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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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".