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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

#91

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jncfhnb wrote: post #64
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…

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.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#92

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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...

reductive is a form of simplification, but a specific form, one in which what is discussed has been reduced to fewer (probably just one) aspect, simplification is not necessary reductive as you can have multiple aspects maintained but each of those aspects made less complex.

This, at any rate, is my usage.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#93

Post by recursive »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #89
recursive wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

> continuing anyway

This is a concept that gives me hope. Hope that I could conceivably read it if I needed to. In all practical likelihood, I probably just won't because that type of slog does not sound enjoyable to me. But thanks for the idea anyway. Reading most of the rest of these comments about how easy it is give me a very you're-holding-the-iphone-wrong sensation.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#94

Post by magarnicle »

recursive wrote: post #42
graemep wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 "quick", but Shakespeare uses to mean "held tight". Speaking of "quick", he would use that to mean "alive".

If you really think about each line you might be able to work it out without notes, but that doesn't make it very easy to read.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#95

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

well Afric here gives a good overview of the whole mutiny thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982155 but when reading it I read immediately like so:

The Montagues and Capulets have a long standing feud, an ancient grudge, the mutiny in this case is that the feud has been cold for some time but is now turning hot again and mutiny in our meaning of it pertains because to indulge in violent feuds between families is mutinous against the public order - in other words to have a feud with murders and public fighting you are definitely rebelling against the social authority that decrees this kind of thing should not happen.

The civil blood is not hot and boiling over because it is "civil" as in civilized, but also there is civil blood - the blood of the civilized civillians who are not members of your little feud that will always get hurt when there is violence on the scale of two large and rich households having a feud which means you get the civil blood (of the civillians) on your civil (civilized) hands.

I get that you don't get it, but this is one of those weird things for me - like when you try to explain how some relatively simple bit of code works to a non-developer and they act like you're a madman.

on edit: changed designer to non-developer

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#96

Post by paulmd »

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…

Watch the 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet with Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Absurdly over the top and campy and fun, which I really think shakespeare would have loved. He was a "butts in seats" kinda guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beV56hp4T3w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEzskNtFnIY

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#97

Post by vonnik »

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…

This exists:

https://playonshakespeare.org/

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#98

Post by eszed »

jfengel wrote: post #35
commodoreboxer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shakespeare is best appreciated in the original pronunciation (OP). I'm a little disappointed that OP Shakespeare continues to be a little niche, given that it's necessary for many of the rhymes and puns. Personally, I think it just sounds better than received pronunciation (RP). I think that's one of the strongest arguments against modernizing the language. Shakespeare has a flow, and much verse, that is lost in any…

Shakespeare definitely doesn't need to be done in RP. It's no closer to Elizabethan English than American is. I've seen OP performances. They don't especially move me, but I think it's because so much effort is spent on the accent. The audience does adjust to it rather quickly, but it still requires a lot of heavy lifting to make any Shakespeare play accessible to modern sensibilities. (Pacing, culture, references, e…

I agree with everything you say.

Are you North American? I found OP largely to be a curiosity to American performers and audiences, but a revelation and a revolution to people in the UK who have only ever associated Shakespeare with RP. At least, that's how it was over a decade ago when I first performed in OP there.

I remember once being in a workshop with a Scottish actor who did a creditable job at a speech from Maccers in his drama-school (ie, RP) voice, was much better in OP, and then just about broke down (out of character, for real) when asked to repeat it in his own native Edinburgh dialect. It was - get this - the first time ever in his life that he'd spoken Shakespeare in anything other than RP. It (has?) had such a strong, elitist grip on Shakespe-ah, that OP was received very differently (I was on the receiving end of some of the hostile reactions, too!) in the UK.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#99

Post by _ZeD_ »

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…

Dude... every Italian kid read the divina commedia.

Dante wrote it in 1321. In poetry.

Oh, and he basically "invented" the Italian language.

that is difficult to read now.

Re: Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

#100

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #95
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…

well Afric here gives a good overview of the whole mutiny thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982155 but when reading it I read immediately like so: The Montagues and Capulets have a long standing feud, an ancient grudge, the mutiny in this case is that the feud has been cold for some time but is now turning hot again and mutiny in our meaning of it pertains because to indulge in violent feuds between famili…

I'll note here that as with much of Shakespeare, there are really more edges connecting to the node civil here than the two ones I point out, which I guess is part of the enjoyment of the reading for me.
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