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

41–50 of 169 posts

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#41

Post by retrac »

AlbertCory wrote: post #20
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…

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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#42

Post by recursive »

graemep wrote: post #23
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 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 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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#43

Post by pavel_lishin »

AlbertCory wrote: post #20
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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#44

Post by pavel_lishin »

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…

Not much to add, but my experience mirrors yours.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#45

Post by jccooper »

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'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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#46

Post by scientator »

AlbertCory wrote: post #20
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…

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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#47

Post by jfengel »

ipnon wrote: post #36
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…

Yes I find most people who find Shakespeare incomprehensible suddenly find it clear and simple once they read it aloud

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#48

Post by comex »

lordleft wrote: post #17
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 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.

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#49

Post by recursive »

olddustytrail wrote: post #34
recursive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Shake…

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! ;)

> 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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#50

Post by ahazred8ta »

jfengel wrote: post #47
ipnon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I find most people who find Shakespeare incomprehensible suddenly find it clear and simple once they read it aloud

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 i…

We never figured Roddy McDowall for a fairy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Tempest_Hallmark_Ha...
Post reply on HN