Ok, I give. Not that I have a vote anymore, but I concede that if we are going to continue teaching Shakespeare’s plays to high school kids, we need to provide them with modern English translations. Please understand, though, that this capitulation pierces my heart.
I used to get a huge buzz whenever a high school student would read, comprehend, and appreciate something that Mr. Shakespeare, whoever he was, said in the original Elizabethan language. And I grieve too, for some of the beautiful phrases that have been corrupted by our modern speech patterns. Two examples: when Hamlet said, “what a piece of work is man,” he meant that a man is a magnificent creation. These days, we only use “piece of work” in the bitterest sarcasm. When Hamlet spoke of a man as being “in apprehension, how like a god,”* he likely meant that man’s capacity for understanding things was almost beyond the mortal ken. Now, of course, “apprehension” is something that indicates a possible need for prescription medication.
And old King James. I am not a religious person these days, but having cut my teeth on the elegant language in his version of the Bible, I can still be moved to tears by some of its passages.
Consider these two biblical passages:
“And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid” vs “Then an angel of the Lord appeared to them. A bright light from God shone all around them. That frightened them very much.”
And these two from Hamlet:
“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action. . .” vs, say, “humans are awesome.” (I made that last part up.)
Anyway, those of us who get a big bang out of phrases like “I assure my good liege, I hold my duty as I hold my soul” might be a vanishing breed. With a somewhat heavy heart, I agree that “Boss, I won’t let you down” can get the same message across to a wider audience. However, if you ever want someone with whom to ponder the relative merit of phrases like “man delights not me,” or to giggle over some five-hundred-year-old jokes, then I’m your huckleberry.
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For your further edification:
*There has, apparently, been a generations-long scholarly argument about the placement of the commas. English teachers love this stuff!
hamlet what a piece of work is man original language – Bing images
Shakespeare’s Original Hamlet Text: Act 2, Scene 2 (nosweatshakespeare.com)
LUKE CHAPTER 2 KJV (kingjamesbibleonline.org)
Luke 2 – EasyEnglish Bible (EASY)
I’m your huckleberry youtube – Search (bing.com)
I’ve been nearly moved to tears by the articulate use of our language by those in the past. The authors were not as lofty as those you mentioned. They were more humble which made their writing feel to me like something once available, now lost. I have marveled at observations written in such detail and at their wonderous sensitivity.
Evelyn, I am with some humility going to pose a few questions. Do you think that the general population fully understood what Shakespeare wrote? Does language reflect our intellect or maybe types of intellects? Are we losing ground?
Wow, what good questions you ask. I think that with every passing generation it gets harder for people to understand Shakespeare, because the living language keeps changing. (I get a mental image of teachers from earlier generations insisting that students read Chaucer the way he wrote it, which started like this: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote. . .” (word’s correct function is losing its mind as I type this). What would be the point of that?
And I love modern English! Everybody loves to dump on English because it is such a mishmash of other languages, where sometimes the evolution of the spelling failed to keep up with the evolution of the pronunciation, etc. But the truth is, many times I have struggled to find the right word or phrase for a thought or feeling, and very rarely have I come up empty. There are just so many words and phrases to choose from.
So no, I really don’t think we are losing ground per se. Maybe it’s just that I’m. . .sentimental.
I know I’m going to be thinking about your questions for a while! Thank you, my friend.
Oh, and what I said about modern speech patterns–I think there are way too many people who barely skim the surface of what modern English can do. But I bet the same was true in Shakespeare’s day too.
Older daughter needed a Bible for Sunday School, and I vow I stood in the bookstore for twenty minutes with the version the class wanted her to have in one hand and the King James version with its beautiful, if sometimes not understandable, poetry, in the other… I walked out with the King James version.
Good for you! That’s a “modern English” translation that added nothing much and took away a lot.
I once had a certain book of modern poetry, and still remember parts of one poem: “said the bishop, eating his ketchup,” and “the hairy sky, that I take for a coverlet comfortably.” Mama was reading this and put it down in disgust and picked up Tarzan of the Apes, probably long since taken off library shelves. She said they just don’t write like ERB anymore. Her example was when Tarzan, still marooned with his tribe of apes and only speaking ape language, had saved the life of the French soldier who became his lifelong friend. The Frenchman asked in writing (Tarzan had taught himself to read and write from books he found in his father’s cabin, but could not speak it) what he could do to repay the debt. Tarzan wrote back, “Teach me to speak the language of men.”
Ah yes, that ketchup-eating bishop underneath his hairy sky. I hope the poet sees this and owns himself a charlatan after all these years. The mental image of that just freaks me out. I can just see Mama’s face!
The part about the Tarzan passage that I really appreciate is that, just because you can read and write a language doesn’t mean you can speak and understand it, a concept that other movies and books have conveniently ignored.
May we all spend our lives learning the language of men!
I try to be humble about my efforts to have my poetry published… how in the world did that poem get published??? And for what reason???
I’m about to google it. . .apparently it has not gained any traction in recent years. Maybe it is mercifully extinct. As to why: Emperor’s New Clothes!
Yes, language changes so the challenges we have as to even being sure which word Chaucer was using would not have been the issue to his contemporaries. I was wondering if his contemporaries had more complexity in their own writing and greater appreciation for the nuance in his. There may be examples of letters in library archives or museums that could answer my question. Perhaps this is one of those questions for which there is no answer unless I am willing and able to research it myself!
If you have any knowledge about this to pass on, I welcome it and courtesy to your teacheriness! 🙂
It’s a good question! I am getting a mental picture of a crowd of theater goers from his day. The stood, I believe, in a sort of cattle-pen area, probably complete with straw on the floor, and came armed with rotten food in case they got bored. I wonder if that’s just a stereotype.
Could be too they were like families sitting down to a Disney movie. Some were there for the highbrow stuff, and the others just to laugh at the pratfalls.
I live an hour-ish outside a major Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario. It runs from April to November every year and there are always school age folks in the audience. I think that the number of phrases Shakespeare contributed to the English language is staggering. It’s important for people to understand the evolution of language as well as the root of so many popular culture references.
I agree it needs to be more accessible, but there are many ways to do that beyond a full localization to current vernacular. I mean, that might be the hook, but hearing the lilt and beautiful imagery by the Bard himself feels important to the process.
But I’m a Word nerd who took her now grown kid to see a play at Stratford every year since he was 12, so your mileage may vary .
Hi, Mary! My favorite Shakespeare-with-high-school-kids was when we read an abridged version of Midsummer NIght’s Dream (60-minute Shakespeare by Cass Foster). All of the language was the original, but making it a bit shorter helped the kids not get bogged down, I think. Anyway, they loved it. And I do agree that it would be a shame to let all of that beautiful language go by the wayside. Compromise, as you say, must be the answer. Long live the Bard!
I seem to remember when reading Shakespeare in high school English that in the margins there were translations.
Some of the textbooks I used had footnotes, which in my opinion slowed it down even more. Somewhere there is a happy medium!
For some strange reason I bought a copy of Beowulf to read again… haven’t started yet, but it will definitely need translation help!
I think Beowulf might actually be written in Middle English? Almost a foreign language, so yes, translation is in order for that one! Such a strange, sad story. Whenever Beowulf comes up, I always mention “Grendel” by John Gardner. A fascinating take from the monster’s point of view. Enjoy!
Here is another comment about across the cultures (referencing the Tarzan quote) and your Shakespearean article. This from the fiction book about Nomusa, the Zulu girl. Nomusa was sent off to get an English education because she wanted to become a nurse. She felt quite at home with the first English author she read because his name was Shake-a-spear.
I wonder if those books are still around? It would be fun to read them again.