Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
elizabethandrama.org
Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
1–10 of 169 posts
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#2I think it’s already been hugged to death and no one has even started talking about it
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#3Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#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 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.
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#5Cool 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.
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#6"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…
[deleted]
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#7Cool 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 we…
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.
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#8Link 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.
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#9Cool 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 we…
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.
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.
Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read
#10https://web.archive.org/web/20240519050125/http://elizabetha...
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.