Making Elizabethan Plays Understandable and Fun to Read

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...

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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