Stage | guardian.co.uk: Do we need to rewrite the classics? Increasingly, people seem to think so. The latest news is that Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler are among the novelists who have signed up to a project involving "prose retellings" of Shakespeare's plays. Actually, I have no problem with that, since the original works are in constant revival. Where I get a bit shirty is when rare Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – which we hardly ever see on stage – are adapted on the grounds of their supposed "difficulty". There's a ripe example at Stratford-on-Avon right now, where Thomas Middleton's A Mad World My Masters has been "edited" by Sean Foley and Phil Porter on the dubious assumption that modern audiences are too dumb to understand it.
2 comments:
That article poses a really good question, and with each person you ask there would be a different answer. My generation for example would probably tend to want to rewrite the plays with a modern spin. However my dad would probably not want to rewrite them as he grew up knowing Shakespeare the way it currently is and wouldn't want it to change.
I agree with Will that different generations would most likely answer this question differently, but no matter what, people will keep "updating" and rewriting older plays. What we have to keep in mind, however, when doing this is maintaining the integrity of the original work. In this article, it sounds like the original work didn't shine through as much in the adaptation as it could have. Plays should not lose their original intention when being adapted. The new version should be able to say something new about the play, but the playwright or adapter should be aware that they are not creating a new work but commenting on an older one. The integrity must be maintained even if colloquialisms and context are being changed.
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