Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

> 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...

Fewer letters.

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

“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"

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com