[HN Gopher] Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
___________________________________________________________________
Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
Author : lordleft
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-07-16 15:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (elizabethandrama.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (elizabethandrama.org)
| dwighttk wrote:
| I think it's already been hugged to death and no one has even
| started talking about it
| IndySun wrote:
| >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).
| dwighttk wrote:
| 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.
| IndySun wrote:
| Yep, the site was down. And for quite a while. One can only
| ignore, roll eyes, and move on. There you go. Thanks for
| replying too.
| pvg wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240519050125/http://elizabetha...
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| That _As You Like It_ pun on hours /whores ripe/rape and
| rot/rut was new to me; thanks for sharing.
| joshstrange wrote:
| The explanation in that first video is more interesting to me
| than all of the Shakespeare I was ever taught in school.
| arduanika wrote:
| 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.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| 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.
| arduanika wrote:
| 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.
| recursive wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I was the same as you. Now I think I didn't care enough about
| it to put in the effort.
| recursive wrote:
| 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.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I think it is possible. Rather than reading it for
| yourself, why not get other people to read the lines out to
| you? And maybe even "act out" the story?
|
| Obviously it would be expensive to get it done just for you
| but if you could spread the cost among a larger audience it
| might be feasible. Get them to record it and you could even
| watch it on TV! ;)
| recursive wrote:
| > why not get other people to read the lines out to you?
|
| Among other reasons, that I didn't think it would help.
| Getting someone else to read it _does_ provide the
| possible benefit of hearing emphasis and inflection. The
| downside is that it becomes difficult to go back and re-
| read a difficult passage. My uninformed guess is that the
| cumulative result of this is approximately a wash.
|
| I can't bring myself to write this with a matching degree
| of sarcasm.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Well it was jokey sarcasm so don't worry about it. :)
| What I mean is trying to get a Shakespeare play by
| reading it, is like trying to get a film by reading the
| script!
|
| Sure, if you're an experienced actor or director that'll
| work but for regular folks just watch it performed!
|
| Seriously, you wouldn't take a film recommendation and
| start by reading the script would you? You might read it
| later if you really liked it but you watch it first. Get
| the details later.
| recursive wrote:
| Well, I mean, it wasn't my idea. I can't take the credit
| or blame. It was the required reading for my literature
| class.
|
| But... I still don't think my comprehension would have
| been great if I had been watching a performance instead.
| It would establish an upper bound on time investment,
| which would have been a plus I guess.
| garof wrote:
| Did either of you ever try watching e.g. Titus?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_(film)
|
| It's not considered one of his great plays. I enjoyed the
| film, sought out a solo copy of the play, which I managed
| to slog through. That was years ago; I don't really
| remember it. Still revisit the film though.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_lishin wrote:
| Not much to add, but my experience mirrors yours.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| recursive wrote:
| Oh wow, very different from my experience. I was just given
| the book, and deadlines for reading certain parts.
| ycombinete wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you extend this to Restoration, Pepys went to the theatre
| several times a week. About 50% he was unimpressed by.
| kens wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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
|
| I found a version of the Canterbury Tales online that
| footnoted the lines. No one is going to pretend that
| Chaucer is comprehensible to modern speakers. But it was
| very charming to see that it wasn't necessary to indicate
| which words the footnotes for a line applied to. Enough of
| the line is obvious that it's clear what difficulty the
| footnote is helping you with as it explains the meaning of
| a word.
|
| That wouldn't work in a more foreign text.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _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...
| garof wrote:
| 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?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/?scr=1
|
| SparkNotes has a clearer and more printable version but is
| behind a paywall.
| magnetowasright wrote:
| There are some editions, often made for schools, that have
| the original text on the right hand page with
| translations/explanations of the language on the left hand
| page. The description of the jokes, puns, euphemisms, and
| general turns of phrase that are no longer intuitive today
| enrich the experience for sure. Ask your local library.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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"
| dbspin wrote:
| This is reductive. Clueless is certainly not "just" a
| modernised version of Emma. It takes broad strokes
| inspiration from the plot of Emma, but the charm of the
| film isn't something that can be reduced to the original
| novel. The application of a comedy of manners onto the
| contemporary setting, combining broad farce with
| naturalistic performances, skewering (while also benefiting
| from) consumer fetishism etc. The point here being that one
| could write a million bowdlerised versions of Emma and
| never land on a Clueless. Modern English Shakespeare
| translations are readily available. It takes genius to make
| one that rivals the original in popularity.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > This is reductive
|
| And this is a meaningless insult. One might say it needs
| translation into Normal People English.
|
| > The point here being that one could write a million
| bowdlerised versions of Emma
|
| Who cares? The point is, the plots and characters are
| readily adaptable into modern settings, and that IS a
| valid modernization of Shakespeare, as McWhorter wants.
| There are a million ways to do that, and godspeed to all
| of them.
|
| Having dukes and queens and earls speaking modern English
| is just stupid.
| commodoreboxer wrote:
| "reductive" isn't an insult. And note the "just" in the
| parent post. It is an adaptation, but it is more than
| just that.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| it's a pretentious, overblown word that apparently had a
| burst of interest around 2012 and is completely
| unnecessary (but _sounds_ scientific).
|
| What does it give you that "oversimplified" or
| "simplistic" does not?
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&
| q=r...
|
| https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/reductive
|
| https://mathoverflow.net/questions/321096/what-is-the-
| defini...
| toyg wrote:
| Fewer letters.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| you're right: saves one character over "simplistic"
| Affric wrote:
| "Simplistic" isn't too bad but "oversimplified" is a
| terrible word.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I won't attribute this to Einstein:
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/
|
| That word you dislike means you've violated "But Not
| Simpler"
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| reductive is a form of simplification, but a specific
| form, one in which what is discussed has been reduced to
| fewer (probably just one) aspect, simplification is not
| necessary reductive as you can have multiple aspects
| maintained but each of those aspects made less complex.
|
| This, at any rate, is my usage.
| dbspin wrote:
| I'm not sure precisely what you mean by pretension -
| since affecting importance makes little sense in the
| context. I presume you're misusing the word to refer to
| 'tall poppy syndrome' or similarly to the Irish
| colloquialism 'notions'. The word reductive is perfectly
| common in English writing - according to the OED it dates
| to the 1500s. Perhaps it's new and frightening to you
| because you're level of literacy is not what it might be?
|
| https://edtrust.org/the-equity-line/the-literacy-crisis-
| in-t...
|
| Perhaps we'd do better to cull the amount of words used?
| To reduce to available pool to the most efficient use of
| letters? Personally I think that would be double plus
| ungood, but perhaps I need to brush up on my 'normal
| people English'.
|
| Look, sarcastic nose tweaking aside, a new word is a
| gift! When I come across one I add it to a list and count
| myself richer for having found a more nuanced
| understanding of how others view the world.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| hey, way to be exemplify that condescension:
|
| > Perhaps it's new and frightening to you because you're
| level of literacy is not what it might be?
|
| and you can't spell "your." My level of literacy is most
| likely much higher than yours.
|
| Using pretentious words in order to sound more educated
| than you are is the very thing I'm talking about.
|
| > To reduce to available pool to the most efficient use
| of letters?
|
| (Pun intended there, I guess?) "Reducing" things to their
| essence is what we do in science and mathematics. It's a
| good thing.
| The_Blade wrote:
| Bowdlerize as a verb literally came from Thomas Bowdler
| gutting Shakespeare
|
| Ophelia was randy AF if you study her verses closer
| especially the "mad scene" (act 4, scene 5)
|
| Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I started with "Clueless" and then realized, "Oh, hey,
| that's Jane Austen."
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| The Moonlighting adaptation of Taming of the Shrew with
| Bruce Willis went over well.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=moonlighting+taming+of+the+shrew
| commodoreboxer wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| Shakespeare definitely doesn't need to be done in RP. It's
| no closer to Elizabethan English than American is.
|
| I've seen OP performances. They don't especially move me,
| but I think it's because so much effort is spent on the
| accent. The audience does adjust to it rather quickly, but
| it still requires a lot of heavy lifting to make any
| Shakespeare play accessible to modern sensibilities.
| (Pacing, culture, references, etc.)
|
| I personally find that Shakespeare can sound remarkable in
| just about any modern accent. I love hearing it in accents
| that aren't entirely common: Yorkshire, Geordie, American
| South, Black English Vernacular. I once got to perform with
| a British woman with Ghanian parents, and whose native
| accent was Estuary -- absolutely a knockout.
| eszed wrote:
| I agree with everything you say.
|
| Are you North American? I found OP largely to be a
| curiosity to American performers and audiences, but a
| revelation and a revolution to people in the UK who have
| only ever associated Shakespeare with RP. At least,
| that's how it was over a decade ago when I first
| performed in OP there.
|
| I remember once being in a workshop with a Scottish actor
| who did a creditable job at a speech from Maccers in his
| drama-school (ie, RP) voice, was much better in OP, and
| then just about broke down (out of character, for real)
| when asked to repeat it in his own native Edinburgh
| dialect. It was - get this - the _first time ever in his
| life_ that he 'd spoken Shakespeare in anything other
| than RP. It (has?) had such a strong, elitist grip on
| Shakespe-ah, that OP was received very differently (I was
| on the receiving end of some of the hostile reactions,
| too!) in the UK.
| jfengel wrote:
| Fascinating! I'm glad that they're breaking that RP grip
| on Shakespeare. It's certainly a valid way to do it, but
| Shakespeare himself wanted a diversity of accents,
| especially for his lower-class characters.
|
| It's funny that you mention Mack. A few years ago I was
| directing a Maccers whose native accent was Pittsburgh.
| Not very different from the general American, but Mac has
| a line, "I have supped full with horrors". Which in his
| accent comes out as "full with whores".
|
| I wasn't gonna mention it, but the cast giggled, and I
| was afraid the audience might too. It took rather a lot
| of work to find the right pronunciation for one word, and
| I think I made a mistake even trying. The cast hears it
| every night but an audience would have blipped right past
| it.
| eszed wrote:
| Heh. When I try the line out in OP I'm convinced that pun
| was intended. It's in response to the women's cries
| inside the castle, no? That Mac, at this point in the
| show (and consciously or not), associates all women with
| whores is a _fascinating_ character note. Not that you
| were wrong to cover it up - if the word had distracted
| the audience right then it would have been unfortunate -
| but I like your story as an example of how being aware of
| OP can help open up the text.
|
| You're absolutely right about diversity of accents, and
| "OP" (in its time) was never at all only one thing. David
| Crystal - I hope I'm not doxxing myself other than to my
| friends to say I worked with his and Ben's company - was
| adamant about that. We were a crazy-diverse crew, with
| our own underlying patterns of speech - Standard
| American, all sorts of regional UK dialects, Indian
| English, and various second-language speakers - all of
| which brought welcome individual "flavours" to our OP
| palettes. (Then David got to go _really_ nerdy with his
| suppositions about what 16th-century cod Welsh and cod
| French accents might have been, and overlaying those was
| a hoot!)
|
| It's only RP that enforces standardization - which is why
| all of us from elsewhere (more accustomed to hearing and
| performing Shakespeare in our own voices) sometimes had a
| hard time grokking the immense effect of OP on UK
| performers and audiences.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'd compare that to hearing Bach on period instruments, or
| Beethoven on a fortepiano. I actually played a modern
| reproduction of one of those.
|
| Yeah, it IS closer to what people experienced then. I can't
| argue that.
|
| But we're different; the halls are different; our ears are
| different. The miracle of Shakespeare (or Beethoven) is
| that it still means something to us, no matter how much you
| torture it.
| retrac wrote:
| 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.
| zoky wrote:
| > But here's a question: how many more centuries until we
| will have to translate?
|
| It's not clear that we ever will have to. Chaucer wrote a
| mere 200 years before Shakespeare, and would have been
| incomprehensible in the latter's time. The widespread
| development of printing put a huge brake on the evolution
| of language. Arguably, the Internet is having an even
| stronger influence, turning English into a global lingua
| franca the likes of which the world has not seen since the
| Roman Empire, or possibly even before that. Also, more and
| more people are educated throughout the world, and English
| is taught in a fairly consistent manner everywhere.
|
| Writing, consistent and universal education, and global
| dominance are all factors that work against the development
| of a language. Yes, new words and slang terms are being
| adopted constantly, and perhaps just as many are falling
| out of use, but overall the meaning of a sentence spoken
| today would be easy enough for a speaker from the 1800s to
| understand, and there's no reason to believe it will be any
| different for a speaker from the 2300s.
| Affric wrote:
| Point of information: we don't have a Shakespeare
| manuscript. We have folios and quartos.
|
| Beyond that I find the example with the long s perfectly
| readable.
|
| Agree that pointing out the dirty jokes ruins them.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _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.
| ghaff wrote:
| If you must read Shakespeare in high school, a good
| annotated copy of the play would probably be helpful.
| However, a film or video of a stage production in probably
| a better introduction. Reading a good critique of the play
| would also probably help with noy having an idea of what is
| going on.
| scientator wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > It's also the constant references to Greek and Roman
| mythology, via Ovid
|
| that's a perfect reason to NOT "update" it: the past is a
| foreign country. They do things differently there.
|
| You can't make it seem like the First World in the 21st
| Century. You just have to go there.
| scientator wrote:
| Updating it wouldn't eliminate the original. It would
| simply give many people an accessible introduction to the
| work, and perhaps inspire them to explore the original. I
| really don't understand the resistance to providing
| people with that introduction.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| What stops anyone from doing it? I'm pretty sure I could
| search Amazon or Abebooks [1] and find lots of attempts
| at it.
|
| [1] https://www.abebooks.com/docs/community/featured/out-
| of-prin...
| krapp wrote:
| >That mythology is no longer part of mainstream culture.
|
| Tell that to Percy Jackson, Disney's Hercules, Hades, God
| of War, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Smite, Lore Olympus,
| Disney Descendants, Immortals, Blood of Zeus, Kaos,
| numerous Marvel and DC characters and countless other media
| that still incorporate it.
| scientator wrote:
| The Hollywood versions of Greco-Roman mythology aren't
| the same as what you get in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
| References to Ovid's Metamorphoses can be found on almost
| every page of Shakespeare, and if you haven't read Ovid
| (and really, how many people nowadays have?) a lot of
| Shakespeare's references can be cryptic.
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| recursive wrote:
| > 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.
| magarnicle wrote:
| It is modern English, it is generally comprehensible, but
| it isn't easy for the modern speaker. The main reason is
| that Shakespeare is full of familiar words that have
| secondary meanings that are uncommon or unusual for us now.
| So we find it hard to parse because a word we tend to use
| as a verb might be a noun, for instance.
|
| An example off the time of my head would be the word
| "fast", which we usually use to mean "quick", but
| Shakespeare uses to mean "held tight". Speaking of "quick",
| he would use that to mean "alive".
|
| If you _really_ think about each line you might be able to
| work it out without notes, but that doesn 't make it very
| easy to read.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| That meaning of fast is still current in phrases such as
| 'hold fast to'.
|
| Similarly for quick. There is a relatively recent film
| called The Quick and the Dead based on a 1973 novel of
| the same name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_an
| d_the_Dead_(1987_f...
|
| If you are moderately well read most such words should
| not pose more than momentary difficulties.
| recursive wrote:
| I guess I'm not moderately well read.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I guess I'm not moderately well read.
|
| At least you're honest about it. Assuming you aren't just
| being sarcastic. A lot of people never read much beyond
| whatever is required for their schooling but pretend
| otherwise.
| reddit_clone wrote:
| Hmm, I always interpreted the title of the movie with the
| current/conventional meaning of 'quick'.
|
| There are two kinds of people. Those who are quick on the
| trigger. And those who are dead (because they were not
| quick enough ..)
|
| It was an entertaining movie! Several big name stars.
| romanhn wrote:
| I find this very interesting. I'm not a native English
| speaker but I would say I have native level proficiency. I
| just finished (literally yesterday) going through about 20
| of Shakespeare's plays. Moreover, I did it in the audiobook
| format, where I didn't just have to follow the story, but
| also constantly figure out who's speaking. This wasn't a
| walk in the park and I had to familiarize myself with each
| play before listening to it. But - I found most of it
| perfectly understandable and often relatable. A fascinating
| difference in experience.
| adrian_b wrote:
| This matches my experience too.
|
| I am also not a native English speaker, but I did not
| find Shakespeare hard to understand. The same happened
| for other non-native speakers that I know.
|
| However, I am used to reading texts in many foreign
| languages and I am familiar with the etymology of many
| English words, i.e. with the evolution of their meanings
| in time. This is much more typical for non-native English
| speakers than for native English speakers and it might
| explain the difference.
|
| In any case it is inappropriate to claim that
| Shakespeare's language is not Modern English.
|
| The differences between Shakespeare's language and the
| current language are orders of magnitude smaller than for
| example the differences between French as taught
| officially and the language in which the novels of
| Frederic Dard (the San-Antonio series) have been written
| (in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century). Those
| novels can really be hard to understand for native and
| non-native French speakers alike, before learning the
| specific slang used in them.
| samastur wrote:
| I love going to theaters when we visit London and over the
| years I've seen tens of plays if not over a hundred.
| Shakespeare's are the only ones I had problems following so
| we stopped seeing them.
|
| Like you I don't think this is a problem of Shakespeare or
| me. My English is not perfect, but since I don't seem to
| have problems communicating otherwise or following plays or
| movies even in dialects (within reason) I take this as a
| substantial proof that it is generally good enough.
|
| My personal take is that it is a combination of language
| that is just unfamiliar enough and old references and
| idioms that I don't get because I haven't been taught them
| in school while learning about plays.
| graemep wrote:
| I thin you are right (and this is reflected in other
| comments) that some people find Elizabethan language hard
| and others do not.
|
| There are lots of things that prevent some English speakers
| understanding others. Dialect, vocabulary and culture for a
| start. I often hear or read (and use) words in some places
| that I would not use in others (a huge range from lakh to
| orthogonal). I often read things that other people might
| have a problem reading, or things that contain words I need
| to look up.
|
| Short of using only very simple language all the time it is
| impossible to find anything that is not going to present
| difficulties to some significant group of people.
|
| > Despite these qualifications, I was hard-pressed to find
| any lines that I could make sense of in Shakespeare
|
| Really. Take a look at the first few exchanges in the play
| I know best:
|
| https://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html
|
| The word I can find that has had a change of meaning is
| "revenue" and that is slight. You can read a long way down
| without seeing anything that is hard to understand.
|
| My children have been able to enjoy Shakespeare from before
| before they were teenagers. I think it is because they read
| a variety of books so are not confused by unfamiliar
| language.
| recursive wrote:
| The first line looks more approachable than in R&J. But
| in addition to revenue, I'm at least unfamiliar with
| step-dame and dowager. My phone's autocomplete also
| thinks that latter one is not a word.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Dowager is essentially widow, I think it comes up in UK
| english still. I wasn't familiar with step-dame, but
| understand step from stepfather and other step relations,
| and obviously knew dame was a female, so assumed it was
| stepmother or similar. I feel like most people would have
| similar thought processes to figure those words out.
| carterdmorgan wrote:
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Different 'you' forms?
| qntty wrote:
| Shakespeare's plays are already in modern English
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes I find most people who find Shakespeare incomprehensible
| suddenly find it clear and simple once they read it aloud
| jfengel wrote:
| I think it takes some experience in getting a Shakespeare
| text from the page into a form that really clicks with
| people. It's not because the words are unfamiliar, but
| because Shakespeare has a fondness for long, elliptical
| sentences and convoluted grammar. It can be hard to figure
| out where the emphasis goes.
|
| It helps that the poetry gives you a lot of cues. Iambic
| pentameter gives you a framework. Deviations from it are
| cues that something is important. It's not a formula for
| performance, but it reveals just how much more Shakespeare
| was directing you than just the words to say.
|
| John Barton's "Playing Shakespeare" course has been how
| they teach that to RSC actors, and that has given us some
| of the greatest Shakespeare lights of the last 50 years.
| The videos of it with his students are magnificent views of
| a comically young Patrick Stewart, a ridiculously baby-
| faced Judi Dench, a positively embryonic Ian McKellen, and
| many others.
|
| Inexperienced readers may not be able to get that just from
| reading it aloud by themselves. But if they listen to
| somebody who has practiced it, they'll have a huge leg up
| on comprehension.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| We never figured Roddy McDowall for a fairy. https://en.m
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Tempest_Hallmark_Ha...
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Another fun trick: Shakespeare rhymes much better if you
| read it aloud in your broadest "talk like a pirate" accent.
| jfengel wrote:
| Double down and do Pericles, which has actual pirates.
|
| (When I did it, we replaced all of the pirate's dialogue
| with "arr".)
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Yes I find most people who find Shakespeare
| incomprehensible suddenly find it clear and simple once
| they read it aloud
|
| That but also, it becomes a lot easier once you stop
| pretending it's incomprehensible and put forth even a tiny
| effort into understanding it.
| recursive wrote:
| You might not believe me, but I'm not pretending. Maybe I
| just don't know how to apply the effort, but you're
| wrong, whether you believe it or not.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Wherefore petards are pants and the rub is a catch
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The first time I heard hoist by one's own petard I had
| assumed petard was the ass, but it turns out it is a small
| bomb.
| jfengel wrote:
| It's not quite "ass", but "petard" does also suggest
| "fart". The French still use "pet" to mean "fart".
| Including an amusingly named pastry: Pete De Soeur,
| "nun's fart".
|
| Shakespeare definitely loved his fart jokes. And if I
| ever get around to directing Hamlet, I'm gonna see if a
| fart joke works at that line. It would be hilarious to
| break the tension.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| Thank you. I didn't always like Shakespeare, but exactly 25
| years ago next week I founded a Shakespeare theater troupe.
| (Unimaginatively called the Rude Mechanicals, a very
| popular name. But since I nabbed rudemechanicals.com, I get
| a lot of their email.)
|
| Our quarter century anniversary is in a week. We've done
| every Shakespeare play. Even the really bad ones.
| Especially the really bad ones. Often they are the most
| successful, because we can find great things nobody has
| ever seen before.
| defrost wrote:
| > 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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_.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Shakespeare has a few perplexing words and some apparently
| contorted phrase constructions that become clearer if read
| aloud. Nothing compared to actual difficulties.
| materielle wrote:
| 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?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| "The truth is that understanding Shakespeare is hard
| because he doesn't write in anything that would be
| considered English."
|
| I just want to record for posterity that you wrote and
| published this sentence. It's not just factually incorrect;
| it actually boggles the mind that someone would think it,
| write it, and post it in public.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _easier to read than to watch live._
|
| Obviously there are some benefits to reading like being
| able to skip around, pause, take notes, look stuff up, sit
| wherever you feel most comfortable, etc. But in general I'd
| say this is only true for people with a ton of experience
| reading old plays. For everyone else, good acting is
| tremendously helpful at helping the audience to follow the
| characters' actions, relationships, and intentions.
|
| > _language that we don't speak_
|
| It really not that far off, and doesn't take that much
| practice to get into. It's similar to trying to watch a TV
| show set somewhere with a strong accent you aren't familiar
| with (e.g. the Baltimore accents in _The Wire_ ). It starts
| out challenging but human brains are amazing language
| interpreting machines.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >1) Shakespeare didn't use literary language. His works
| were written in the common parlance of the day.
|
| I'm pretty sure it was a mix.
|
| >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.
|
| I don't remember a time when I found Shakespeare difficult
| reading, but I guess I started reading him at 16 at which
| point I had already quite a long and varied reading life.
|
| I suppose advanced High School English classes could have
| the original Shakespeare and the non-advanced the
| modernized, but I think it's doing a disservice to those
| kids in Ohio who would understand to give them what I would
| at that age have referred to as the dumbed down versions,
| and which at this age I still have some tendency to think
| of as being of lesser quality.
|
| >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.
|
| there's a lot of actors who don't read Shakespeare well,
| and tend to hit the rhythm exactly and heavily, like a bad
| poetry reading - this makes the text harder to understand.
| saghm wrote:
| > there's a lot of actors who don't read Shakespeare
| well, and tend to hit the rhythm exactly and heavily,
| like a bad poetry reading - this makes the text harder to
| understand
|
| If actors can't even be expected to perform it right, why
| would we expect students to be able to read it right?
| This sounds like even more of an argument to translate it
| for modern audiences
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >This sounds like even more of an argument to translate
| it for modern audiences
|
| when speech is uttered in an unnatural rhythm it is
| harder to understand what is being said then when reading
| the same text at one's leisure, it is not quite the
| argument you imagine.
| saghm wrote:
| The point is that modern actors struggling to deliver the
| correct rhythm is a pretty good sign that the language is
| hard to parse for a modern person, and that will affect
| the ability of students to be able to read and understand
| it.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Rubbish. Comprehending this material has been well within
| the capabilities of 16 year olds for as long as the
| material has been taught. For your premise to hold true
| there would need to have been a significant diminishment in
| children's linguistic and reading skills which would no
| doubt be reflected in all manner of standardized testing
| across the cohort. If someone's struggling with the
| material it seems more likely that either it's being taught
| poorly or they simply have no interest in engaging with it.
| Curb your enthusiasm for revisionism, not everything should
| be easy.
| hnfong wrote:
| Markest thou well, good sir, thy words are naught
| But foolish prattle. Forsooth, for many a year, The
| younglings of sixteen winters have grasped This
| very material with ease and little fear. If
| thy premise held water, then, by the stars, A
| woeful decline in linguistic arts Would manifest
| itself in tests of old, A downward trend that would
| not be untold. But nay, 'tis not the youth
| that falter here, But rather thou, dear teacher,
| dost impart A lesson poorly taught, or else the
| pupil's heart Doth not incline to learn, and doth
| not start. Curb, then, thy zeal for revision's
| sway, Not every task should be a trivial play.
| Some things, by rights, should challenge and vex,
| Lest wisdom's virtues be but empty text.
| joshstrange wrote:
| If ever I was ok with an AI generated comment on HN this
| is it.
|
| I'm firmly in the "the cognitive load to read/understand
| Shakespeare far outweighs leaving it in the 'original'
| form"-camp and this further confirms my view point.
|
| I love reading, I always have, but I never loved reading
| Shakespeare and probably never will. I maintain that
| teachers do their students a massive disservice by
| shoving dry or hard to understand books down their
| pupil's throats in the name of "it's what we've always
| done" instead of something that students might actually
| enjoy AND learn from. Maybe one day they will enjoy "the
| classics" but I think you turn more children off of
| reading as whole with way it's taught currently.
|
| And yes, I'm including books like To Kill a Mockingbird
| and most "required reading". Maybe I'm dumb (I don't
| think I am, my career and what I've accomplished says I'm
| not) but it wasn't until years after reading it that
| actually understood it. I still have an incredibly
| negative reaction to that book, not because of the
| contents, but because of how it was forced on me. English
| classes suck the life out of every book they touch. In
| fact, I dislike just about every book I was forced to
| read in my English classes but I regularly read more than
| my peers. I was lucky that my mom and grandmother
| instilled a love of reading in me, school did its best to
| beat that out of me.
| lieks wrote:
| ...huh. As a non-native speaker, that was... easy to
| read? Where did I learn this vocabulary again? I haven't
| read Shakespeare's works yet (though they are on my
| reading list).
|
| What makes it hard to read for some people _and not
| others_ (as with any translation problem) is
| unfamiliarity.
|
| It's easier to learn just japanese honorifics and then
| read a partial translation than to learn all of japanese
| and read the original. But a full translation loses that
| dimension of meaning.
|
| But it's not as difficult to learn some Early Modern
| English vocabulary, and this way you can avoid losing
| _any_ meaning. I hear there are a lot of puns that wouldn
| 't work with modern vocabulary.
|
| If it wasn't required reading in English-speaking
| countries, "translating" it probably wouldn't be even in
| consideration.
| goosedragons wrote:
| That's not actually Shakespeare. Enough word meanings
| have shifted and other words that were once common
| becoming rare that it makes it much harder to read. A lot
| of context has been lost too because we're not 16th
| century English people. It's particularly bad in the
| "comedies". If every joke has to be pointed out and
| explained is it really a joke still?
|
| Like here's some real random Hamlet:
|
| "My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber, Lord Hamlet,
| with his doublet all unbrac'd, No hat upon his head, his
| stockings foul'd, Ungart'red, and down-gyved to his
| ankle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
| And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been
| loosed out of hell To speak of horrors, he comes before
| me."
|
| What exactly is down-gyved? Purport as noun here is weird
| for contemporary speakers even if they have an idea of
| the meaning and a lot of the clothing terms like doublet
| and ungartered are not spectacularly common these days.
| saghm wrote:
| "Down-gyved" sounds more like it's gibberish from the
| Jabberwocky than actual English, and that's honestly true
| of a lot of Shakespeare nowadays.
| qohen wrote:
| "Ungart'red, and down-gyved to his ankle" -- seems pretty
| clear that it means something to the effect that his
| unfastened stockings have fallen down to his ankles, no?
| And the context seems clear, that Hamlet's clothes are in
| disarray, as is his emotional-state.
| graemep wrote:
| My kids never had any problem with Shakespeare. I have been
| to several of his plays in the last few years with my
| daughter who has just turned 16 and she had no problem -
| and she did not seem to have any problem much younger than
| that. At one performance there was a school group including
| early teen, maybe pre teen kids, sitting in front of us who
| were clearly enjoying the play (among other things they
| were discussing it, and had to be told to be quiet by their
| teacher in the interval).
|
| > But for high school students in Ohio
|
| Maybe they need to improve their English comprehension
| closer to what we seem to have here in Warwickshire.
|
| To be fair, some kids do find it difficult - but you learn
| most by tackling difficult stuff, not by doing only what is
| easy.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| Yeah, comedy always ages poorly. Even 40 year old comedy
| movies are often weak now. With 400 year old comedies it's
| surprising anything works.
|
| Twelfth Night is actually one of the better ones. With some
| skillful editing and a good dose of physical comedy
| (basically you can write your own jokes), it can be
| entertaining. There's practically no salvaging something
| like _Measure for Measure_ or _All 's Well That Ends Well_.
|
| _Merchant_... is complicated. (I have thoughts. I played a
| very well-received Shylock a few years back.) Think of it
| as a tragedy with some comic sub-plots. Which isn 't unlike
| the tragedies, which also have comic sub-plots.
|
| Even so, it's just a weird goddamn play. It is a tragedy
| that ends in act 4, followed by a really dumb romantic
| comedy one-act. The audiences comes out feeling, well,
| ooky. And you just gotta lean into that.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Someone of that is similar to the Seinfeld is unfunny trope
| right? Where it's not funny because we've been inundated
| with the same humor from other media before experiencing
| shakespeare, so it seems trite.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| recursive wrote:
| > 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Are you trying to parse every word in sequence, or just
| understand the meaning in context? The latter is much
| easier.
| recursive wrote:
| I'd settle for either one. In order to have have a
| context at all, one must have some critical mass of
| understanding. The density of parts I can understand is
| never enough to achieve that. My experience is that any
| portion of Shakespeare that I attempt to read goes the
| same way. If I dig farther into "mutiny", there's no way
| to know if I'm eventually going to produce a "context" or
| whether I'm on a fool's errand. In order to develop a
| context, one must somehow achieve a sufficient foothold
| of comprehension from which to build it. There are
| precious few sentences in Shakespeare for which I would
| be able to do that. The farther you get into the play,
| the more references there are to earlier, so you kind of
| have to start at the beginning. But I can't understand
| that part either.
|
| You keep saying it's easy. I believe you when you say
| that's your experience. What I'm trying to tell you is
| that it's not easy for everyone. There is no amount of
| patience that I could apply to this pursuit that would
| yield success. This is my good-faith best effort to
| comprehend it and it's not happening.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| > What I'm trying to tell you is that it's not easy for
| everyone.
|
| I think that's undeniably correct.
|
| > There is no amount of patience that I could apply to
| this pursuit that would yield success.
|
| I think that, however, is very likely incorrect. IMO, you
| need to develop patience with not understanding, and
| continuing anyway. Just read the play, see what you pick
| up, then read it again. Treat it like poetry and don't
| worry too much about understanding every word; see if you
| can get the feel. I found that Milton's Paradise Lost
| took me 3 or 4 false starts over a decade before I
| managed to get into the flow enough to read the whole
| thing. There's still probably a lot I missed, but it was
| thoroughly enjoyable.
|
| Sometimes it's handy have a study guide, though,
| especially to understand some of the wordplay:
|
| Hamlet[To Ophelia] > 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?
|
| I read this in high school and was thinking... what the
| hell are "country matters"? The footnote in the study
| guide quite succinctly pointed out:
|
| > The emphasis is on the first syllable
|
| Needless to say this became an highly used in-joke
| amongst my friends.
| recursive wrote:
| > continuing anyway
|
| This is a concept that gives me hope. Hope that I could
| conceivably read it if I needed to. In all practical
| likelihood, I probably just won't because that type of
| slog does not sound enjoyable to me. But thanks for the
| idea anyway. Reading most of the rest of these comments
| about how easy it is give me a very you're-holding-the-
| iphone-wrong sensation.
| Affric wrote:
| > 1. 1567-1667+ Discord, contention, tumult; a state of
| discord; a dispute, quarrel. Frequently in in (a) mutiny,
| at (a) mutiny. Obsolete.[1]
|
| Mutiny in this case means as defined above. An old grudge
| is boiling over. Note that it is highly unlikely for the
| grudge to literally be ancient how I would think of that
| word today.
|
| "Civil blood" Is a double meaning a reference to the
| prestige of the families and brings into contrast their
| incivility in their vendetta. Part of the magic of
| communication is deliberate double meaning. It is not a
| well defined API.
|
| As someone with a disability who teaches computer science
| to students with disabilities (and without), your problems
| reading Shakespeare do not sound like those of people that
| come to mind when I read the term "regular person".
|
| If one is going to attempt to parse every word in the play
| and believes that it is the only way to follow the plot
| then one is going to have a bad time. If you could get to
| the Queen Mab speech reading that way then you'd probably
| melt at that point.
|
| My suggested way forward is to not attempt to think
| definitionally about words that are used in a manner you
| cannot understand. When you arrive at a word like mutiny
| think that Shakespeare isn't talking about a literal mutiny
| (though he might be) but something that is like a mutiny.
| What are mutinies like, not in cause but in deed. When
| Shakespeare starts talking about "atomies" he has no
| knowledge or Bohr or QM, but we know that atoms are really
| small. When Mercutio mentions Crickets bone... well,
| Crickets don't have bones but if they did they would be
| small.
|
| Shakespeare's scribes weren't writing an API for you to
| extract the plot out of. It's a lot fuzzier than that.
|
| [1]
| https://www.oed.com/dictionary/mutiny_n?tab=meaning_and_use
| recursive wrote:
| > Part of the magic of communication is deliberate double
| meaning. It is not a well defined API.
|
| In order to appreciate a double meaning, I'd have to have
| enough basis of understanding to even be able to
| recognize it.
|
| > As someone with a disability who teaches computer
| science to students with disabilities (and without), your
| problems reading Shakespeare do not sound like those of
| people that come to mind when I read the term "regular
| person".
|
| I don't have any particular diagnosis, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if I could get one. In any case, I'm just out
| here operating in regular society. I don't seem to have
| any particular problems communicating in English anyway,
| as far as I can tell.
|
| > If one is going to attempt to parse every word in the
| play and believes that it is the only way to follow the
| plot then one is going to have a bad time.
|
| I don't believe it is the only way. Most written
| material, like your post here, I'm able to digest chunks
| at a time. I just don't understand any of the chunks in
| Shakespeare.
|
| > If you could get to the Queen Mab speech reading that
| way then you'd probably melt at that point.
|
| I can read words, but at no point do I ever achieve
| comprehension in this type of material. If Queen Mab's
| speech consists of words, I wouldn't even notice a
| difference.
|
| > When you arrive at a word like mutiny think that
| Shakespeare isn't talking about a literal mutiny (though
| he might be) but something that is like a mutiny.
|
| I don't think I can tell the difference between over-
| thinking it, and under-thinking it.
|
| My dictionary didn't have that definition in it. My best
| guess about what was meant was that the two houses each
| had _internal_ struggles, which is more consistent with
| the only definitions of "mutiny" I've ever known. Also,
| it seems to be more consistent with taking a break from
| the feud.
|
| But now "I'm parsing every word again". When I encounter
| difficult material, I just don't know any other way to
| approach it.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| well Afric here gives a good overview of the whole mutiny
| thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982155 but
| when reading it I read immediately like so:
|
| The Montagues and Capulets have a long standing feud, an
| ancient grudge, the mutiny in this case is that the feud
| has been cold for some time but is now turning hot again
| and mutiny in our meaning of it pertains because to indulge
| in violent feuds between families is mutinous against the
| public order - in other words to have a feud with murders
| and public fighting you are definitely rebelling against
| the social authority that decrees this kind of thing should
| not happen.
|
| The civil blood is not hot and boiling over because it is
| "civil" as in civilized, but also there is civil blood -
| the blood of the civilized civillians who are not members
| of your little feud that will always get hurt when there is
| violence on the scale of two large and rich households
| having a feud which means you get the civil blood (of the
| civillians) on your civil (civilized) hands.
|
| I get that you don't get it, but this is one of those weird
| things for me - like when you try to explain how some
| relatively simple bit of code works to a non-developer and
| they act like you're a madman.
|
| on edit: changed designer to non-developer
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I'll note here that as with much of Shakespeare, there
| are really more edges connecting to the node civil here
| than the two ones I point out, which I guess is part of
| the enjoyment of the reading for me.
| recursive wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation.
| paulmd wrote:
| Watch the 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet with Leo
| DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Absurdly over the top and campy
| and fun, which I really think shakespeare would have loved.
| He was a "butts in seats" kinda guy.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beV56hp4T3w
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEzskNtFnIY
| Suppafly wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| This exists:
|
| https://playonshakespeare.org/
| _ZeD_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| " 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| 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.
| mike-the-mikado wrote:
| Does anyone have a recommendation of a good starting point,
| outside the works of Shakespeare?
| keepamovin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| 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.
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