Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems | Hacker News Reader

Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems

shakespeare.folger.edu

68 pointsmartialg63 comments

Note that many editions of Shakespeare modernize the language a bit. I don't know what Folger does (anyone know?) and I haven't found an authoritative source for the original, but Open Source Shakespeare is the best I've found so far:

https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/

Does anyone know an authoritative source for the 'original' text [0]? I suppose books in the Interet Archive might be a good place to look next.

[0] In some cases, the true original has been lost to time and the earliest text we have was published many years later.

A couple of years ago I read The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio, the story of how Henry Folger got obsessed with early editions of Shakespeare and created the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. He was a high ranking executive at Standard Oil and had the money to buy up a large number of copies of the First Folio, bringing them to America. An interesting story of obsession and, let's face it, greed coming out of the Gilded Age.

I also really appreciate Standard E-Books https://standardebooks.org. Their renditions of public domain works is better than most paid Kindle versions.

Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/65

Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:William_Shakespeare_(1...

Sure, but how many of them have 82 copies of the 1623 First Folio?

https://www.folger.edu/collection-materials

The texts on Folger’s site have a CC-BY-NC license, prohibiting commercial use. Wikisource seems to use CC-BY-SA, and the Gutenberg texts seem to be in the Public Domain as long as the name “Gutenberg” is removed from the text.

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/index.html

Does it included the notes and annotations found in the Folger print editions.

I recommend Folger editions if you want to read Shakespeare in print, they are inexpensive and has each facing page filled with definitions of obscure words and explanations.

I know this is Heathen Heresy but I never enjoyed Shakespeare. As part of my English studies I have read the following ones - Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale.

Average grades on them were between A+ to B's but dayamn! that olde timee englishee is hard to parse (even with the crib notes) and made me question the validity of them as an example of 'good English writing'

'Get Thee to a Nunnery!' Indeed.

And don't even get me started on Chaucer <shudder>.

Team John Webster with lashings of Molière FTW

Tartuffe & The Duchess of Malfi rank with the works of that upstart crow.

I know how you feel, but it's really not so bad. It's kind of like being used to c-style syntax and then going to some other convention.

To people who are interested, here are a few things that I figured out. A lot of the weird words are actually just contractions. They kind of make sense when you think about it though. So, 'twas is "it was", etc... sometimes these are used to convey the past too.

All the thy, thee, thou kind of stuff can be the next difficulty. If you pay attention though you realize that they all mean some version of "you", and which one is used depends on the meaning. I think it goes sort of like this: Thee is when "you" is the object of some verb, e.g. "He told thee". Thy is like "you" but possessive, e.g. "Mind thy business". And thou is like "you" when it's just the normal subject of a sentence, e.g. "thou are a saucy fellow".

Actually, I didn't get Shakespeare in school at all. Then one day I just picked it up as a joke and started reading it aloud to a friend... 5 min later I'm like, "But wait, like, so what exactly happened to the King? Don't you think it's a bit sus for his Ghost to be haunting the sentinels? Clearly they all see the ghost, so they're not making it up, meaning something sketchy has happened..."

Chaucer is practically in a different language. Middle English basically needs to be learned separately before you can be thrown into reading the Canterbury Tales in its original text. Any self respecting Chaucer course in a university literature program will begin with a week of just Middle English instruction.

It's always sad to me to hear of people reading Shakespeare as "literature". Shakespeare's not meant for reading. (Most plays, indeed, don't read very well.)

Unfortunately, it's also a bit hard to find a well-performed production (even in professional companies), but that's the way to experience Will's works.

I can't remember the last stage performance that didn't leave me wishing the director had paid attention to Hamlet's advice to the players. Even and especially the RSC.

I actually like the Elizabethan English in Shakespeare, but it's good to have a text with footnotes that explain some things. One thing we miss in modern times is a lot of Shakespeare's puns. The words he punned on have shifted in pronunciation such that the word play is no longer clear. For example, one play had a pun on raisin and reason, which were pronounced similarly in Shakespeare's day. Some are bawdy puns, such as hour vs. whore. Some groups are putting on productions of his plays in reconstructed "OP" (Original Pronunciation) and I hope to hear one some day.

Indeed. Hence the Nunnery reference I made. That one (being of school age at the time) made me chuckle

Reasons vs raisins caught my interest. I read somewhere that the accent of Shakespeare's time was somewhat closer to what the Irish accent is/was than it is to RP (Received Pronunciation) and I have often heard "reason" spoken as a homophone of "raisin". Indeed a colleague of mine used to say "there are reasons for everything and raisins for cake" when he heard someone using one or t'other. Shakespeare punning on reasons/raisins (in the Irish accent sense) is not all that amazing when one considers that the avon in Stratford on Avon is related to the word abhainn or river in Irish. Ofc, I could be completely wrong about this.

Of course, it is pretty uncommon to enjoy something when it is "required reading".

And about the "good English", come on! The Bard has done a huge amount of work to improve the English language itself, by introducing or popularizing an insane lot of words [1] and idioms [2]. How does that not classify as "good"?

[1] https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/words-shakespeare-i...

[2] https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-phrases...

Unsurprisingly if you force students to read the same crap for 200+ years some of it sticks. Is it because it's good or because we've subjected generations of students and future English authors to it?

The syntax makes it a foreign language to the modern ear, but eventually you acclimatise. Of course the naff bits are still naff. But once you have a taste for the poetry, nothing matches it. It's ended up being my supreme form of relaxation.

The dated language is only part of the problem.

The bigger issue in my opinion is that most of his plays are written like poems, intentionally using lyrical rather than natural language.

Consider the lines:

"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss"

The main barrier to understanding this isn't the word choice; most readers know what these words mean (expect maybe palmer); it's the way the sentences are constructed. Shakespeare's English contemporaries like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke are much easier to decipher, whereas many modern poets are similarly opaque.

It's called "elevated language." That used to be what people expected from plays. It's not a "problem" unless you expect everything to read like David Mamet.

The "problem" is the fact that the commenter, as well as many other readers, find Shakespeare's language difficult to parse and enjoy. Obviously this is subjective. My only point was that the difficulty is more attributable to style than vocabulary.

The lack of context make the quote hard to understand. Why is she talking about hands and why is she calling him a pilgrim? In context it makes much more sense. The verse is an answer to Romeos pick-up line.

The plays aren't written like poems, they are poems, like most plays of the era, and the language was also the literary language of the day. This is the way plays were written in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It shouldn't be heresy. I think that I could show you what I enjoy about Shakespeare, but there's no reason you have to, any more than any other kind of genre.

I really hate the way we teach Shakespeare. You shouldn't be parsing it at all. That's incredibly hard, and not the point. You should be watching the plays, preferably in a good film version with highly skilled actors. You'll be able to follow the story better for being able to see it and to pick up what they mean from context.

You'll get a chance to hear why people think it's good writing: it just sounds good, the way a song just sounds good. Only then are you in a position to look at the words on a page, and begin to study what makes them sound so good. And yeah, you should be applying the exact same skills to some modern pop songs (including rap songs, which can have some of the same level of creative exuberance).

The stories are really the last of it. I despise the way the entire thing is treated as an exercise in decryption of what are over-long, confusing, and frankly mediocre stories. The language is great, but it's more important that you use that to see how language works. If it also turns out that you enjoy this particular story-teller, fantastic -- but it's asinine that they treat it as if you must enjoy it just because they do.

Chaucer would be worth studying what it shows about language evolution, another advanced skill. It has the advantage that you can do so in reading a very funny and bawdy story, which is at least enjoyable, but not if they're going to shy away from the fucking. There is absolutely no reason to read it if you can't use the word "fucking" in class.

So speaking as a Shakesperean who has done every single Shakespeare play, you have not committed heresy. Heresy was done to you by screwing up these plays. I am so sorry and angry that they did that, because it could have been so worthwhile.

One of my own favorites is "Zounds!" (which has passed into kitschy villain-speak):

It meant "by His wounds" and even hearing that you still might not get it. It was a mild form of blasphemy.

"His" of course was Jesus, and "His wounds" were the wounds of crucifixion. So using that as an expression was sorta like cursing, given that various forms of Christianity were practiced by nearly everyone in England.

"Gadzooks" is similarly a corruption of "God's hooks", referring to the nails on the cross. "(Cor) blimey" = "God blind me", "strewth" = "God's truth", and so on. Lots of garbled/minced profanities of this nature.

I'd never heard that about Gadzooks.

It was probably beyond the pale to say "Jesus Christ!" back then like we do now.

Hm. I don't really enjoy reading plays. Watching live performances (or films) I do enjoy. And he certainly had an impact on the English language as demonstrated by Kae (née Kate) Tempest: "My Shakespeare":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i_auc2Z67OM

Ed: see also the "original pronunciation" movement - eg: https://youtu.be/qYiYd9RcK5M

Although if you've studied him at college level, hopefully you already know that Shakespeare can rhyme - despite modern pronunciation.

Chaucer is hilariously, laugh out loud funny even after all these centuries.

I’ve read almost no Shakespeare, but I have seen several of his plays performed and I liked all of them. I suspect just as some others do that reading a screenplay isn’t nearly as interesting as setting it performed.

Why speculate - just give it a try. It will take only a minute to begin.

I’m not speculating, I have read some Shakespeare.

Lovely, but kind of an overwrought interface for what can be found in other places also completely and freely.

Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School.

Shakespeare wrote plays. They were meant to be heard and seen. Filled with drama and comedy (lots of poop and sex jokes). Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous.

The plays themselves had a runtime of approximately only 2.5 - 3 hours. No need to stretch out Romeo and Juliet for weeks reading through passage by painful passage. Let them watch the movie version and then discuss certain parts or re-enact it themselves. Shakespeare was entertainment. And we now treat him like some kind of biblical text. It’s crazy!

edit: and to reinforce that last point, Shakespeare was put his plays in the Globe theater, across the River Thames, which at the time was not considered London proper. He was also not a court playwright and considered at best, midbrow. The “high art” playwright of the time who did play in London proper was Ben Johnson.

There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity so he could write freely away from the stuffy conventions of high society and the court. Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.”

Is there any evidence that reading Shakespeare at school is "kill[ing] the love of literature in children"?

I don't know, I really enjoyed reading Shakespeare as a kid at school. It stayed with me too. I actually can't remember the other books we read, except Lord of the Flies.

It stayed with me as well. I loved reading Shakespeare in school. I think reading Shakespeare can instill a love of language in a young kid.

I loved reading Shakespeare in school too, even as an ESL student. Reading Early Modern English was really fun, and perhaps what made me love the language.

My school had 'As You Like It' and Animal Farm in its curriculum. I must say, Shakespeare was a lot of fun to read, especially finding so many hidden puns in simple looking passages.

My teacher also showed us a movie adaptation at the end, and watching it as a drama while you understood the nuances of their dialogues actually enhanced the experience.

I have somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, plays are mostly meant to be seen performed. On the other hand, watching even a relatively accessible play like As You It cold as a high school student is probably a bit toss in the pool's deep end. It's sort of easy to tune out the unfamiliar language at that point.

One option is to use some commentary on a play rather than the whole thing--e.g. Garber's book.

My favorite memory of high school was Sophomore year - reading Othello in class - seeing how terribly we acted it out - and then watching the same scene from the movie.

We wouldn't have appreciated the movie and the story so much if we didn't sort of take part in it.

It's like when you go to a dinner party and you have to help cook a little - it makes the meal taste better knowing you had some part in it.

You had me for a sentence. Shakespeare is the very essence of "public domain."

But then you lost me at the 2nd sentence.

Who TF cares what "high art" was then? Or who the groundlings at the Globe were? They apparently had better taste than the people at court. Not the first time.

In the early days of rock 'n' roll or blues or rap or hip-hop or jazz (etc.) only lower-status people were into it.

And your "theory" about Ben Jonson (not "Johnson") has been debated (and debunked) for literally centuries, along with several other possibilities. Are you just now discovering it?

People in every culture of the world always have and continue to love Shakespeare's plays. At the same time, there are children who can't be torn away from their Harry Potter books. If they read at all.

Think you're missing the point about the "high art" comment, which is just that we should introduce people to shakespeare in the way it was intended - as entertaining theater, not boring undecipherable books.

I can vouch for this, I hated reading Shakespeare and just sparknotes'd everything. Maybe I would've loved it if I had watched a funny play instead.

If he just left it at that, I wouldn't have any objection.

Although if I'm in Ashland and going to see a Shakespeare play, I'll usually read it first. It helps to know what they're talking about. Some characters have three different names in the same play, for example.

> Like, Shakespeare was not high art. We must stop treating him that way and kill the love of literature in children by forcing them dryly read “To be or not to be.”

Is that not the same thing?

SparkNotes has a "translated" version of each play [0] that is more accessible for the modern reader. Yes, purists will tell you that you're missing out on Shakespeare's flowery and playful use of language but you also spend a much smaller fraction of the time parsing through the text than you otherwise would. Also, the original text is right next to the translated version so you can just look over if you want to compare.

[0] https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/ac...

Or... we could have kids read Shakespeare in School so they have a fighting chance of understanding the text, experience seminal works of literature in the English language and learn the structure of modern drama.

If your argument is "you should also experience Shakespeare plays as plays," then I'm with you. But if your argument is "It was difficult to read Shakespeare and I liked watching the movies," then you might have completely missed the point of studying literature.

> then you might have completely missed the point of studying literature.

Judging by the amount the kids actually learn, doing things the right way is an equal waste of time to just watching the plays on VHS.

> learn the structure of modern drama

IMO, far too few English teachers focus on this aspect of the Bard's plays. Instead, it's nonsense about iambic pentameter or treating R&J as romance instead of farce, black comedy, or tragedy that turns students into STEMlords.

Regarding the genre of R&J, the confusion is because the genre names have changed meaning over time. "Romance" back then is closer to what we would call "adventure" today. Comedy basically means the characters get married in the end, while tragedy means they lose everything and die. What often confuses readers today is that Shakespeare tragedies can be very funny.

"Tragedy is when I get hurt. Comedy is when you get hurt."

Shakespeare is pop-culture. Is understanding old pop-culture important? I think it is. Opera and epic poems work the same way.

> Imagine if we forced children to experience Star Wars as a screenplay, read aloud in class? It’s ridiculous.

Wait, is that ridiculous? I honestly think it's beneficial to let young students get a better sense of how all the media they consume is actually created. Seeing how a screen play differs from a film, discussing how subtle changes in reading a line might influence the interpretation of a scene, understanding the nature of improvisation and just knowing where movies come from sounds like it would be both very interesting and very educational.

The equivalent for video games would be understanding how a PC works and walking through some of the actual code that goes into making a game, maybe building a simple mod. I imagine that would also be a useful class and enjoyed by quite a few HS students.

I agree there's nothing ridiculous about reading lines from Star Wars in class. I never had that in class but I remember English classes where we'd read parts of the script of other TV shows (an episode of Party of Five, I seem to recall) and I know some Star Trek episodes were used in that way even decades ago.

When I was in my senior year at university (1978) I took a class in dramatic structure, and one of my classmates had somehow gotten hold of a copy of the Star Wars (what we now call A New Hope) shooting script. The instructor (head of the drama department) immediately latched onto it as an example of a screenplay, while all the other reading was plays. George Lucas may not be a great writer, but the Hero's Journey structure of the story made a great study for the class.

"Also hot take: we need to stop making kids read Shakespeare in School."

I strongly disagree, though I entirely agree that the plays were meant to be seen, not read. Despite this, they happen to be some of the most profound writings in human history, so only watching and not reading would miss much of high value.

For me, struggling with the language of Shakespeare was one of my childhood joys. I grew up in a very rural state with little guidance and a poor local school system. But I like challenges, so this worked for me.

It worked so well, that I developed a life-long passion for wordplay, etymology, theater, and poetry. Eventually, I graduated at the top of my class at an ivy league school, with a concentration in comparative literature (focusing on Joyce and Nietzsche). I still read Shakespeare almost daily, and he inspired me to write 153 of my own (bad!) sonnets. I am grateful for the time I spent struggling with Shakespeare's language.

Please don't stop making kids read Shakespeare! From my very biased perspective, this is one of the worst things we could do.

I would be really surprised if there has been any Shakespeare curriculum in the past 30 years (at minimum) that was solely based on reading the text of the plays without any performance elements. Certainly my experience was that we watched film adaptations, went and saw a stage performance, etc. as well as reading scenes aloud in class.

>There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity . . . Shakespeare was not high art.

You need to pick one. The reason there are 300 "Shakespeare was actually person X" conspiracy theories is because people throughout history were horrified with the idea a common person could make such high art.

> There is even a theory that Shakespeare was Ben Johnson’s secret identity

Those theories are bullshit. Shakespeare was Shakespeare.

Otherwise I agree with you. Shakespeares plays was meant to be performed by actors on stage.

But for the intendend theatre audience, the language would be much easier to understand than it is for us today. Reading it with annotations might help us understand more of the meaning.

Shakespeare's company was literally called "The Kings Men" because they had the patronage of the king.

Did 10,000 monkeys finally do this thing?

they didn't because they won't because they can't. it has been statistically proven impossible.

But did they use an infinite number of monkeys?

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