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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

#81

Post by materielle »

jfengel wrote: post #31
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. 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…

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. It isn’t modern in any normative sense. It’s just a linguistic classification, not to be taken literally in casual parlance.

Look, I have a degree in English literature. I’ve read the canon. I’ve read all the major works of Shakespeare. I’ve seen many of the plays live.

It’s difficult to read. Because he’s writing in a language that we don’t speak.

If I see a play live, I have to read it beforehand in order to refresh my memory. If I haven’t read it recently, I have no clue what the actors are saying.

John Mcwhorter, a linguist Phd and a lover of Shakespeare agrees with me.

The truth is that understanding Shakespeare is hard because he doesn’t write in anything that would be considered English.

Perhaps English literature majors should still be forced to learn the original plays.

But for high school students in Ohio, can we please just translate the plays into something they understand? Can we give up the bit and stop pretending like these 16 year olds have the slightest clue what on earth is happening in those plays?

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#82

Post by Affric »

retrac wrote: post #41
AlbertCory wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Point of information: we don’t have a Shakespeare manuscript. We have folios and quartos.

Beyond that I find the example with the long s perfectly readable.

Agree that pointing out the dirty jokes ruins them.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#83

Post by Affric »

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...

“Simplistic” isn’t too bad but “oversimplified” is a terrible word.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#84

Post by WolfeReader »

materielle wrote: post #81
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…

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.…

"The truth is that understanding Shakespeare is hard because he doesn’t write in anything that would be considered English."

I just want to record for posterity that you wrote and published this sentence. It's not just factually incorrect; it actually boggles the mind that someone would think it, write it, and post it in public.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#85

Post by jacobolus »

materielle wrote: post #81
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…

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.…

> easier to read than to watch live.

Obviously there are some benefits to reading like being able to skip around, pause, take notes, look stuff up, sit wherever you feel most comfortable, etc. But in general I'd say this is only true for people with a ton of experience reading old plays. For everyone else, good acting is tremendously helpful at helping the audience to follow the characters' actions, relationships, and intentions.

> language that we don’t speak

It really not that far off, and doesn't take that much practice to get into. It's similar to trying to watch a TV show set somewhere with a strong accent you aren't familiar with (e.g. the Baltimore accents in The Wire). It starts out challenging but human brains are amazing language interpreting machines.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#86

Post by Affric »

recursive wrote: post #60
karaterobot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McWhorter's a fun, cantankerous guy, always ready with a hot take. This one is wrong. We do have access to Shakespeare! Even ignoring productions, which are immediately understandable, a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! They may have to look up some of the words, but that's exactly what people have…

> a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! This just is not my experience. Today, I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand the first sentence of "Romeo and Juliet". When I get to "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny," I cannot reconcile any dictionary definition of "mutiny" with anything this fra…

> 1. 1567–1667† Discord, contention, tumult; a state of discord; a dispute, quarrel. Frequently in in (a) mutiny, at (a) mutiny. Obsolete.[1]

Mutiny in this case means as defined above. An old grudge is boiling over. Note that it is highly unlikely for the grudge to literally be ancient how I would think of that word today.

“Civil blood” Is a double meaning a reference to the prestige of the families and brings into contrast their incivility in their vendetta. Part of the magic of communication is deliberate double meaning. It is not a well defined API.

As someone with a disability who teaches computer science to students with disabilities (and without), your problems reading Shakespeare do not sound like those of people that come to mind when I read the term “regular person”.

If one is going to attempt to parse every word in the play and believes that it is the only way to follow the plot then one is going to have a bad time. If you could get to the Queen Mab speech reading that way then you’d probably melt at that point.

My suggested way forward is to not attempt to think definitionally about words that are used in a manner you cannot understand. When you arrive at a word like mutiny think that Shakespeare isn’t talking about a literal mutiny (though he might be) but something that is like a mutiny. What are mutinies like, not in cause but in deed. When Shakespeare starts talking about “atomies” he has no knowledge or Bohr or QM, but we know that atoms are really small. When Mercutio mentions Crickets bone… well, Crickets don’t have bones but if they did they would be small.

Shakespeare’s scribes weren’t writing an API for you to extract the plot out of. It’s a lot fuzzier than that.

[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/mutiny_n?tab=meaning_and_use

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#87

Post by aragonite »

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…

> "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 language they speak."

This reminds me of a popular anecdote in philosophy, that German students grapping with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason often prefer Norman Kemp Smith's English translation over trying to deciper Kant's 18th-century German :)

That said, I'd argue that literary work (especially literary work with such linguistic significance) should be handled differently than theoretical/expository work. What modern students really need are not so much translations [1] as meticulously annotated editions where the annotations are (so to speak) written by linguists rather than literature professors (i.e. the focus should be on bridging the language gap & providing linguistic context, not on literary interpretation or tediously over-analyzing literary symbolism)

[1] which would be as exciting to read compared to the original as a remake of Gone with the Wind in the 21st century - the plot is there, but the magic is lost.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#88

Post by recursive »

Affric wrote: post #86
recursive wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! This just is not my experience. Today, I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand the first sentence of "Romeo and Juliet". When I get to "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny," I cannot reconcile any dictionary definition of "mutiny" with anything this fra…

> 1. 1567–1667† Discord, contention, tumult; a state of discord; a dispute, quarrel. Frequently in in (a) mutiny, at (a) mutiny. Obsolete.[1] Mutiny in this case means as defined above. An old grudge is boiling over. Note that it is highly unlikely for the grudge to literally be ancient how I would think of that word today. “Civil blood” Is a double meaning a reference to the prestige of the families and brings into…

> Part of the magic of communication is deliberate double meaning. It is not a well defined API.

In order to appreciate a double meaning, I'd have to have enough basis of understanding to even be able to recognize it.

> As someone with a disability who teaches computer science to students with disabilities (and without), your problems reading Shakespeare do not sound like those of people that come to mind when I read the term “regular person”.

I don't have any particular diagnosis, but I wouldn't be surprised if I could get one. In any case, I'm just out here operating in regular society. I don't seem to have any particular problems communicating in English anyway, as far as I can tell.

> If one is going to attempt to parse every word in the play and believes that it is the only way to follow the plot then one is going to have a bad time.

I don't believe it is the only way. Most written material, like your post here, I'm able to digest chunks at a time. I just don't understand any of the chunks in Shakespeare.

> If you could get to the Queen Mab speech reading that way then you’d probably melt at that point.

I can read words, but at no point do I ever achieve comprehension in this type of material. If Queen Mab's speech consists of words, I wouldn't even notice a difference.

> When you arrive at a word like mutiny think that Shakespeare isn’t talking about a literal mutiny (though he might be) but something that is like a mutiny.

I don't think I can tell the difference between over-thinking it, and under-thinking it.

My dictionary didn't have that definition in it. My best guess about what was meant was that the two houses each had internal struggles, which is more consistent with the only definitions of "mutiny" I've ever known. Also, it seems to be more consistent with taking a break from the feud.

But now "I'm parsing every word again". When I encounter difficult material, I just don't know any other way to approach it.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#89

Post by Yodel0914 »

recursive wrote: post #67
karaterobot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to parse every word in sequence, or just understand the meaning in context? The latter is much easier.

I'd settle for either one. In order to have have a context at all, one must have some critical mass of understanding. The density of parts I can understand is never enough to achieve that. My experience is that any portion of Shakespeare that I attempt to read goes the same way. If I dig farther into "mutiny", there's no way to know if I'm eventually going to produce a "context" or whether I'm on a fool's errand. In…

> What I'm trying to tell you is that it's not easy for everyone.

I think that's undeniably correct.

> There is no amount of patience that I could apply to this pursuit that would yield success.

I think that, however, is very likely incorrect. IMO, you need to develop patience with not understanding, and continuing anyway. Just read the play, see what you pick up, then read it again. Treat it like poetry and don't worry too much about understanding every word; see if you can get the feel. I found that Milton's Paradise Lost took me 3 or 4 false starts over a decade before I managed to get into the flow enough to read the whole thing. There's still probably a lot I missed, but it was thoroughly enjoyable.

Sometimes it's handy have a study guide, though, especially to understand some of the wordplay:

Hamlet[To Ophelia] > Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia > No, my lord!

Hamlet > I mean, my head upon your lap.

Ophelia > Ay, my lord.

Hamlet > Do you think I meant country matters?

I read this in high school and was thinking... what the hell are "country matters"? The footnote in the study guide quite succinctly pointed out:

> The emphasis is on the first syllable

Needless to say this became an highly used in-joke amongst my friends.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#90

Post by bryanrasmussen »

materielle wrote: post #81
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…

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 guess I started reading him at 16 at which point I had already quite a long and varied reading life.

I suppose advanced High School English classes could have the original Shakespeare and the non-advanced the modernized, but I think it's doing a disservice to those kids in Ohio who would understand to give them what I would at that age have referred to as the dumbed down versions, and which at this age I still have some tendency to think of as being of lesser quality.

>If I see a play live, I have to read it beforehand in order to refresh my memory. If I haven’t read it recently, I have no clue what the actors are saying.

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.

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