that it's in Elizabethan English, but that it's in poetry. The Russians and French have strong poetic cultures. They enjoy reading poetry, and the challenge of writing it, including translation. That just doesn't exist in Anglophone cultures.

But Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read. It was meant to be performed, and a native speaker watching a good performance has no need of translation. The emotions and flow of the story are clear. They may not understand each and every word, but that's often true of even the latest movies. (The dialogue is often mixed in a way that makes it hard to understand -- by the director's choice.)

I regularly perform Shakespeare for audiences who have never seen it before, and I never translate a word of it. I generally edit it to make it move more briskly than Elizabethan audiences wanted, but the only time I'll change a word is to make the pronouns match the actors I cast (and not even always then).

Shakespeare's stories are rarely worth preserving for their own sake. The stories themselves are dated -- not the words, but the culture. There's no "translation" that will make Claudio not an asshole for the way he treats Hero, or make Hero not look pitiful for taking him back.

Shakespeare's plays in modern words are always flat, dull, and penitential. If you're going to modernize the language, modernize the whole thing -- go see the delightful "Ten Things I Hate About You" or the magical "West Side Story".

ipnon• 2 years ago

Yes I find most people who find Shakespeare incomprehensible suddenly find it clear and simple once they read it aloud

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

Wherefore petards are pants and the rub is a catch

MrVandemar• 2 years ago

You know, I know it's poor form to post "I agree", adding nothing but a little noise to the conversation.

But here I am, in the stadium, leaping to my feet, cheering as if you just scored the winning goal. Great comment, insightful and shows the passion and knowledge you have for the topic. This kind of commentary is why I'm here, and I'm calling it out as such. Love your work.

defrost• 2 years ago

go see the delightful

ShakespeaRe-Told ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShakespeaRe-Told ) at the very least for Sally Wainwright's modern take on The Taming of the Shrew.

Slings & Arrows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slings_%26_Arrows) for darkly comic irreverance and a couple of piano opening numbers in the actors bar.

So many examples, these are just two.

thaumasiotes2• 2 years ago

The difficulty with Shakespeare isn't that it's in Elizabethan English, but that it's in poetry. The Russians and French have strong poetic cultures.

This is wrong; everyone loves poetry. We have plenty of major cultural productions mostly or entirely written in poetry; Jesus Christ Superstar isn't losing any audience members because of the fact that it doesn't use any prose.

It's contemporaneous with the King James Bible, which is still widely read, without translation.

And this is wrong too; the King James Bible is widely read with the benefit of translation.

materielle• 2 years ago

1) Shakespeare didn’t use literary language. His works were written in the common parlance of the day.

2) It’s actually easier to read than to watch live. We’ve heard all the arguments by now. “Go see it live”, “You need to see it with better actors”, “It makes more sense when the accents are British”. All made up, none of it is true.

3) “Early Modern English” is “Modern” only relative to “Middle” and “Old” English. It isn’t modern in any normative sense. It’s just a linguistic classification, not to be taken literally in casual parlance.

Look, I have a degree in English literature. I’ve read the canon. I’ve read all the major works of Shakespeare. I’ve seen many of the plays live.

It’s difficult to read. Because he’s writing in a language that we don’t speak.

If I see a play live, I have to read it beforehand in order to refresh my memory. If I haven’t read it recently, I have no clue what the actors are saying.

John Mcwhorter, a linguist Phd and a lover of Shakespeare agrees with me.

The truth is that understanding Shakespeare is hard because he doesn’t write in anything that would be considered English.

Perhaps English literature majors should still be forced to learn the original plays.

But for high school students in Ohio, can we please just translate the plays into something they understand? Can we give up the bit and stop pretending like these 16 year olds have the slightest clue what on earth is happening in those plays?

inglor_cz• 2 years ago

I am generally a lover of history, but Shakespeare's comedies are just too "weird" for me. The plots that tend to rotate around some elaborate disguise etc. just cannot "roll me in".

I attended a local adaptation of the Twelfth Night a few days ago. The actors really did their best, but the plot felt like product of a brain injury to me. I wonder what has changed since the 16th century, as obviously Shakespeare's humor was genuinely popular back then.

It is a different story with the tragedies. The Merchant of Venice was very visceral even for 21st century audience. As if troubles of people (be it debt or anti-Semitism) changed less over time.

xenadu02• 2 years ago

Shakespeare only really works for me in original pronunciation. The rhyme scheme makes sense, the alliteration comes back... even some nonsensical lyrics become obvious jokes.

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

I don’t think many have read your link. It’s great. Some lines from King Lear:

The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look to receive from his age, not alone the imperfections of long-engraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.

Regan replies:

Such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s banishment.

Goneril continues:

There is further compliment of leave-taking between France and him. Pray you, let’s hit together.

The commentary on these lines is delightful!

jccooper• 2 years ago

I'm very much on board with cuts and/or emendations to remove or update archaisms and obsolete cultural references, and align better to modern expectations with regards to length and intermissions and such. Unless your mission is explicitly historical accuracy, you're probably doing a disservice to your audience if you don't.

But Shakespeare doesn't need translating after you've done that, as I think all the attempts at doing so have shown. They're dreadful.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

McWhorter's a fun, cantankerous guy, always ready with a hot take. This one is wrong.

We do have access to Shakespeare! Even ignoring productions, which are immediately understandable, a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! They may have to look up some of the words, but that's exactly what people have been doing for hundreds of years—without access to the internet, even. I don't know what's changed now to make this task onerous. I mean, I could speculate about our attention spans, but I can't say that with certainty.

A contemporary English translation is unnecessary, wouldn't make the plays even a tiny bit more relevant or meaningful, and I predict most people would prefer the original anyway.

recursive15• 2 years ago

a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now!

This just is not my experience. Today, I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand the first sentence of "Romeo and Juliet". When I get to "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny," I cannot reconcile any dictionary definition of "mutiny" with anything this fragment might reasonably mean.

There are a few definitions of "mutiny", but generally, it's "rebellion against any authority". Who is the authority? Is it the heads of the dignified households? Like the staff of the house is trying to seize power? Or younger members of the family? What's civil blood? If I spent eight hours pondering this prologue, I strongly doubt that I would make any more headway than this.

Suppafly8• 2 years ago

a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it

It's amazing how many people commenting here are pretending otherwise. I get that it seems unapproachable until you've done it once, but that's why we do in school, so you realize how approachable such works really are.

aragonite• 2 years ago

"Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak."

This reminds me of a popular anecdote in philosophy, that German students grapping with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason often prefer Norman Kemp Smith's English translation over trying to deciper Kant's 18th-century German :)

That said, I'd argue that literary work (especially literary work with such linguistic significance) should be handled differently than theoretical/expository work. What modern students really need are not so much translations [1] as meticulously annotated editions where the annotations are (so to speak) written by linguists rather than literature professors (i.e. the focus should be on bridging the language gap & providing linguistic context, not on literary interpretation or tediously over-analyzing literary symbolism)

[1] which would be as exciting to read compared to the original as a remake of Gone with the Wind in the 21st century - the plot is there, but the magic is lost.

vonnik• 2 years ago

This exists:

https://playonshakespeare.org/

_ZeD_• 2 years ago

Dude... every Italian kid read the divina commedia.

Dante wrote it in 1321. In poetry.

Oh, and he basically "invented" the Italian language.

that is difficult to read now.

vundercind• 2 years ago

I found hip-hop, in general, much harder to approach than Shakespeare. I still miss a lot of the allusions and references in it without notes.

I don’t think hip-hop needs to be translated, though. I think I needed to try harder and acquire some education before I could begin to appreciate it beyond a very-surface level, if even that. I certainly wouldn’t care to use a “translation”. What’s the point? The invitation to grow is important and shouldn’t be dismissed. This isn’t completing your sprint goals, it’s art appreciation. However long it takes is fine.

waldrews• 2 years ago

Yes please. When we torture students with seemingly archaic math, like geometry largely in the form it was in the time of Euclid, we do it for a reason, setting up subsequent ideas, and we have modern textbooks that clean up the presentation and connect it to modern applications.

Making students learn an outdated form of English, useful for Shakespeare and nothing else, does not seem that useful as an investment of effort, compared with learning another modern language, or even something like Latin that in turn helps in learning other languages and understanding English vocabulary in several useful fields.

Growing up reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon, being able to actually understand what was going on, gave me more of an appreciation of the literature/stories/history than later struggling through it in archaic English with a reference in hand.

sbelskie• 2 years ago

“ Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak."

I think the more radical argument and the one closer to the truth (but not the whole truth) is that these countries possess nothing of Shakespeare, for the simple reason that they, unlike us, have never read him.

mauvehaus• 2 years ago

I think a better question isn't "is it hard to read/consume as originally written?", but "Is it worth getting over the hump of reading/consuming as originally written?".

I'd argue the answer to that second question is "yes". It's relatively understandable as Early Modern English, and it's eye opening just how loose the grammar and phrasing can be while remaining understandable. It's delightful to see how Shakespeare plays with the language and a treat to find unfamiliar words and phrases.

Is some of it a little cumbersome? Sure. Are there jokes that have lost something over the last 400 years? Absolutely. Are some of the stories a little ridiculous? Certainly. Is it also a fascinating glimpse into English as a language? Absolutely! Does everyone delight in language as much as I do? Of course not.

I remember reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in 7th grade and the book we used having the play on the left page, and notes for the modern reader on the right page. I found that to be a great way of making the text accessible. Especially as a seventh grader.

For the record, I found Pride and Prejudice (without the zombies) to be a harder read than any of the Shakespeare I've read.

jermaustin1• 2 years ago

This is my view as well. I'm no literature buff, but some of my fondest lessons in school were dissecting the meanings of Shakespearean prose. Finding the fun pronunciations that turned something boring into something humorously vulgar. His play on words is what makes so much of his comedies work even today.

It is always a treat to get to watch a play that stays true to the cadence that Shakespeare wrote for.

Can I understand an entire play while watching it: no. Can I find the fart joke: YES!

mbg721• 2 years ago

They don't get it in the language they speak at all! Puns are shitty in translation, and Shakespeare is loaded with them. Modern English isn't good enough, you need the allusions, the little nods, the things that make it human.

Suppafly8• 2 years ago

Shakespeare's plays are pretty easy to understand though. You could certainly translate them into easier to understand English, but a lot of the tougher language is due to the word play and such, not because the words themselves aren't understandable.

morgango• 2 years ago

| You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.

linearrust• 2 years ago

The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak.

Shakespeare is modern enough to be understandable by any english speaker. What shakespeare requires isn't a translation but annotation for the cultural/historical/etc references and archaic words.

"Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak."

I don't think you can truly enjoy shakespeare in a language other than english. After all, the value in shakespeare isn't the plot, but the language.

However, we would never complain a translation of Beowulf 'isn’t Beowulf'

I would. But it isn't worth learning old english just to read a book. It is worth reading a bit of annotation for shakespeare.

Certainly this 'well-known linguist' isn't equating the difficulty of reading beowulf with hamlet?

mike-the-mikado• 2 years ago

Does anyone have a recommendation of a good starting point, outside the works of Shakespeare?

keepamovin• 2 years ago

Aren’t they already both those things?

I know it’s not entirely the language that we speak but it’s still intuitively understandable. Sometimes maybe you have to let it work on you a bit and sometimes it’s Shakespeare’s brilliance in his word playing / metaphor, and other times it’s just a different way of expressing than we use today.

Some strange words and phrases are normally footnotes to add to the enjoyment heh :)

botanical• 2 years ago

This is how we did Shakespeare in school; left side original text and the right side, an explanation. It made it much more bearable than trying to decipher what's being said.

Great project! I just wish it were in epub format to read on a smaller screen.

GolfPopper• 2 years ago

I do not think the difficulty with understanding Shakespeare is that they are "written in a language we no longer speak" but rather that they are written for a culture much different than our own. Shakespeare is loaded with wordplay, sly and overt references, callouts, contemporary jokes and in-jokes. How do you "translate" that?

He references a Western cultural history that we don't spend a lot of time learning anymore. As someone around a half-century old, I've noticed that most of my younger co-workers no longer "get" many references to bits of classic myth and history that were near-universal when I was growing up.

Imagine trying to "translate" all the cultural baggage of a very dense modern action-drama-comedy. It's not a matter of language, it's a matter of cultural familiarity. Sure, you can re-write Shakespeare for a different time and place, but you're not "translating" it, you're re-writing it, and producing a substantially transformed work by doing so.

Suppafly8• 2 years ago

Honestly, I bet the bulk of his audiences, aka the common folk, didn't grasp all of his references and allusions, but you don't need to when watching a play. Consuming Shakespeare as a play vs reading it is a very different experience.

Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

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