Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense | Hacker News Reader

Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense

nautil.us

121 pointsdnetesn45 comments

The subject of the piece (Stephen Booth) has written "400 pages of virtuosic commentary exploring the ambiguity and polysemy of Shakespeare’s verse." Does anyone know if he addresses Step Zero of appreciating the sonnets, which is to use Original Pronunciation (OP)? [1] Many of the sonnets don't even rhyme properly when pronounced in modern British or American English, but they do in OP. [2]

[1]: http://www.pronouncingshakespeare.com/

[2]: See, for example, the recitation of Sonnet 116 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt7OynPUIY8.

As a former student of Booth, he has this covered.

I saw a video on this recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

He also makes use of puns that you will only notice when using OP. I believe one of the examples they talk about is:

"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes"

Where "loins" and "lines" are pronounced in the same way, so it's actually a pun, where "loins" refer to physical loins and "lines" refer to their genealogical lines.

At a certain point, you have to assume that everything is a pun, "now MOTHER what's the MATTER," etc.

There are still accents in England where those words would be pronounced almost the same :)

I find David and Ben Crystal's efforts to promote the Original Pronunciation admirable, but ever since I've heard their version of Sonnet 116 a few years ago, I've harbored doubts about their particular choices. Several books I read on Early Modern English phonetics agree that love-prove, love-move, love-remove etc. are not visual rhymes. But Ben Crystal chooses to pronounce all these words with the short [ʌ] sound (like the vowel of modern 'cut'). And I think it's wrong (well, not on my own authority, I'm not a linguist or a specialist in this area, just someone very interested in historical phonetics of English who read a bunch of books and articles).

Words like move, remove, prove used to be pronounced with the long [o:] sound before the Great Vowel Shift (which is how they got their spelling), and by Shakespeare's time they moved to [u:], which they retained until modern times. I tried to find any evidence other than the love- rhymes that these words could be pronounced with a short [ʌ] sound, and couldn't.

On the other hand, "love" was probably pronounced usually with a short [u] sound, the same sound we use today in "put". All the words with u in a closed syllable used that sound as well, like "cut", "but", "cup" "sun" etc. The change from this [u] to [ʌ] happened after Shakespeare's time, mostly later in the 17th century, resulting in the familiar pronunciation of "but" "cup" "sun", but leaving after it a fair number of exceptions that refused to follow the change, such as "put" "push" etc.

"prove" and "love" did rhyme when Shakespeare used them; but perhaps the rhyme was a bit inexact, rhyming long [u:] of "prove/move/remove" and short [u] of "love" (but still much more exact than modern [u:] and [ʌ] of course). Or, as Charles Barber claims in his "Early Modern English" (unwieldly Google Books links: http://bit.ly/1uI7SWQ), "love" was exceptional in having a variant [u:] pronunciation especially beloved by poets, precisely because they could use it to rhyme it with handy words like "prove" and "move". Either way, the love/move rhyme did not sound at all the way Ben Crystal pronounces it.

The sound we use today in "put" isn't [u], it's [ʊ]. Today, it would definitely not be considered an adequate rhyme for [u:]; would you call "look" [lʊk] an inexact rhyme for "Luke" [lu:k]?

On the other hand, I tend to suspect that [u], if it occurred, would be accepted as an exact rhyme for [u:]. Any line-final [u] in a poem would sort of necessarily be promoted to [u:], though.

On an unrelated note, are there areas that use a [lʊv] pronunciation of "love" today? That might explain the to-me odd use of "lurve" in humor.

"On an unrelated note, are there areas that use a [lʊv] pronunciation of "love" today? That might explain the to-me odd use of "lurve" in humor."

According to http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/lurve:

"Origin - 1930s: as a parody of the pronunciation of love in popular romantic songs."

Thank you for correcting my careless notation. I often forget about the differences between some of the u-sounds, because my native language (Russian) has just one. To me, "look" and "Luke" actually sounds like a passable rhyme, and in general one feature common to nearly everyone who speaks English with a Slavic accent is that they do not distinguish between [ʊ] and [u:]. I know the difference intellectually, and I try to pronounce them correctly, but I probably still get it wrong every now and then.

I believe [ʊ] used to be [u], but I don't remember when this quality change happened.

I think there are still current dialects in the center and north of England where this split didn't happen, so they would have [lʊv]. Here's an interesting self-aware example: http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6911/understa...

But you obviously haven't read, for example, Ben Jonson's English Grammar (1616), who says, in his description of letter 'o', 'In the short time more flat, and akin to u; as... brother, love, prove', indicating that prove was pronounced like love, not the other way round. I suggest you do bit more reading.

"Shallow processing explains our predisposition to miss the problem of whether a man should be allowed to marry his widow’s sister."

What a neat example!

It is an interesting example. Shallow processing is subjective though (the use of the word 'shallow'), as is 'higher level reasoning', or the capacity to derive a layer of meaning from a sequence of characters. It depends on what perspective.

I am reading a book on syntactic pattern recognition, and if I may quote from the chapter on 'elements of formal language theory':

"Observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar or can in some way be calibrated ~Benjamin Lee Whorf"

The problem with this hypothesis is that it treats "linguistic backgrounds" as static, as if language creation was not a basic and routine part of the machinery we use to picture the universe.

But this is not the case. The sciences, for example, would be impossible without the routine creation of new language, and once you admit language creation into the fold as a basic linguistic ability you've lost pretty much all the force of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a limit on our understanding. Linguistic background is a weak and temporary barrier to reaching any particular picture of the universe based on the physical evidence because whenever our linguistic background impedes us we create new language.

Shakespeare, famous for his neologisms, is a great example of this process, obviously, and language creation is an area where the sciences and the arts overlap very heavily that so far as I know has never been properly studied.

I don't make the assumption that linguistic background is static, only that it is possible that the way in which the language shapes perception can be the cause of disagreement. That is not to say that once this is resolved, linguistic background can't change. Linguistic background may change as a result of language creation disagreement.

You might be interested to know that Cicero, irritated at the prevailing viewpoint of the time that discussing philosophy required Greek, made a point of using Latin and coining the words he needed when he needed them.

The idea that your language forms unbreakable shackles around your soul has apparently been unreasonably popular for a very long time :/

Is that shallow processing or the presumption of coherence? People frequently say things using linguistic shorthands that are literally nonsense, and we are only able to communicate because we routinely impose a generous interpretation on statements that would otherwise be incoherent. Since the literal interpretation of "Should a man be allowed to marry his window's sister?" makes no sense, reading it "incorrectly" in a way that does make sense makes sense.

*widow's sister

The other is even more nonsense :-)

For certain definitions of nonsense:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-QoGKj6YQM

This reminds me of another schooldays riddle - "a plane crashes on the US/Mexico border, where do they bury the survivors?"

TLDR is actually in the middle of the whole text:

The Shakespeare expert wrote a book (more than a decade ago!) on how Shakespeare is a genius apparently for controlling and using the nonsense in his verses.

Much ado (the linkbait quality title) about connoisseur (as in xkcd).

For further reading, this is Booth's book on nonsense generally: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft538nb...

Very cool article. For those who didn't read and might wonder why someone is arguing that Shakespeare isn't a genius, the title is a play on words. The article argues that Shakespeare's unusual use of language ("nonsense") is what makes his work genius.

Thanks. I have a hard time defending Shakespeare well enough, but now I don't have to.

I wonder what translation of Shakespeare, to Italian for example, Booth prefers. Translators can make the archaic stuff accessible again, and so maybe the italian crowd gets the jokes that are lost on the english one.

Interesting idea. What would it look like if a one of the works is translated to Italian (which might improve its ability to be understood) then translated back to English? What would it look like, and how accessible would it become?

Probably something completely different, but I think what you want is Shakespeare in modern English, which is a thing that exists:

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/

I've heard bits of Shakespeare in German, and I think it was pretty well done. Any good translation is going to effectively be a whole new work of art that tries to capture something of the essence of the original. But the beauty of Shakespeare is the language.

That translation is pretty terrible. It's not a translation of the musicality and beauty of Shakespeare into modern English, it's a translation of Shakespeare into poorly written literal statements.

When foreign translators are doing Shakespeare, they are trying to capture the whole essence, not just a literal extraction of what it's referring to.

Example:

    Yes, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.
    If I say sooth, I must report they were
    As cannons overcharged with double cracks,
    So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.

"Translated" to:

> The new challenge scared them about as much as sparrows frighten eagles, or rabbits frighten a lion. To tell you the truth, they fought the new enemy with twice as much force as before; they were like cannons loaded with double ammunition.

That is halfway to Orwell's conversion of Ecclesiastes to bureaucratic English. Absolutely painful.

Yep, that's it. Shakespeare's dialect is full of false friends.

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. Shakespeare is translated into rich, poetic varieties of these languages, to be sure, but since it is the rich, poetic modern varieties of the languages, the typical spectator in Paris, Moscow or Berlin can attend a production of Hamlet and enjoy a play rather than an exercise. In Japan, new editions of Shakespeare in Japanese are regularly best-sellers—utterly unimaginable here, since, like the Japanese, we prefer to experience literature in the language we speak, and a new edition of original Shakespeare no longer fits this definition. In an illuminating twist on this, one friend of mine—and a very cultured, literate one at that—has told me that the first time they truly understood more than the gist of what was going on in a Shakespeare play was when they saw one in French!

-- http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/jan10/shakespeare.cfm

The flip side is that English speakers get to enjoy a treasure trove of 500 years of stories that are basically riffs on his works and a vast collection of day to day sayings and words which color our everyday language.

We actually get to live intimately with his works even if we can barely understand the originals.

So do you when you speak German and French. Shakespeare isn't just an English classic, he is an European and a World's classic and in Europe, many countries have lived intimately with him for centuries as well.

Granted, not all went as far as the Germans and Klingons, but thinking that only the English people have a long lived history with Shakespeare is false.

I looked at what Wikipedia had about Shakespeare's influence in non-English countries and was surprised that this is hardly mentioned.

Is this really an obscure fact that for example in the 19th century Shakespeare was widely more popular in Germany than in Britain or that Goethe and Voltaire were avid admirers of Shakespeare?

Agreed. The article exhibited it's own bit of genius.

As I was reading I kept waiting for the big "..BUT.." that would talk about how Shakespeare wasn't a genius. It wasn't until I got to the section on garden path sentences that the purpose of the title clicked. The author of the article was employing one of the very "tricks" he talks about in the article!

Looks like the headline got changed. It was, "Shakespeare’s Genius Is Nonsense" which I thought was both more correct (by HN rules) and more entertaining.

The headline is currently "What Shakespeare can teach about language and the limits of the human mind."

Ok, we put it back. The HN rule, by the way, is to not use misleading or linkbait titles. This one is obviously the latter. But if it's that descriptive of the content, we can let it go. (Edit: I'm moving this subthread to the root level so we can mark it off topic without penalizing the parent.)

Since when did legitimately clever headlines, once a source of pride for any editor, become "obviously linkbait"?

Probably better to call it "intentionally inflammatory." I feel, and I think this is shared by others, that these are typically not on high quality stories.

In that case changing the headline is intentionally deceptive.

Headlines are the original linkbait.

It's clever in context; that is, once you know what the article is about. On the face of it, someone is saying "it's nonsense that Shakespeare is considered a genius", and is thus more linkbait than the average, descriptive title.

Shakespeare's penchant for making up words and wordplay is well-known; there is enough context for an educated reader to figure it out before clicking on the link.

In a world where the most banal and boring article gets tortured into clickbait, this educated reader wondered, "Is that something interesting do to with Shakespeare's use of language, or something dull and stupid that has been given a ridiculous headline to attract the gullible?"

So no, there is not enough context for "an educated reader" to figure it out.

You conflate "educated" with "superficially cynical."

The difficulty today with a headline that looks like linkebait--even if its descriptive of the content--is that some of us won't click on it because we find linkbait repellant and habitually avoid it.

So rather than inform the reader and allow them to judge whether the article is interesting, you have created a situation where people who are repulsed by linkbait (I hope I'm not alone in this) are required to do more work to find out of the article is worth checking out, which is pretty much the opposite of what a headline ought to do.

There's likely some objective measure of the balance between people who click on the linkbait and learn something interesting about Shakespeare vs people who are repulsed and fail to do so, and it may well be that the former outweigh the latter, but I figured I'd make sure the latter's view is mentioned here.

misleading or linkbait titles. This one is obviously the latter.

It's not obvious to me. The title is a play on words; to the extent that it misleads, it does so for effect. And not all cleverness is tantamount to linkbait. (For what it's worth, I immediately understood the title to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to Shakespeare's well-known love of linguistic innovation.)

IMO what it was previously titled here (What Shakespeare can teach...) just sounded pompous and overly grandiose- coincidentally, another common sin of the BuzzFeed era. I prefer the actual albeit clickbaity headline

Maybe a better title would be 'Shakespeare's Nonsense is Genius'

:-D

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