71–80 of 169 posts
I know it’s not entirely the language that we speak but it’s still intuitively understandable. Sometimes maybe you have to let it work on you a bit and sometimes it’s Shakespeare’s brilliance in his word playing / metaphor, and other times it’s just a different way of expressing than we use today.
Some strange words and phrases are normally footnotes to add to the enjoyment heh :)
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Yes I find most people who find Shakespeare incomprehensible suddenly find it clear and simple once they read it aloud
Another fun trick: Shakespeare rhymes much better if you read it aloud in your broadest "talk like a pirate" accent.
(When I did it, we replaced all of the pirate's dialogue with "arr".)
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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 b…
> It's also the constant references to Greek and Roman mythology, via Ovid that's a perfect reason to NOT "update" it: the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. You can't make it seem like the First World in the 21st Century. You just have to go there.
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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 b…
>That mythology is no longer part of mainstream culture. Tell that to Percy Jackson, Disney's Hercules, Hades, God of War, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Smite, Lore Olympus, Disney Descendants, Immortals, Blood of Zeus, Kaos, numerous Marvel and DC characters and countless other media that still incorporate it.
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…
ShakespeaRe-Told ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShakespeaRe-Told ) at the very least for Sally Wainwright's modern take on The Taming of the Shrew.
Slings & Arrows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slings_%26_Arrows) for darkly comic irreverance and a couple of piano opening numbers in the actors bar.
So many examples, these are just two.
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> It's also the constant references to Greek and Roman mythology, via Ovid that's a perfect reason to NOT "update" it: the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. You can't make it seem like the First World in the 21st Century. You just have to go there.
Updating it wouldn't eliminate the original. It would simply give many people an accessible introduction to the work, and perhaps inspire them to explore the original. I really don't understand the resistance to providing people with that introduction.
[1] https://www.abebooks.com/docs/community/featured/out-of-prin...
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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...
Fewer letters.
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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…
> But here's a question: how many more centuries until we will have to translate? It’s not clear that we ever will have to. Chaucer wrote a mere 200 years before Shakespeare, and would have been incomprehensible in the latter’s time. The widespread development of printing put a huge brake on the evolution of language. Arguably, the Internet is having an even stronger influence, turning English into a global lingua fr…
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…
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 James Bible, which is still widely read, without translation.
And this is wrong too; the King James Bible is widely read with the benefit of translation.
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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…
I found a version of the Canterbury Tales online that footnoted the lines. No one is going to pretend that Chaucer is comprehensible to modern speakers. But it was very charming to see that it wasn't necessary to indicate which words the footnotes for a line applied to. Enough of the line is obvious that it's clear what difficulty the footnote is helping you with as it explains the meaning of a word.
That wouldn't work in a more foreign text.