Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

elizabethandrama.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 169 posts

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#131

Post by jfengel »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #91
jncfhnb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wherefore petards are pants and the rub is a catch

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.

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#132

Post by jfengel »

inglor_cz wrote: post #108
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…

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 hum…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#133

Post by GolfPopper »

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#134

Post by mbg721 »

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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#135

Post by recursive »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #111
magarnicle wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I'm not moderately well read.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#136

Post by recursive »

graemep wrote: post #127
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 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 mi…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#137

Post by dwighttk »

IndySun wrote: post #112
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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#138

Post by recursive »

at_a_remove wrote: post #102
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…

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

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#139

Post by saghm »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #90
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.…

>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 gue…

> 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

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#140

Post by saghm »

goosedragons wrote: post #126
lieks wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

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…

"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.
Post reply on HN