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Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

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Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#101

Post by vundercind »

kens wrote: post #13

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 langua…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#102

Post by at_a_remove »

recursive wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#103

Post by forgetfreeman »

materielle wrote: post #81
jfengel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#104

Post by romanhn »

recursive wrote: post #42
graemep wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Sh…

> 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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#105

Post by recursive »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #95
recursive wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fra…

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 famili…

Thanks for the explanation.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#106

Post by ycombinete »

recursive wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#107

Post by adrian_b »

romanhn wrote: post #104
recursive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 l…

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 Frédéric 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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#108

Post by inglor_cz »

jfengel wrote: post #31
kens wrote: post #13

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 langua…

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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#109

Post by samastur »

recursive wrote: post #42
graemep wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Sh…

> 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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#110

Post by waldrews »

kens wrote: post #13

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 langua…

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.

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