Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read | Hacker News Reader

Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

elizabethandrama.org

104 pointslordleft162 comments

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 language they speak."

"'But translated Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare!' one might object. To which the answer is, to an extent, yes. However, we would never complain a translation of Beowulf 'isn’t Beowulf'—of course it isn’t, in the strict sense, but we know that without translation, we would not have access to Beowulf at all."

His full discussion is here, and is worth reading: https://www.americantheatre.org/2010/01/01/its-time-to-trans...

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 doesn't exist in Anglophone cultures.

But Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read. It was meant to be performed, and a native speaker watching a good performance has no need of translation. The emotions and flow of the story are clear. They may not understand each and every word, but that's often true of even the latest movies. (The dialogue is often mixed in a way that makes it hard to understand -- by the director's choice.)

I regularly perform Shakespeare for audiences who have never seen it before, and I never translate a word of it. I generally edit it to make it move more briskly than Elizabethan audiences wanted, but the only time I'll change a word is to make the pronouns match the actors I cast (and not even always then).

Shakespeare's stories are rarely worth preserving for their own sake. The stories themselves are dated -- not the words, but the culture. There's no "translation" that will make Claudio not an asshole for the way he treats Hero, or make Hero not look pitiful for taking him back.

Shakespeare's plays in modern words are always flat, dull, and penitential. If you're going to modernize the language, modernize the whole thing -- go see the delightful "Ten Things I Hate About You" or the magical "West Side Story".

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?

> 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.

>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.

> 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

If actors can't even be expected to perform it right, why would we expect students to be able to read it right? This sounds like even more of an argument to translate it for modern audiences

>This sounds like even more of an argument to translate it for modern audiences

when speech is uttered in an unnatural rhythm it is harder to understand what is being said then when reading the same text at one's leisure, it is not quite the argument you imagine.

The point is that modern actors struggling to deliver the correct rhythm is a pretty good sign that the language is hard to parse for a modern person, and that will affect the ability of students to be able to read and understand it.

Well, there are students who are able to read and understand it, and my experience is that the students who can do these things get offended when you dumb things down for them.

I suppose these are incompatible viewpoints of the point of education.

My viewpoint is that the system should help students get to the point where they understand the more complicated Shakespearean texts and not offend the students who already handle those texts for what I am loathe to describe as the "benefit" of the students that don't.

I have to ask a question - what do you see as the benefits of teaching Shakespeare as literature?

I see the following: learning classics of the English Language and why they are classics, learning foundational parts of the English language that will often be referred to by other authors.

The first benefit seems to be removed by not teaching the original text - Shakespearean plots are seldom the reason one thinks the plays are so impressive, Shakespearean language is. Remove the language you remove a benefit for the student, albeit giving them another benefit, allowing them to pass this stupid English class with less work.

I can understand the urge to have a simpler version of stories for helping those who are not yet advanced enough to read the original, when I was 8 I had some simplified versions of Mark Twain and Dickens to read that I am grateful for, but on the other hand High School is pretty close to the point where students might never get the benefits of Shakespeare conveyed to them by a teacher who hopefully is adequate to convey those benefits (I have to admit I am not especially optimistic about these teachers existing, based on the Utah high schools I attended, but such is the American educational system)

"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.

My kids never had any problem with Shakespeare. I have been to several of his plays in the last few years with my daughter who has just turned 16 and she had no problem - and she did not seem to have any problem much younger than that. At one performance there was a school group including early teen, maybe pre teen kids, sitting in front of us who were clearly enjoying the play (among other things they were discussing it, and had to be told to be quiet by their teacher in the interval).

> But for high school students in Ohio

Maybe they need to improve their English comprehension closer to what we seem to have here in Warwickshire.

To be fair, some kids do find it difficult - but you learn most by tackling difficult stuff, not by doing only what is easy.

Rubbish. Comprehending this material has been well within the capabilities of 16 year olds for as long as the material has been taught. For your premise to hold true there would need to have been a significant diminishment in children's linguistic and reading skills which would no doubt be reflected in all manner of standardized testing across the cohort. If someone's struggling with the material it seems more likely that either it's being taught poorly or they simply have no interest in engaging with it. Curb your enthusiasm for revisionism, not everything should be easy.

  Markest thou well, good sir, thy words are naught
  But foolish prattle. Forsooth, for many a year,
  The younglings of sixteen winters have grasped
  This very material with ease and little fear.

  If thy premise held water, then, by the stars,
  A woeful decline in linguistic arts
  Would manifest itself in tests of old,
  A downward trend that would not be untold.

  But nay, 'tis not the youth that falter here,
  But rather thou, dear teacher, dost impart
  A lesson poorly taught, or else the pupil's heart
  Doth not incline to learn, and doth not start.

  Curb, then, thy zeal for revision's sway,
  Not every task should be a trivial play.
  Some things, by rights, should challenge and vex,
  Lest wisdom's virtues be but empty text.

If ever I was ok with an AI generated comment on HN this is it.

I’m firmly in the “the cognitive load to read/understand Shakespeare far outweighs leaving it in the ‘original’ form”-camp and this further confirms my view point.

I love reading, I always have, but I never loved reading Shakespeare and probably never will. I maintain that teachers do their students a massive disservice by shoving dry or hard to understand books down their pupil’s throats in the name of “it’s what we’ve always done” instead of something that students might actually enjoy AND learn from. Maybe one day they will enjoy “the classics” but I think you turn more children off of reading as whole with way it’s taught currently.

And yes, I’m including books like To Kill a Mockingbird and most “required reading”. Maybe I’m dumb (I don’t think I am, my career and what I’ve accomplished says I’m not) but it wasn’t until years after reading it that actually understood it. I still have an incredibly negative reaction to that book, not because of the contents, but because of how it was forced on me. English classes suck the life out of every book they touch. In fact, I dislike just about every book I was forced to read in my English classes but I regularly read more than my peers. I was lucky that my mom and grandmother instilled a love of reading in me, school did its best to beat that out of me.

I didn't expect so many eager responses to my AI generated copy-pasta!

Oddly on topic, I've recently experimented with shoving classics into an LLM to "modernize" the language and see what comes out on the other side. ( https://github.com/hnfong/gutchopper/ )

And I don't know whether the results should be considered good or not:

  It's a fact: when a single guy with a fat bank account moves into a new neighborhood, he's basically a prize to be won by one of the local girls.

(Pride and Prejudice, Butchered Version)

It's telling that AI generated mediocrity in lieu of an actual thoughtful response would be cheerlead by the same crowd that suddenly can't read Shakespeare despite it being an uncontroversial curriculum topic for what, a dozen generations or so? Eh, water finds it's level I suppose.

...huh. As a non-native speaker, that was... easy to read? Where did I learn this vocabulary again? I haven't read Shakespeare's works yet (though they are on my reading list).

What makes it hard to read for some people and not others (as with any translation problem) is unfamiliarity.

It's easier to learn just japanese honorifics and then read a partial translation than to learn all of japanese and read the original. But a full translation loses that dimension of meaning.

But it's not as difficult to learn some Early Modern English vocabulary, and this way you can avoid losing any meaning. I hear there are a lot of puns that wouldn't work with modern vocabulary.

If it wasn't required reading in English-speaking countries, "translating" it probably wouldn't be even in consideration.

That's not actually Shakespeare. Enough word meanings have shifted and other words that were once common becoming rare that it makes it much harder to read. A lot of context has been lost too because we're not 16th century English people. It's particularly bad in the "comedies". If every joke has to be pointed out and explained is it really a joke still?

Like here's some real random Hamlet:

"My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac’d, No hat upon his head, his stockings foul’d, Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosed out of hell To speak of horrors, he comes before me."

What exactly is down-gyved? Purport as noun here is weird for contemporary speakers even if they have an idea of the meaning and a lot of the clothing terms like doublet and ungartered are not spectacularly common these days.

"Down-gyved" sounds more like it's gibberish from the Jabberwocky than actual English, and that's honestly true of a lot of Shakespeare nowadays.

"Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle" -- seems pretty clear that it means something to the effect that his unfastened stockings have fallen down to his ankles, no? And the context seems clear, that Hamlet's clothes are in disarray, as is his emotional-state.

> "Ungart’red, and down-gyved to his ankle" -- seems pretty clear that it means something to the effect that his unfastened stockings have fallen down to his ankles, no?

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on whether this is "pretty clear" or "only passably comprehensible due to the surrounding context". It's hard for me to consider something "pretty clear" if I could replace one of the words with actual gibberish and the meaning wouldn't change to me; "Ungart’red, and down-barboodled to his ankle" is equally "clear".

You know, I know it's poor form to post "I agree", adding nothing but a little noise to the conversation.

But here I am, in the stadium, leaping to my feet, cheering as if you just scored the winning goal. Great comment, insightful and shows the passion and knowledge you have for the topic. This kind of commentary is why I'm here, and I'm calling it out as such. Love your work.

Thank you. I didn't always like Shakespeare, but exactly 25 years ago next week I founded a Shakespeare theater troupe. (Unimaginatively called the Rude Mechanicals, a very popular name. But since I nabbed rudemechanicals.com, I get a lot of their email.)

Our quarter century anniversary is in a week. We've done every Shakespeare play. Even the really bad ones. Especially the really bad ones. Often they are the most successful, because we can find great things nobody has ever seen before.

> 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.

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.

Shakespeare has a few perplexing words and some apparently contorted phrase constructions that become clearer if read aloud. Nothing compared to actual difficulties.

I am generally a lover of history, but Shakespeare's comedies are just too "weird" for me. The plots that tend to rotate around some elaborate disguise etc. just cannot "roll me in".

I attended a local adaptation of the Twelfth Night a few days ago. The actors really did their best, but the plot felt like product of a brain injury to me. I wonder what has changed since the 16th century, as obviously Shakespeare's humor was genuinely popular back then.

It is a different story with the tragedies. The Merchant of Venice was very visceral even for 21st century audience. As if troubles of people (be it debt or anti-Semitism) changed less over time.

Someone of that is similar to the Seinfeld is unfunny trope right? Where it's not funny because we've been inundated with the same humor from other media before experiencing shakespeare, so it seems trite.

Yeah, comedy always ages poorly. Even 40 year old comedy movies are often weak now. With 400 year old comedies it's surprising anything works.

Twelfth Night is actually one of the better ones. With some skillful editing and a good dose of physical comedy (basically you can write your own jokes), it can be entertaining. There's practically no salvaging something like Measure for Measure or All's Well That Ends Well.

Merchant... is complicated. (I have thoughts. I played a very well-received Shylock a few years back.) Think of it as a tragedy with some comic sub-plots. Which isn't unlike the tragedies, which also have comic sub-plots.

Even so, it's just a weird goddamn play. It is a tragedy that ends in act 4, followed by a really dumb romantic comedy one-act. The audiences comes out feeling, well, ooky. And you just gotta lean into that.

> go see the delightful

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.

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.

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

Another fun trick: Shakespeare rhymes much better if you read it aloud in your broadest "talk like a pirate" accent.

Double down and do Pericles, which has actual pirates.

(When I did it, we replaced all of the pirate's dialogue with "arr".)

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

That but also, it becomes a lot easier once you stop pretending it's incomprehensible and put forth even a tiny effort into understanding it.

You might not believe me, but I'm not pretending. Maybe I just don't know how to apply the effort, but you're wrong, whether you believe it or not.

Shakespeare only really works for me in original pronunciation. The rhyme scheme makes sense, the alliteration comes back... even some nonsensical lyrics become obvious jokes.

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.

It's not quite "ass", but "petard" does also suggest "fart". The French still use "pet" to mean "fart". Including an amusingly named pastry: Pete De Soeur, "nun's fart".

Shakespeare definitely loved his fart jokes. And if I ever get around to directing Hamlet, I'm gonna see if a fart joke works at that line. It would be hilarious to break the tension.

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 Shakespeare is and fun is to watch it (on stage, or film). I have been to several Shakespeare plays in the last year and there were none where I felt I was just "catching the basic gist". The jokes worked for a start.

> 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.

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.

That meaning of fast is still current in phrases such as 'hold fast to'.

Similarly for quick. There is a relatively recent film called The Quick and the Dead based on a 1973 novel of the same name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_and_the_Dead_(1987_f...

If you are moderately well read most such words should not pose more than momentary difficulties.

Hmm, I always interpreted the title of the movie with the current/conventional meaning of 'quick'.

There are two kinds of people. Those who are quick on the trigger. And those who are dead (because they were not quick enough ..)

It was an entertaining movie! Several big name stars.

I guess I'm not moderately well read.

>I guess I'm not moderately well read.

At least you're honest about it. Assuming you aren't just being sarcastic. A lot of people never read much beyond whatever is required for their schooling but pretend otherwise.

I love going to theaters when we visit London and over the years I've seen tens of plays if not over a hundred. Shakespeare's are the only ones I had problems following so we stopped seeing them.

Like you I don't think this is a problem of Shakespeare or me. My English is not perfect, but since I don't seem to have problems communicating otherwise or following plays or movies even in dialects (within reason) I take this as a substantial proof that it is generally good enough.

My personal take is that it is a combination of language that is just unfamiliar enough and old references and idioms that I don't get because I haven't been taught them in school while learning about plays.

I find this very interesting. I'm not a native English speaker but I would say I have native level proficiency. I just finished (literally yesterday) going through about 20 of Shakespeare's plays. Moreover, I did it in the audiobook format, where I didn't just have to follow the story, but also constantly figure out who's speaking. This wasn't a walk in the park and I had to familiarize myself with each play before listening to it. But - I found most of it perfectly understandable and often relatable. A fascinating difference in experience.

This matches my experience too.

I am also not a native English speaker, but I did not find Shakespeare hard to understand. The same happened for other non-native speakers that I know.

However, I am used to reading texts in many foreign languages and I am familiar with the etymology of many English words, i.e. with the evolution of their meanings in time. This is much more typical for non-native English speakers than for native English speakers and it might explain the difference.

In any case it is inappropriate to claim that Shakespeare's language is not Modern English.

The differences between Shakespeare's language and the current language are orders of magnitude smaller than for example the differences between French as taught officially and the language in which the novels of Frédéric Dard (the San-Antonio series) have been written (in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century). Those novels can really be hard to understand for native and non-native French speakers alike, before learning the specific slang used in them.

I thin you are right (and this is reflected in other comments) that some people find Elizabethan language hard and others do not.

There are lots of things that prevent some English speakers understanding others. Dialect, vocabulary and culture for a start. I often hear or read (and use) words in some places that I would not use in others (a huge range from lakh to orthogonal). I often read things that other people might have a problem reading, or things that contain words I need to look up.

Short of using only very simple language all the time it is impossible to find anything that is not going to present difficulties to some significant group of people.

> Despite these qualifications, I was hard-pressed to find any lines that I could make sense of in Shakespeare

Really. Take a look at the first few exchanges in the play I know best:

https://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html

The word I can find that has had a change of meaning is "revenue" and that is slight. You can read a long way down without seeing anything that is hard to understand.

My children have been able to enjoy Shakespeare from before before they were teenagers. I think it is because they read a variety of books so are not confused by unfamiliar language.

The first line looks more approachable than in R&J. But in addition to revenue, I'm at least unfamiliar with step-dame and dowager. My phone's autocomplete also thinks that latter one is not a word.

Dowager is essentially widow, I think it comes up in UK english still. I wasn't familiar with step-dame, but understand step from stepfather and other step relations, and obviously knew dame was a female, so assumed it was stepmother or similar. I feel like most people would have similar thought processes to figure those words out.

I am also a native english speak and didn't find Shakespeare difficult to read in High School, thought I did read books on my own time--more than most.

It helps to have an annotated version that explains the occasional phrase that is no longer used.

You can argue that Shakespeare is comprehensible to a modern English speaker, but I don't think you can argue that it's modern English. The different "you" forms alone are enough to make it difficult to understand for most modern speakers.

Different 'you' forms?

Thou, thee, ye [,thy, thine] are variants of 2nd person pronouns.

"You" used to be the formal plural form.

All of these have different connotations and/or subtly different meanings, and context will affect if they are to be taken at face value or are e.g. sarcastic (I've not read enough Shakespeare to recall if he made use of that)

[Thy/thine is your/yours and which is right depends on if it's before a vowel or consonant...]

I think a better question isn't "is it hard to read/consume as originally written?", but "Is it worth getting over the hump of reading/consuming as originally written?".

I'd argue the answer to that second question is "yes". It's relatively understandable as Early Modern English, and it's eye opening just how loose the grammar and phrasing can be while remaining understandable. It's delightful to see how Shakespeare plays with the language and a treat to find unfamiliar words and phrases.

Is some of it a little cumbersome? Sure. Are there jokes that have lost something over the last 400 years? Absolutely. Are some of the stories a little ridiculous? Certainly. Is it also a fascinating glimpse into English as a language? Absolutely! Does everyone delight in language as much as I do? Of course not.

I remember reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in 7th grade and the book we used having the play on the left page, and notes for the modern reader on the right page. I found that to be a great way of making the text accessible. Especially as a seventh grader.

For the record, I found Pride and Prejudice (without the zombies) to be a harder read than any of the Shakespeare I've read.

This is my view as well. I'm no literature buff, but some of my fondest lessons in school were dissecting the meanings of Shakespearean prose. Finding the fun pronunciations that turned something boring into something humorously vulgar. His play on words is what makes so much of his comedies work even today.

It is always a treat to get to watch a play that stays true to the cadence that Shakespeare wrote for.

Can I understand an entire play while watching it: no. Can I find the fart joke: YES!

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.

> 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

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.

Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English

I've been running through the works of Shakespeare translated into modern English[0]. The original text is next to the new stuff and annotations are present when translations are weird or questionable. I'd highly recommend this for anyone who wants to read his stuff but doesn't have the time to look up every third word.

https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati...

I always thought that I should do the translation myself to current colloquial English, for my own better understanding.

I didn't know about that link, thanks! Anyone know if there is a printed version that is similar? And, extending that request to other classic works too?

There are some editions, often made for schools, that have the original text on the right hand page with translations/explanations of the language on the left hand page. The description of the jokes, puns, euphemisms, and general turns of phrase that are no longer intuitive today enrich the experience for sure. Ask your local library.

https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/?scr=1

SparkNotes has a clearer and more printable version but is behind a paywall.

I don’t think many have read your link. It’s great. Some lines from King Lear:

The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look to receive from his age, not alone the imperfections of long-engraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.

Regan replies:

Such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s banishment.

Goneril continues:

There is further compliment of leave-taking between France and him. Pray you, let’s hit together.

The commentary on these lines is delightful!

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 you adapt the plot into something else entirely.

Ran (King Lear)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_3...

10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

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.

> 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 franca the likes of which the world has not seen since the Roman Empire, or possibly even before that. Also, more and more people are educated throughout the world, and English is taught in a fairly consistent manner everywhere.

Writing, consistent and universal education, and global dominance are all factors that work against the development of a language. Yes, new words and slang terms are being adopted constantly, and perhaps just as many are falling out of use, but overall the meaning of a sentence spoken today would be easy enough for a speaker from the 1800s to understand, and there’s no reason to believe it will be any different for a speaker from the 2300s.

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.

> 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.

If you must read Shakespeare in high school, a good annotated copy of the play would probably be helpful. However, a film or video of a stage production in probably a better introduction. Reading a good critique of the play would also probably help with noy having an idea of what is going on.

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.

> 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.

What stops anyone from doing it? I'm pretty sure I could search Amazon or Abebooks [1] and find lots of attempts at it.

[1] https://www.abebooks.com/docs/community/featured/out-of-prin...

>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 Hollywood versions of Greco-Roman mythology aren't the same as what you get in Ovid's Metamorphoses. References to Ovid's Metamorphoses can be found on almost every page of Shakespeare, and if you haven't read Ovid (and really, how many people nowadays have?) a lot of Shakespeare's references can be cryptic.

> and that's why there are so few "modern English" productions put on

Modern productions of shakespeare or even victorian era stories constantly make their way into Hollywood. "Clueless" is just a modernized version of "Emma"

This is reductive. Clueless is certainly not "just" a modernised version of Emma. It takes broad strokes inspiration from the plot of Emma, but the charm of the film isn't something that can be reduced to the original novel. The application of a comedy of manners onto the contemporary setting, combining broad farce with naturalistic performances, skewering (while also benefiting from) consumer fetishism etc. The point here being that one could write a million bowdlerised versions of Emma and never land on a Clueless. Modern English Shakespeare translations are readily available. It takes genius to make one that rivals the original in popularity.

Bowdlerize as a verb literally came from Thomas Bowdler gutting Shakespeare

Ophelia was randy AF if you study her verses closer especially the "mad scene" (act 4, scene 5)

Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings

> This is reductive

And this is a meaningless insult. One might say it needs translation into Normal People English.

> The point here being that one could write a million bowdlerised versions of Emma

Who cares? The point is, the plots and characters are readily adaptable into modern settings, and that IS a valid modernization of Shakespeare, as McWhorter wants. There are a million ways to do that, and godspeed to all of them.

Having dukes and queens and earls speaking modern English is just stupid.

"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...

I'm not sure precisely what you mean by pretension - since affecting importance makes little sense in the context. I presume you're misusing the word to refer to 'tall poppy syndrome' or similarly to the Irish colloquialism 'notions'. The word reductive is perfectly common in English writing - according to the OED it dates to the 1500s. Perhaps it's new and frightening to you because you're level of literacy is not what it might be?

https://edtrust.org/the-equity-line/the-literacy-crisis-in-t...

Perhaps we'd do better to cull the amount of words used? To reduce to available pool to the most efficient use of letters? Personally I think that would be double plus ungood, but perhaps I need to brush up on my 'normal people English'.

Look, sarcastic nose tweaking aside, a new word is a gift! When I come across one I add it to a list and count myself richer for having found a more nuanced understanding of how others view the world.

hey, way to be exemplify that condescension:

> Perhaps it's new and frightening to you because you're level of literacy is not what it might be?

and you can't spell "your." My level of literacy is most likely much higher than yours.

Using pretentious words in order to sound more educated than you are is the very thing I'm talking about.

> To reduce to available pool to the most efficient use of letters?

(Pun intended there, I guess?) "Reducing" things to their essence is what we do in science and mathematics. It's a good thing.

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.

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

I won't attribute this to Einstein:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/

That word you dislike means you've violated "But Not Simpler"

Fewer letters.

you're right: saves one character over "simplistic"

The Moonlighting adaptation of Taming of the Shrew with Bruce Willis went over well.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=moonlighting+taming+of+the+shrew

I started with "Clueless" and then realized, "Oh, hey, that's Jane Austen."

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 translation, or has to be creatively and intelligently reproduced across a language barrier.

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, etc.)

I personally find that Shakespeare can sound remarkable in just about any modern accent. I love hearing it in accents that aren't entirely common: Yorkshire, Geordie, American South, Black English Vernacular. I once got to perform with a British woman with Ghanian parents, and whose native accent was Estuary -- absolutely a knockout.

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.

Fascinating! I'm glad that they're breaking that RP grip on Shakespeare. It's certainly a valid way to do it, but Shakespeare himself wanted a diversity of accents, especially for his lower-class characters.

It's funny that you mention Mack. A few years ago I was directing a Maccers whose native accent was Pittsburgh. Not very different from the general American, but Mac has a line, "I have supped full with horrors". Which in his accent comes out as "full with whores".

I wasn't gonna mention it, but the cast giggled, and I was afraid the audience might too. It took rather a lot of work to find the right pronunciation for one word, and I think I made a mistake even trying. The cast hears it every night but an audience would have blipped right past it.

Heh. When I try the line out in OP I'm convinced that pun was intended. It's in response to the women's cries inside the castle, no? That Mac, at this point in the show (and consciously or not), associates all women with whores is a fascinating character note. Not that you were wrong to cover it up - if the word had distracted the audience right then it would have been unfortunate - but I like your story as an example of how being aware of OP can help open up the text.

You're absolutely right about diversity of accents, and "OP" (in its time) was never at all only one thing. David Crystal - I hope I'm not doxxing myself other than to my friends to say I worked with his and Ben's company - was adamant about that. We were a crazy-diverse crew, with our own underlying patterns of speech - Standard American, all sorts of regional UK dialects, Indian English, and various second-language speakers - all of which brought welcome individual "flavours" to our OP palettes. (Then David got to go really nerdy with his suppositions about what 16th-century cod Welsh and cod French accents might have been, and overlaying those was a hoot!)

It's only RP that enforces standardization - which is why all of us from elsewhere (more accustomed to hearing and performing Shakespeare in our own voices) sometimes had a hard time grokking the immense effect of OP on UK performers and audiences.

I'd compare that to hearing Bach on period instruments, or Beethoven on a fortepiano. I actually played a modern reproduction of one of those.

Yeah, it IS closer to what people experienced then. I can't argue that.

But we're different; the halls are different; our ears are different. The miracle of Shakespeare (or Beethoven) is that it still means something to us, no matter how much you torture it.

“ 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."

I think the more radical argument and the one closer to the truth (but not the whole truth) is that these countries possess nothing of Shakespeare, for the simple reason that they, unlike us, have never read him.

> "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.

> 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.

Shakespeare is modern enough to be understandable by any english speaker. What shakespeare requires isn't a translation but annotation for the cultural/historical/etc references and archaic words.

I don't think you can truly enjoy shakespeare in a language other than english. After all, the value in shakespeare isn't the plot, but the language.

> However, we would never complain a translation of Beowulf 'isn’t Beowulf'

I would. But it isn't worth learning old english just to read a book. It is worth reading a bit of annotation for shakespeare.

Certainly this 'well-known linguist' isn't equating the difficulty of reading beowulf with hamlet?

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.

Shakespeare’s plays are already in modern English

In terms of the words they use sure but the grammar/sentence construction is quite different and hard to parse for modern readers. That's their point the translations make decisions to make the language more understandable for their target audience so it's more accessible to them in some ways than it is to English speaking audiences who are usually expected to read it in the original without modification.

Shakespeare's plays are pretty easy to understand though. You could certainly translate them into easier to understand English, but a lot of the tougher language is due to the word play and such, not because the words themselves aren't understandable.

Yes please. When we torture students with seemingly archaic math, like geometry largely in the form it was in the time of Euclid, we do it for a reason, setting up subsequent ideas, and we have modern textbooks that clean up the presentation and connect it to modern applications.

Making students learn an outdated form of English, useful for Shakespeare and nothing else, does not seem that useful as an investment of effort, compared with learning another modern language, or even something like Latin that in turn helps in learning other languages and understanding English vocabulary in several useful fields.

Growing up reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon, being able to actually understand what was going on, gave me more of an appreciation of the literature/stories/history than later struggling through it in archaic English with a reference in hand.

This exists:

https://playonshakespeare.org/

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 been doing for hundreds of years—without access to the internet, even. I don't know what's changed now to make this task onerous. I mean, I could speculate about our attention spans, but I can't say that with certainty.

A contemporary English translation is unnecessary, wouldn't make the plays even a tiny bit more relevant or meaningful, and I predict most people would prefer the original anyway.

> 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 fragment might reasonably mean.

There are a few definitions of "mutiny", but generally, it's "rebellion against any authority". Who is the authority? Is it the heads of the dignified households? Like the staff of the house is trying to seize power? Or younger members of the family? What's civil blood? If I spent eight hours pondering this prologue, I strongly doubt that I would make any more headway than this.

> 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

> 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.

100% it’s over thinking it. The double meaning is an instructive example. You can’t know about the double meaning a priori. It’s foreshadowing.

It’s a play from a time when there was no television. No radio. No internet. People would have seen it multiple times and not expected to understand everything during their first watch. Shakespeare straight up invents words.

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 order to develop a context, one must somehow achieve a sufficient foothold of comprehension from which to build it. There are precious few sentences in Shakespeare for which I would be able to do that. The farther you get into the play, the more references there are to earlier, so you kind of have to start at the beginning. But I can't understand that part either.

You keep saying it's easy. I believe you when you say that's your experience. What I'm trying to tell you is that it's not easy for everyone. There is no amount of patience that I could apply to this pursuit that would yield success. This is my good-faith best effort to comprehend it and it's not happening.

> 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.

> 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.

Without looking anything up, I did not find that phrase confusing ..

"From ancient grudge break to new mutiny"

My immediate read is that the two houses have an ancient grudge, and there will be a change in status involving mutiny, in this case the love between Romeo and Juliette(their houses are enemies so you could see this as a form of mutiny).

Who can say if this is what Shakespeare meant, but the phrase didn't seem hard to follow at all, I didn't have to think about it.

Congrats

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

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.

Thanks for the explanation.

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

>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

It's amazing how many people commenting here are pretending otherwise. I get that it seems unapproachable until you've done it once, but that's why we do in school, so you realize how approachable such works really are.

They don't get it in the language they speak at all! Puns are shitty in translation, and Shakespeare is loaded with them. Modern English isn't good enough, you need the allusions, the little nods, the things that make it human.

| You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.

I found hip-hop, in general, much harder to approach than Shakespeare. I still miss a lot of the allusions and references in it without notes.

I don’t think hip-hop needs to be translated, though. I think I needed to try harder and acquire some education before I could begin to appreciate it beyond a very-surface level, if even that. I certainly wouldn’t care to use a “translation”. What’s the point? The invitation to grow is important and shouldn’t be dismissed. This isn’t completing your sprint goals, it’s art appreciation. However long it takes is fine.

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.

Cool project!

I'm conflicted about this sort of thing. It seems like the goal of someone approaching early modern English -- the earliest iteration that's roughly intelligible to us today -- should be to learn how to read it comfortably, and that with effort, that it should be feasible. Like, that's one major point of reading Shakespeare in school: so that you can get used to the feel of the language (and become a well-cultured, lifelong, paying audience member). On the other hand, there's so much "should" already around reading at all, much less reading difficult old texts, that I suppose that helper notes are a public service -- and even after reading & seeing lots of Shakespeare, I still need notes for some of the obscure idioms and references. And I suppose there's no real reason why someone has to start with Shakespeare, particularly if you're coming to this era in midlife after dozing off in English class.

It's a weird thing about the canon that we pick out one or two authors from every period, and completely forget about all the others. Like, what's the chance that the bottom 10th percentile of Shakespeare's plays are better than the top 10th of Marlowe, or of this guy Chapman who I'd never heard of? And it makes you wonder, who are the artists today who will be idolized through the ages, and who will be totally forgotten?

Like, it's cool to study the compleat works of an exemplary figure like Shakespeare, but maybe if we learn to study his contemporaries and cultural context, we'll gain a better understanding of the life and times, and be less prone to wild theories about how he couldn't have possibly written the plays, how it must have been some other figure with a fancier education, or even a group effort. The group effort was the whole flourishing Elizabethan playwriting scene, and he was merely the best among them.

If the annotations help explain the cultural context and references to current events and recent history, this is the kind of resource I've wished for when reading pre-modern literature. Even just explaining the classical allusions will go a long way to making the modern reader more comfortable with the text.

Yes, absolutely -- I think that was my point?

And looking at some of their pdfs, it looks like their notes have similar quality to the better annotated Shakespeare editions, all for free, and with more breadth in terms of authors. This is the sort of passion project that renews my faith in the internet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240519050125/http://elizabetha...

I wonder, what is a good free CDN service for hobby sites like this? A quick web search shows a lot of them have a free tier. The only one I am familiar with is Cloudflare.

"OP" (original pronounciation) can help bring out some of the original bawdiness; it makes the puns pop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQc5ZpAoU4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2QYGEwM1Sk

Staging, blocking, and competent acting can make the jokes a lot more explicit (and also, explicit!) Our ancestors, on the whole, weren't highfalutin capital-A Art people, and certainly not where common entertainment is concerned!

Beyond that: being a reasonably educated viewer helps; certainly about word use. Knowing that "much ado about nothing" is a sexual triple entendre really helps! The political jokes are going to whiff, though; there's really not too much to be done about that level of extremely tightly scoped reference, it doesn't age amazingly well.

Not a play, but https://pepysdiary.com is a wealth of information and context.

The explanation in that first video is more interesting to me than all of the Shakespeare I was ever taught in school.

That As You Like It pun on hours/whores ripe/rape and rot/rut was new to me; thanks for sharing.

I do not think the difficulty with understanding Shakespeare is that they are "written in a language we no longer speak" but rather that they are written for a culture much different than our own. Shakespeare is loaded with wordplay, sly and overt references, callouts, contemporary jokes and in-jokes. How do you "translate" that?

He references a Western cultural history that we don't spend a lot of time learning anymore. As someone around a half-century old, I've noticed that most of my younger co-workers no longer "get" many references to bits of classic myth and history that were near-universal when I was growing up.

Imagine trying to "translate" all the cultural baggage of a very dense modern action-drama-comedy. It's not a matter of language, it's a matter of cultural familiarity. Sure, you can re-write Shakespeare for a different time and place, but you're not "translating" it, you're re-writing it, and producing a substantially transformed work by doing so.

Honestly, I bet the bulk of his audiences, aka the common folk, didn't grasp all of his references and allusions, but you don't need to when watching a play. Consuming Shakespeare as a play vs reading it is a very different experience.

Aren’t they already both those things?

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 :)

If you extend this to Restoration, Pepys went to the theatre several times a week. About 50% he was unimpressed by.

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.

People rave about Shakespeare, so I'm sure there is something there. I wish I could have been able to get that.

Here's what I'd say to you and others who feel the same way: personally, I think Shakespeare really only comes alive in a live performance where characters have additional context to help you understand what's happening. I think Much Ado About Nothing is one of the most enjoyable performances I've ever seen, but reading Much Ado About Nothing several years earlier only made me resent Shakespeare as it does for so many. Shakespeare's works weren't intended to be read by audiences, yet for some reason that is the primary way we ask young people to experience with it.

The above is not an argument against translating Shakespeare to modern English, which I also support.

A few bits:

1) I think only a few of his plays are really at the level for high-schoolers, so you're not entirely wrong.

2) When I was a private tutor, I had a methodology for teaching these plays, which was a little vocabulary first for a scene, then reading it out loud. It has to be out loud. I usually had extra copies and you bet I would grab a parent and have them do a third part.

I would read in meter and with the appropriate tone, do all of facial expressions, mime any relevant action, and generally ham it up. I would typically pick the most difficult part. After each scene, we'd talk about it, the culture and history of the time, and so forth.

You are not to blame for not getting into it, it's just on the edge of high school appropriate and tends to be taught poorly.

Oh wow, very different from my experience. I was just given the book, and deadlines for reading certain parts.

I had a similar experience, even though I loved poetry in school.

Two things made me completely adore Shakespeare in recent times.

I wrote a Shakespearean sonnet. Once you’ve tried to compose in iambic pentameter the magic of the form really jumps out at you when you see it done so exquisitely in his work.

The other is reading Shakespeare as an adult. Like philosophy, I think a lot of Shakespeare is too foreign to the life experience of the average school student. They can understand the themes in an abstract way, but not really feel them.

It helps to get a good edition with footnotes for the more anachronistic references. That you couldn’t get just by thinking about it. After a while the language should start to feel more normal, and flow.

I was the same as you. Now I think I didn't care enough about it to put in the effort.

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 Shakespeare. I remember my sense of resentment for being asked to read such an incomprehensible word salad.

But yeah, at this point, I have a lot of other stuff going on. It's not a priority for me. I would need to have it spoon-fed to me, and quickly. That's probably not even possible.

Did either of you ever try watching e.g. Titus?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_(film)

It's not considered one of his great plays. I enjoyed the film, sought out a solo copy of the play, which I managed to slog through. That was years ago; I don't really remember it. Still revisit the film though.

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.

Well it was jokey sarcasm so don't worry about it. :) What I mean is trying to get a Shakespeare play by reading it, is like trying to get a film by reading the script!

Sure, if you're an experienced actor or director that'll work but for regular folks just watch it performed!

Seriously, you wouldn't take a film recommendation and start by reading the script would you? You might read it later if you really liked it but you watch it first. Get the details later.

Well, I mean, it wasn't my idea. I can't take the credit or blame. It was the required reading for my literature class.

But... I still don't think my comprehension would have been great if I had been watching a performance instead. It would establish an upper bound on time investment, which would have been a plus I guess.

I think the old language gets in the way, but the genius it has (IMO) is in the characters. You could completely believe that a person would act they way that they do in the play.

Not much to add, but my experience mirrors yours.

Yeah it's an interesting question. Of course these days since it's public domain you could have chat GPT give you every sentence with a modern translation alongside.

It's sometimes hard to tell when people advocate for something esoteric if they are being hipster (e.g "Goldplated audiocables on a record player") [i.e. advocating for something monetarily/intellectually inaccessible as a form of flaunting wealth/intellect] or if it's a genuine recommendation.

I bet a clever person could come up with some ways to test each hypothesis.

This is how we did Shakespeare in school; left side original text and the right side, an explanation. It made it much more bearable than trying to decipher what's being said.

Great project! I just wish it were in epub format to read on a smaller screen.

Does anyone have a recommendation of a good starting point, outside the works of Shakespeare?

I think it’s already been hugged to death and no one has even started talking about it

>I think it's already been hugged to death...

FWIW, I upvoted your benign and completely true comment. Why on earth should it be downvoted? I consider anyone that downvoted your comment as petty and small minded. But I am outnumbered. The fact is it happens here as often as any online public forum. So despite it's apparently admiral lofty ideals of mature debate, this public forum is overrun, like every online public forum, and detrimentally so, by what can mildly be described as immature, petty, and small minded white males, eager to be the first to remark, eager to 'score' more points, and be admired in this narrow arena. I am certain of this stance (as I am on occasion one of those immatures, though I would never sink to down vote such a benign remark).

Thanks… I was mildly confused but I guessed it was just that I didn’t add anything to the discussion

But I couldn’t! Because I couldn’t see the site!

I guess I could have directly asked anyone who could see it to post any alternate links they found.

Yep, the site was down. And for quite a while. One can only ignore, roll eyes, and move on. There you go. Thanks for replying too.

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