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Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

elizabethandrama.org

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Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#111

Post by kwhitefoot »

magarnicle wrote: post #94
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…

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 "qu…

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_and_the_Dead_(1987_f...

If you are moderately well read most such words should not pose more than momentary difficulties.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#112

Post by IndySun »

dwighttk wrote: post #2

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

>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).

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#113

Post by hnfong »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #103
materielle wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

  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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#115

Post by dbspin »

AlbertCory wrote: post #56
commodoreboxer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"reductive" isn't an insult. And note the "just" in the parent post. It is an adaptation, but it is more than just that.

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...

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#116

Post by joshstrange »

hnfong wrote: post #113
forgetfreeman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, d…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#117

Post by quenlinlom »

hnfong wrote: post #113
forgetfreeman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, d…

[dead]

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#118

Post by joshstrange »

hprotagonist wrote: post #4

"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 concern…

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

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#119

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#120

Post by HelloNurse »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #79
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…

> 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 Ja…

Shakespeare has a few perplexing words and some apparently contorted phrase constructions that become clearer if read aloud. Nothing compared to actual difficulties.
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