WSJ: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will announce next week that it has commissioned translations of all 39 of the Bard’s plays into modern English, with the idea of having them ready to perform in three years. Yes, translations—because Shakespeare’s English is so far removed from the English of 2015 that it often interferes with our own comprehension.
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I feel like this article is contradictory to why we still perform Shakespeare to this day. Shakespeare plays are an education and poetic experience. The audience may not entirely understand the language, but that's what makes a Shakespearean performance so unique. Being able to take works from the Elizabethan era and manipulate it so the audience may understand it is definitely worth the challenge and why Shakespeare plays are so popular. I agree that modernizing the works would help the audience understand the play and text better, but it's basically doing the same thing Spark Notes did. No Fear helped a lot of students understand a Shakespeare play because of it's hard language, but it seems understanding Shakespeare expands your knowledge to greater heights. This modernizing I think may be a crouch on our future historical plays. This may also cause a downfall in education because we will not be expanding our knowledge in schools when we read these plays. Even if it's part of the curriculum, students will still try to find the easy way out so they don't have to read the actual play.
Thank the powers that be! I may be a little bias because I absolutely hate sitting through a Shakespeare, but the idea of a play in English is actually appealing to me. Shakespeare was intended for the masses not the pompous nobles. Over the years language has evolved and, if the article is to be believed, only 10% of the play is in modern English. That means as you sit there filling in context from what you think you know, you are just making up 90% of it. Educators claim that Shakespeare is important historically but are often to snobby to consider that maybe it could be better used in its original purpose, to entertain the masses. Beowulf is historically important (and awesome) but you don't try to read it in Old Germanic English because that is silly. Maybe if we made Shakespeare more approachable more people would come see it, and students could spend less time trying to translate, and more time trying to understand the historical significance. Refusing to translate Shakespeare contributes to the tendency of theatrical professionals to make theater an elitist venture.
I can already hear the wannabe academics screaming from the hilltops about how wrong this is and how it's another example of modern Americans being coddled while CONTINUING to fail at acknowledging the social, cultural, and even linguistic differences in 2015. I honestly couldn't be more thankful that OSF is taking this upon themselves, because it's coming from an incredibly well recognized source and can be trusted to do a wonderful job at making Shakespeare immediately relatable to younger audiences. No matter how much we don't want to admit it, most of us don't understand Shakespeare from the getgo, and No Fear Shakespeare has become THE go-to source for assignments related to Shakespeare. The problem with Shakespeare is that at the heart of it, the literature couldn't' be more valuable. The stories have extremely universal themes, and created every trope and literary tactic that we use today. If we could just get them to be understood without having to read the play 5 times over, it would not only make the stories easy to read/see but it would also allow more theatre's to produce Shakespeare with better commercial success.
This might not be what Shakespeare wanted, but as we learn about his plays in English class aren't we supposed to learn how to interpret difficult language? And parse out meanings, analyze everything in a way that expands how we see theme and character and tone? I had a class in junior year where we spent all of the class reading and discussing Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which meant for the majority of class we would look at a word and discuss the linguistics behind it. On the other hand, if we can spread the story to everyone who doesn't get the same great education, then why not? It isn't as if making a more modern English translation of Shakespeare will delete the original from the canon -- that isn't possible. I would want to see a production of the modern version of Shakespeare, because it could be hilarious in its interpretation. There's even a few shows that have taken Shakespeare's works and translated them into rap verse, which is even more entertaining for me. Any way you take it, if it's done well I'll watch.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is doing a great service to those who enjoy want to enjoy Shakespeare, but cannot do so due to his out of date language. Students and even many adults that are supposed to understand Shakespeare no longer have to pretend that they know what is going on. This, I'm sure, tasteful rendition of Shakespeare's works will allow intellectual access to the stories that can sometimes not be understood.
On the other hand, it is sometimes said that Shakespeare wrote at an elevated language even to his peers. Some believe he even invented hundreds of words in the English language. So it could be argued that Shakespeare should not be modernized because even when the original plays were being performed certain audience members could not appreciate the words.
I also feel that understanding Shakespeare is not always about the words. Storytelling can take many different forms. Movement, imagery, scenery, costumes, even media, can be used as an aid to further along a story.
This is a difficult article to choose a side on. As an actor in high school, I had spent so much time pouring over Shakespeare’s text, analyzing every line and figuring out how to deliver the text in the way that would make the audience understand. We would spend so much time worrying about the clarity for audience that everything on stage ended up looking sloppy. I felt like we didn’t spend enough time on the production itself. And on top of that, we weren’t even 100 percent true to the text. My director did end up throwing away things because he knew they would be impossible to understand. The director was so desperate, he set Twelfth Night in a tropical resort. I feel like if a production is going to spend this much time pandering to the audience’s understanding, then they should just do this new, rewritten Shakespeare, and make it really good. On the other hand, I completely respect and support other companies that focus on doing pure Shakespeare, the educational value is definitely worth something.
FINALLY someone is translating Shakespeare into language that everyday people can understand. Personally, I find Shakespeare to be overrated. In many cases, Shakespeare is the only playwright with his own class at colleges. There are a lot of playwrights who have just as impressive works in number, language and production aspects yet we don’t concentrate on them. I hate reading Shakespeare. The language in some cases is meaningless to me and I have to spend time looking this up instead of focusing on understanding the story. No matter the playwright, the language or the context the most important thing to me is understanding the story. Seeing Shakespeare performed often helps in the understanding, but not always. By translating Shakespeare into modern English, it will make it more accessible, more understandable, and more people will read it and see it.
There is no clear cut answer to this. On the one hand, Shakespeare's language is beautiful. He wrote his plays like poems, with perfect configurations of images and metaphors that I am not exaggerating when I say felt like a dagger in my heart the first time I read them. Shakespeare exists for a reason, and that is because it is beautiful and at times perfectly exemplifies how it feels to be a human being. On the other hand, the man was not succinct. There is a strong sense of elitism surrounding Shakespeare, which argues that Shakespeare is only misunderstood by those not intelligent enough to "get it." However, if Shakespeare can relate to all of our lives, isn't it damaging to keep the plays in a dialect that most people cannot understand? Shakespearian english is not modern english. Words are used in different ways, and it could be argued that Shakespearian dialogue is a discriminatory language barrier. The sentiments of the plays are universal, and it is wrong that someone should not be able to encounter a play because they are unable to comprehend the at least partially dead plays.
For myself, I am partial to the original Shakespeare, but I don't see why we cannot have both. Original Shakespeare for those who want the poetry, and translated texts for those who want the story. One is not better than the other, and I don't see the problem in updating texts to be understandable to a different audience.
Which side to choose? On one hand I love Shakespeare’s language, and I think it is really poetic once you get used to his style of language. On the other hand, getting used to it takes a long time and is frustrating. So overall I think this is a good idea because it will broaden Shakespeare’s reach to the people who never liked it because it was too hard to understand. I think as long as they don’t drastically change the language like some of the book versions of Shakespeare does where they have the original text and then the “normal” version where a bunch of the words have been changed so that it is very easy to understand. Recently I saw a video of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced vs how it is pronounced now and it is vastly different. With the original pronunciation more of the words actually rhyme and the puns make more sense. So since our language has already changed so much over the four hundred years that we don’t even pronounce things the same way I think it is time for a new translation.
Although a face-value or lazy translation of Shakespeare could lose a lot of the meaning in the text, I think Oregon Shakespeare Festival won’t fall into that trap. OSF understands Shakespeare. They understand the double meanings and the nuances of the wording. I honestly think this is a really good idea. Shakespeare is very inaccessible to people who aren’t used to the language, and even those who are often need to carefully examine the text with historical definitions of the words in mind. I understand the worry of parts of what Shakespeare intended being lost, but the way I see it, most audiences don’t catch that to begin with, so it is lost already. As this article suggests, a good translation could make Shakespeare be perceived by modern audience more as Shakespeare intended it. And, also, I don’t see any harm in this translation. Afterall, the original texts will still exist, and people will still be able to read and perform the old version. This new version will just give another option.
*Sighs deeply* This is not a good idea. There are so many reasons that this is not a good idea. Shakespeare is very famous for his plays, but it seems that sometimes people do not fully realize why. Shakespeare is not (or should not) be famous for his plots. The stories he wrote about were usually just a collage of different stories and pieces of information that he had access to. Shakespeare is famous for his characters and especially language. If you are reading Shakespeare for plot, you are not reading Shakespeare properly. When the language is "updated", what it shows is an attempt to better understand the plot so that audience members are fully aware of what every line means. When it comes to Shakespeare, we do not need to know what every line means. Has anyone actively seen a Shakespeare play and not followed what was going on? We need to have more trust in the language. We need to trust that the language will get the point across even though it may be outdated. If you, as an audience member, are distressed that you didn't understand two specific lines of text and are worried that it will ruin the experience for you, you are obviously not watching Shakespeare correctly. Additionally, if you are reading a poem and you are unable to understand the meaning of every single word, is it really the best idea to change the words that the poet wrote because you don't trust the them to get the meaning and emotions across? Shakespeare chose those words carefully; he is a poet. To change those words because so many people in this generation are perplexed by the poetic writing style and word choice is just a disservice to the bard and to those of us who understand and appreciate Shakespeare's works.
This article brings up an interesting discussion about the nature of performance and audience comprehension. For Shakespeare's plays were generally understood by the audience of his day, whereas now audiences are expected to have prior knowledge about the content, structure, and language to fully understand. If people can't understand, how are they able to appreciate the story and more importantly, the message? What can be even more confusing is the fact that language changes over time, thus the few words that we are actually familiar with mean something else entirely in the context of a given show. As I do not by any means consider myself to be a scholar of Shakespeare by any means, the ability to watch a live performance of a given show is an invaluable experience, for the act of reading the script can often become too removed from the context of the actual piece. Being able to hear the words being spoken out loud, in combination with tone, pitch, facial movements and body language, can often make the meaning perfectly clear.
I love this idea so much. Although I really love watching Shakespeare, it usually takes me at least three tries to be able to process all of the information in the play. It shouldn't take me that long to interpret something in my first language. A lot of theatre purists might be opposed to this because of how iconic his plays are, but theatre is all about innovation and advancement. Imagine how many more kids would love the works of Shakespeare if they could actually understand it. So many more high schoolers wouldn't dread reading Macbeth in their English classes if they could more easily interpret it. One of the most important lines in this articles is "I suspect that Shakespeare himself, in his eagerness to reach audiences, would be perplexed by the idea that our job today is to settle for only half understanding his work". If Shakespeare really wanted to reach such a large group of people, I think he'd praise OSF for pursing this. I really hope that I'll one day be able to see the finished result, and that these new translations get more people interested in theatre.
I am a huge lover of Shakespeare and all of his works. I love to read his writing and take extra-long to figure out what he was trying to say. I personally do not like the idea of an updated, more present-day translation of his works because learning the meaning of his words is part of the process of doing Shakespeare. There are a lot of people who would love to have easier translations of his works so they can understand it better and that’s totally okay for them. However, I am a person who reads fast and doesn’t have a lot of comprehension afterwards so when a text makes me stop and re-read one line over and over till I understand what it is saying intrigues me and helps me learn and remember. So even though this new translation will help people understand what Shakespeare was saying I hope that his real words never get lost because there is something beautiful always to be found in them.
I think this ultimately comes down to an argument of elitism vs. exposure. Shakespeare, obviously, has some really dynamic interesting storylines to offer the world. As fans and creators of theatre can continue to demand our audience rise to the Shakespeare level while simultaneously using every medium outside of the script to help deliver theatre meaning of the lines, or we can give a bit and make things more accessible. For myself, in order to fully enjoy Shakespeare’s work live I must be familiar with the story line. If we assume that’s true for most, which I think is safe to do, we are restricting our audience to only those who have already read Shakespeare. I knew when reading the title of this that people would be angry, but when you don’t continue to keep your audience expanding your show closes, your art form dies. In no way am I saying we need to start performing no fear Shakespeare, but accessibility kees things going.
Quite often, out of a purist love for Shakespeare and as someone who credits him a lot for creating the art which has constructed the framework of my life, I very easily balk at the thought of "translating" his work. Shouldn't such language only challenge designers and directors and actors further to communicate the story through their work? However, I must remind myself that if theatre could be done without 90% of its language, Shakespeare would be a long forgotten name by now. As hard as it is to swallow, I think the more accessible we can make the theatre we want to keep around, the better chance we have of putting on these productions successfully again and again and again. To leave Shakespeare untranslated is more of a disservice to the life span of his stories than expecting every audience member to "rise to his level." And besides, it's no secret that Shakespeare was not by any means a perfect man. Should we really expect audiences to aspire to the mental status of a man who did not often consider his own personality worth aspiring to? For Shakespeare to ask high intellect of his audiences would have been to undermine his own views on the complex human psyche. The best we can do is help audiences to better comprehend the depth of thought he had by making such thought more communicable to them. In the end, we who adore the original texts will always be able to go back to them - but not everyone has that option, and we as theatre artists must be considerate of this if we wish our craft's survival.
I can see both sides of an effort like this. On one hand, I am someone who loves poetry and enjoys the way words sound and flow in texts like Shakespeare’s. I think there is definitely something to be said about the way words feel, as opposed to just understanding what they mean. However, just because I value the beauty of Shakespeare’s verses doesn’t mean I usually understand them by any stretch of the imagination. I will be the first to admit that seeing a Shakespeare show is usually a very confusing experience for me. I have a hard time following the plot of most moderately- involved shows, let alone one where everything happens at once, and is written in old english. In my AP English class last year, my teacher was a huge Hamlet fan, and we spent almost four months discussing Hamlet. The large majority of that time, in and outside of class, was spent trying to “translate” what was happening into terms we could understand. Only after that was done could we take the time to delve deeper into the meanings of the words that were being said. And, as the article states, Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed, and there isn’t much use in performing something the audience isn’t able to process. In that regard, I totally agree with the idea of updating Shakespeare to make it more accessible. I don’t think this means that we are totally, from now on, rejecting the idea of the honesty and sentimentality of performing original Shakespeare. If anything, we will now be able to produce a wider variety of Shakespeare experiences, and perhaps make it more of a viable option for people who would usually dismiss Shakespeare as pretentious.
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