MMmmmmm this is fantastic. Anyone else read it yet? Well, go do it. it's on the main page, and, in my opinion, is lovely and very poetic (especially for those who generally dislike shakespeares writings, such as myself)
- Leaf (II)
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Wow. I just read through it, and it really IS very good. Most of the changes mainly appear to be explanatory asides meant to clarify more esoteric terminology or plot points, but they fulfill this function admirably without getting in the way of the original language too much.
Posted by ricree101 (Member # 7749) on :
I haven't gotten that far yet, but so far I really liked the job that he did with the opening dialog between Sampson and Gregory. It was always kind of sad that the play on words had lost a lot of their meaning, and didn't have the effect that I'm sure they did for the original audience.
Posted by WntrMute (Member # 7556) on :
The problem is that there is still a large young audience that won't understand. Fortunately, there is THIS.
Enjoy.
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
Okay, so I'm guessing "WTF AER U ROMEO" is the modern day equivalent of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Lol!!!!1
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
No. It'd be "Y U ROMEO?"
Posted by Omega M. (Member # 7924) on :
I've just read the opening and skimmed through the rest, but I agree that it's much more understandable than the original. It still seems too mannered to really "grab" me, but that's probably Shakespeare's fault. Maybe I'd like it better if OSC rewrote it (as a play, short story, or novel) from the ground up, preserving all scenes and events but not worrying at all about sticking to Shakespeare's words. Better yet, maybe he could do this with one of Shakespeare's "big five" tragedies!
So how long has this been in the making? I recall an OSC comment from a while ago that non-English speakers have a better experience of Shakespeare than English speakers, because the former get to read Shakespeare translated into their current idiom while the latter are stuck with trying to parse Elizabethan English; but I never heard him say he was working on this. Is he going to stage it?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:It still seems too mannered to really "grab" me, but that's probably Shakespeare's fault.
Somewhere, a hummingbird was zipping along quite contentedly when your words drifted by, viciously ripping its wings from their sockets and hurling it into the sharp rocks below. Repeatedly.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
This makes me incredibly sad and depressed. I am first of all amazed that a play written in English is felt by so many to require "translation." Old terminology a problem? Learn it! It's not that hard with a little effort. Turning everything into modern idiom completely deprives the reader/audience of the richness of Shakespeare's English.
I am even more sad that all of you seem to approve of, and even prefer, the translated version. This really is a sign that our high schools and colleges are failing our culture.
I have read about the first 20 lines of OSC's translation. It does not translate...it alters the meaning.
In Shakepeare's original, the following exchange occurs (forgive the formatting):
quote: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague's. GREGORY That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall. SAMPSON True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague's men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall. GREGORY The quarrel is between our masters and us their men. SAMPSON 'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the maids, and cut off their heads. GREGORY The heads of the maids? SAMPSON Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads; take it in what sense thou wilt.
In OSC's version, it becomes:
quote: GREGORY.
Ay, the dog will heel, or sit, or stay at his master’s command, but when he sees you, he’ll go to the wall.
SAMPSON.
His back to the wall, you mean.
GREGORY.
His back! The only Montagues that run from you are their maidens.
SAMPSON.
As well they should! For once I’ve thrashed a Montague, I kick his dog and slap his sister.
Slap his sister? Kick his dog? In the Original, Sampson is talking about rape. His threat is full of meanness and menace. In OCS's version, the threat is taken down to the level of the Hardy Boys.
Why? Why sanitize? Why alter one of the greatest plays ever written? This is far worse than colorizing old b&w movies. If Shakespeare's play presents problems for a modern audience, it's the responsibility of the modern audience to educate itself and overcome them.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:If Shakespeare's play presents problems for a modern audience, it's the responsibility of the modern audience to educate itself and overcome them.
I'm curious: why do you feel that way? What about a play makes it immune to changing cultural mores?
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Tom,
I never said it was immune. Romeo and Juliet was written over 400 years ago, and English literature and theater has been through many tremendous changes since then. Yet somehow people, even centuries later - during, say, the Victorian era, when attitudes and literary differences were already drastically different from Elizabethan times - did not need Shakespeare translated.
Romeo and Juliet (and many other Shakespeare plays) was routinely read by middle-school kids from all walks of life in schools even just fifty years ago. And yet now, suddenly, the language presents a problem?
I fear for what Harlan Ellison has referred to as the "twilight of the word." Our cultural understanding and appreciation of literature - especially the poetic uses of langauge - have become so shallow that most people don't even seem willing to try anything difficult any more. Great literature requires that you make a journey to grasp it - not that you drag it kicking and screaming, and heavily mutilated, into the present. What can you learn if you force your preconceptions and (frankly) modern laziness on a canonical work? Art should not be easy. There are many layers to Shakespeare, and Card's re-write obliterates them.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: Romeo and Juliet (and many other Shakespeare plays) was routinely read by middle-school kids from all walks of life in schools even just fifty years ago. And yet now, suddenly, the language presents a problem?
I wouldn't say it's sudden; the inaccessibility of Shakespeare was even observed by Dickens. But you continue to make assumptions here that I don't think you're properly proving:
"Great literature requires that you make a journey..." "Art should not be easy."
I want to know why you assume these things.
Posted by Aliette de Bodard (Member # 9099) on :
There's a saying in Italian: "Every translator is a traitor". That said, I agree Card's translation loses quite a lot of the original meaning (but then, I also agree there was a moment of struggle to get to the point where I understood the Shakespeare bits ).
"Adaptation" might be a more valid term.
Posted by Omega M. (Member # 7924) on :
Hmm, you're right; OSC's version of the passage you quoted really is weaker than the original. And reading the original just now I didn't find it mannered at all. Nobody would ever talk like that in real life, but that's true for all fiction.
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever read Shakespeare I didn't like at least a little; and I've read a lot that I've liked very much. But when I read him I don't find myself wanting to bow down in awe of him the way Harold Bloom etc. think we should. Some people seem to think not only that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English or the greatest writer ever, but that it's impossible for any future writer ever to equal him (because he's already said everything worth saying); and I don't see how you could prove such a claim. I was probably reacting to critics like this when I talked about hating Shakespeare.
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
quote:Nobody would ever talk like that in real life, but that's true for all fiction.
I don't see that at all. I rarely read good fiction that doesn't have believable or realistic dialogue. Plays are a different story, though.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
Two purposes here: 1. To translate for modern comprehension; 2. To have a production suitable for a church-based community theatre.
If I were preparing this translation for publication, I would keep the bawdry and the violent implications - or at least more of it. But also you must remember that in Shakespeare's time, the idea of rape as concomitant with victory in battle was not so repulsive, culturally, as it is now; that is, it was recognized as "what happens" and as something a low-class person might boast of intending. Now it would be regarded as monstrous, and the speaker of the lines as repulsive. Stronger? OF course. But would Shakespeare use it in this position, in this play? Doubtful. Still ... translation would lead me to stay much closer to the original if I were not ALSO preparing it for production in a different setting. Shakespeare also adapted his works (or so we believe) when performing in front of different audiences - performances at court surely omitted language here and there that would be bound to offend or bother royalty.
As for the fact that the play is still somewhat difficult to understand, I brought it to the level where I knew I could get the actors to make it instantly clear to the audience; in other words, I kept the Shakespearean "feel." We have to recognize that when we "translate" Shakespeare, we can do it at different levels: A wholly modern one (which I will someday attempt), and this kind, which preserves the kind of language we think of as "Shakespearean" while allowing comprehension.
My version could be produced in a high school without fear of parental outrage. That's one legitimate use (for production; not at all for STUDY of Shakespeare); I would prepare a different script for production in a different setting.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
I'll address a few points.
OSC said:
quote: Two purposes here: 1. To translate for modern comprehension; 2. To have a production suitable for a church-based community theatre.
Starting with #2 - that explains things a little bit. I would point out, however, that Shakespeare's plays have been performed across England in Church-based community theatres for centuries, right into the present, without any need for expurgation or translation - save for the usual edits to reduce running time.
#1 is what I really take issue with. Tom's remark about Dickens aside (and I'd like to be sourced on that), Shakespeare was widely read and performed for pleasure in Victorian England, and in the States for that matter. You'll find many characters in Victorian novels quoting Shakespeare, and often times the novels themselves overtly or covertly reference Shakespearean plot-lines (for a darkly ironic example of this - check out Hardy's The Woodlanders). Many members of the working class, who could not afford to buy the latest Dickens or Bronte, could buy cheap editions of Shakespeare and other dead poets. They were read widely and enjoyed.
OSC also said:
quote: If I were preparing this translation for publication, I would keep the bawdry and the violent implications - or at least more of it. But also you must remember that in Shakespeare's time, the idea of rape as concomitant with victory in battle was not so repulsive, culturally, as it is now; that is, it was recognized as "what happens" and as something a low-class person might boast of intending. Now it would be regarded as monstrous, and the speaker of the lines as repulsive. Stronger? OF course. But would Shakespeare use it in this position, in this play? Doubtful. Still ... translation would lead me to stay much closer to the original if I were not ALSO preparing it for production in a different setting.
The issue of the setting aside, all of this, for me, tends to support the preservation of the original language. No, Shakespeare would not write it that way today. Then again, he probably would not have employed Elizabethan English, or written a play about two underage teens who fall in love and then kill themselves. The play would not exist today - it is a product of its time, a very different time from ours, and you cannot exctricate the play from its time. But those differences between then and now are exciting and wondrous - to be treasured and not "translated."
Shakespeare may very well have adapted his plays for different audiences. Again, beside the point. The definitive folio editions are what have lasted, and those are what have also informed western literature for the last four centuries. This is why there is so much reverence for Shakespeare, as Harold Bloom notes, there is no idea you can have that he has not also had, no concept that would startle him. Any book or play you encounted today feels his influence.
More a little later...work calls.
[ February 03, 2006, 12:55 PM: Message edited by: KidB ]
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:But those differences between then and now are exciting and wondrous - to be treasured and not "translated."
Again, I'm wondering why you feel this way. Are they something akin to mortal scripture?
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:I rarely read good fiction that doesn't have believable or realistic dialogue.
It seems to me that most fiction, even good fiction, is required to have either long dull passages of exposition, which many authors try to avoid, or sneak it into dialog, making the exposition more palatable, but making the dialog less believable and realistic.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
KidB -- I'm wondering how much far you believe this. Do you think that people reading translations of Chaucer are robbing themselves of the delight of experiencing it in the original language? What about Beowulf? The Illiad? Don Quixote? The Ring Cycle? Should no art be translated, or is it just Shakespear?
Posted by WntrMute (Member # 7556) on :
quote:Originally posted by KidB: Tom,
I never said it was immune. Romeo and Juliet was written over 400 years ago, and English literature and theater has been through many tremendous changes since then. Yet somehow people, even centuries later - during, say, the Victorian era, when attitudes and literary differences were already drastically different from Elizabethan times - did not need Shakespeare translated.
"Err" yourself. Your own link explains that Bowdler's purpose was primarly expurgation of "offensive" bits. He did not modernise the language.
Look, there are two different issues here, so let's seperate them out to avoid further confusion.
1. Expurgation. This is not my main complaint. While I have seen a number of Church-based community Shakespeare productions that left in some very saucy material without incident, I understand that attutudes vary from one community to another and that the sensibilities of the audience must be taken into account. That's fine. Cutting scenes and shortening passages is routine for peforming Shakespeare - the plays are rarely done without edits for one reason or another.
2. Re-writing or "translating" what remains. This is what I take issue with.
Mr. Ph asked "how far" I would take it. The other works he cites are written in different languages, and are therefor translated. This seems like a no-brainer to me. (Though Chaucerian English is not so different as you might think, you can start to get the hang of it with just an hour of instruction and a few more of practice).
Shakespeare, however is IN ENGLISH. As in, the language you and I speak. The language that English theatre audiences hear when they attend several of these plays a year. The language that every British actor uses from the onset of acting-class. If you find something difficult about Shakespeare, I'd contend that it's not the vocabulary - which is very easy to get used to - but the structure. Which, I'm sorry, does require that you pay attention and think. Which is why Shakespeare is fun and engaging.
What I'm objecting to is the approval of "making it easier." This is our spoon-fed, consumerist culture talking here. As readers, we have become lazy. The funny thing is, Shakespeare really is not that difficult, with just a little work.
Tom,
I don't know how else to say it, except to say that I'm amazed you even have to ask. How can any curious and imaginitive person ask that question? I feel like you should explain why anyone should seek to erase these historical differences by creating a modern idiom. If you re-write the words to make it "easier" you're not introducing people to Shakespeare at all, but to something else entirely.
Shakespeare is the basis of modern English literature. No matter how often the plays are performed, they are never exhausted by interpretation or performance - they always yield new things when you revisit them.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
I've since gone through and compared other parts of the text - and there are, indeed, large sections that are mostly unaltered in OCS'c version. Perhaps I was thrown by the initial differences in the opening scene.
Queen Mab's speech retains much it's atmosphere, though I'm not sure why "atomies" must become "sneezes."
So I'll retract what I said about Card's re-write robbing the audience of the experience. It mitigates it a bit.
More than anything else I'm reacting to the attitude I see here that somehow Shakespeare is too difficult for us modern readers to bother with. I've seen this before with complaints about Dickens as well - that "all those words just get in the way." It's this utilitatian attitude to language that I find harmful.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:It's this utilitatian attitude to language that I find harmful.
I used to feel that way, too, until I recalled that language IS utilitarian. It's beautiful as well, but language without meaning, as beautiful as it may be, is failed and useless.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Language in literature is not utilitarian, unless you incorrectly conflate "having a purpose" with "utilitarian."
And...do you contend that Shakespeare uses language without meaning?
Posted by docmagik (Member # 1131) on :
I think we need to remember what it really is that Card is doing. He is absolutely not breaking in to every university library and swapping pages of text. That would be wrong, and harmful, and would undo everything the Bard was doing.
Instead, he's adapting. He's creating a somewhat altered version that is more accessible to the audience he's perfoming for.
On a whim this week, I picked up the book version of I Know What You Did Last Summer--the book that even the author felt was ruined by the SMG/Freddie Prinze movie. I didn't see any signs of ruination anywhere. Everything seemed to be pretty much how the author had originally written it (including such insane things as having the guys say lines like, "Oh, Jill, in that pink shirt you look just like a tea rose).
The book was still there, unaltered by whatever the movie had been.
Now if the movie had been any good, even if somewhat altered from the original story, it would have sent readers to the original book en masse, who then could have discovered what the author had originally intended.
In this case--and I have not read the entire book, so I don't know whodunit yet--but the author's real gripe wasn't so much about the fact she'd been adapted as it was about the complete change they'd made in the storyline. Where her story is about the fear that guilt brings, the movie is about psychotic fishermen serial killers. The author's daughter was actually murdered by a serial killer, and so the change--using serial killing as entertainment--was morally offensive to her.
I know that's a lot about a fairly unimportant book and movie, but I think it illustrates the same point as here.
Yes, in order to get the full effect of Shakespeare, you would want to read him in the original. However, two things stand in the way of this.
The first is that it requires some effort for most of us to ajust our thinking to get into it. It's like when I watched Dear Frankie. It was in english, but the accents were so thick that at first I had to turn on the subtitles. I stopped needing them after about half an hour, but it took a minute for my mind to "wrap" itself around what they were speaking. I read Shakespeare using side-by-side texts with "translations" alongside. Often, I stop needing to rely on the translations so much, but they help me get into the language and rhythm of the story. In a play, there isn't the luxury of either subtitles or the back-and-forth of a text reading, so doing it this way will probably help to bring in the lay audience.
The second thing is the fact that most high school english classes have brought so many Americans to the belief that Shakespeare can't be understood. Since he can't be understood, he isn't worth it. What adaptations like this do is help those people who believe that see that he is worth it. The stories are engaging and funny and emotional and wonderful. Hopefully, these adaptations give the audience an engaging and funny and emotional and wonderful experience that they will come to associate with Shakespeare stories, and, at best, they will drive the readers back to the original.
Now if you were arguing that Card were altering the meaning or the message of the play in some serious way--like in the movie example, or as in Bowdler's making Ophelia's death "accidental"--that might be different. But I personally dissagree with the idea that adaptations feed the idea that Shakespeare is too difficult to bother with. When done well, adaptations show those with that attitude exactly why he's worth bothering with.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
doc,
Even though you disagree with me, I'm glad that you see where I'm coming from.
As to the goodness/badness of an "adaptation" it's all a matter of degree. I can't object to editing for length, or to slipping in a word-change here and there to avoid confusion (not in all cases, but where an artifact of language would lead to an obvious misdirection for a modern audience). Re-writing or adding lines is another matter. I think Card's version is borderline.
But I think you've conceeded most of my major points. Given the differences in the opening passage, the description of the work as an "adaptation" AND "translation," and the early posts noting a marked difference while complaining of the difficulty and wordiness of the original, I was expecting drastic differences all the way through.
I prefer footnotes for reading Shakespeare, though most of the differences I can intuit. For seeing it performed - usually I try to read it first.
I agree with what you said about our high-schools. That really is the crux of the problem. High school ruins literature.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:High school ruins literature.
So, I suspect, does the opinion that literature should be pinned to a page and trapped inside glass.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Tom,
Please explain, with reference to my own statements, why anything I've said here argues that literature should be "pinned to a page and trapped inside glass."
I'll go make popcorn.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:If you find something difficult about Shakespeare, I'd contend that it's not the vocabulary - which is very easy to get used to - but the structure. Which, I'm sorry, does require that you pay attention and think. Which is why Shakespeare is fun and engaging.
Wow. You make it sound about as fun as doing long division.
Posted by Uprooted (Member # 8353) on :
I think an adapted version of Shakespeare is better than no version at all. As a kid, I remember loving my picture-book version of As You Like It. But I'd hate to imagine the original plays being set aside and never studied by high school students. (And yes, I did note that OSC made that point in his post.) There is a beauty in his language that it's worth the work to get used to, and I think we're doing kids a disservice if we don't ask them to study it. Shakespearean language isn't as far removed from Modern English as Canterbury Tales and Beowulf, so I think it's worth stretching ourselves to master. And as far as the Iliad and so forth -- I haven't studied classical languages, but I have no doubt that the experience of reading Homer in Greek would far surpass my muddlings through English translations.
Part of the reason I think reading Shakespeare's own language is so valuable is because our idiom is filled with allusions to his words. I feel the same way about the King James Version of the Bible. No, not the original Hebrew/Greek by any means, and perhaps not always the most accurate translation. But it is the translation that has enriched our language. I just think it's beautiful, and that's subjective; I feel the same way about Shakespeare. If that's pinning literature to a page and viewing it through glass, then so be it.
Then there's the whole different question of whether plays should be read as literature rather than enjoyed as stage performances as they were intended. Perhaps this is part of the "high school ruins literature" problem. I don't know -- but I do know that I am grateful for the English teachers who got us through a Shakespeare play a year in high school. I didn't always love it, but I would probably have been too lazy to do it on my own, and it helped instill in me a love for literature. I wish every high school student could see an excellent stage production of Shakespeare; I know I suffered through the old movie versions we watched (I'm old) to accompany our study.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Ditto everyting Uprooted said.
Mr. ph,
I'm sorry that paying attention and thinking are such unpleasant tasks for you.
Look folks, I'm not some retired mossback English professor who's chosen to spend his retirement harassing wayward youths on the internet. I'm a youngish, Ritalin-popping, American Idol watching, video-game playing ADHD freak like the rest of you.
However, I also have tremendous curiosity about the past, especially when it comes to literature. And I have noticed that many of my age-group - generations X, Y, and Z - harbor grave misconceptions about "old" literature, and are largely unware of what our culture is now in danger of losing forever. As I said, much of this has to do with the dumbing-down of our literature classes, and lowered expectations. But I think there has been an overall decline in our ability to read and write eloquently, and confront complex texts, across the board. Our newspaper articles are getting shorter and shallower, our textbooks more sterile, our literature more "utilitarian." The language of the Victorian novel, considered by many now to be "wordy" or overlong, is actually remarkably efficient when properly viewed, but somehow our system is not conveying this. Often, teachers who discuss older novels do not even understand them properly, at a basic level (as when Thomas Hardy is portrayed as a rustic nature-lover).
Talk to your grandparents someday, and ask what they read for fun as kids. Kipling! Robinson Crusoe! And...Shakespeare! And now most adults find this too difficult to be worth their time. This is bad news.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
Hey, I read Shakespeare (real Shakespeare) for fun myself as a kid. You're going to be pretty wrong if you make assumptions about what I'm like just because I disagree with you about this.
quote: The language of the Victorian novel, considered by many now to be "wordy" or overlong, is actually remarkably efficient when properly viewed
Please elaborate on this opinion.
Posted by WntrMute (Member # 7556) on :
We're up to generation Z now? Good gravy.
I guess we'll have to sterilize them all, though, since we've run out of letters -- how will we know what stereotypical assumptions to make about them, unless we have some trite name for them as a collective?
Unless....we could always bring back the letters 'thorn': þ (it stands for voiceless 'th' like 'thin') and 'eth': ð (voiced 'th' as in 'the') and just use ðose. I þink ðat'll work out perfectly.
Posted by docmagik (Member # 1131) on :
I vote for the letters in Dr. Seuss's "On Beyond Zebra."
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Mr. ph,
I make no assumptions about you. Your comment about "long division" sounded like a petulant reaction to "thinking and paying attention."
Sorry to offend.
As for "elaborating" - this will require a somewhat lengthy analysis of a sample passage. I do not have the time now, but will happily indulge you, time permitting, after the weekend.
Here's the brief version: The structure of a sentence, the sequence of phrases and careful word-choice, says as much as the words themselves. Victorian novelists also often relied on what was then "popular" culture - a broad and comprehensive familiarity with the Bible, with Greco-Roman and sometimes Teutonic mythology, and in many cases with Shakespeare. They were thus able to embed a rich symbolic layer within the surface narrative. For a quickie example, read the opening line of Great Expectations, and then the first line of King James' Book of John. See a similarity? Not a coincidence.
Posted by solo (Member # 3148) on :
quote:Originally posted by KidB: This is why there is so much reverence for Shakespeare, as Harold Bloom notes, there is no idea you can have that he has not also had, no concept that would startle him. Any book or play you encounted today feels his influence.
I really strongly disagree with this statement. The idea that nothing is new is not only untrue, but it is irrelevent. A story told by someone else is never the same story. We bring our own ideas to things and to say that "there is no idea you can have that he has not also had" elevates him to a godlike status. There is no one person who is the source of all originality on this earth. I refuse to accept that it's all been done. Sure, much of what is available in modern media is all rehashes of the same old stories but there is also much that isn't.
Also, some of your comments seem to imply that a work of literature written in our common vernacular is inherently inferior to something written centuries ago. This is sad to me. There is so much written word that has great power and beauty being produced. Sure, much of it is influence by Shakespeare but I am sure that the bard was influenced by the stories he read, the plays he saw, and the culture of his day.
Posted by A Rat Named Dog (Member # 699) on :
quote:... there is no idea you can have that he has not also had, no concept that would startle him ...
"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
"Also, some of your comments seem to imply that a work of literature written in our common vernacular is inherently inferior to something written centuries ago."
This seems important.
Posted by Amilia (Member # 8912) on :
quote:Then there's the whole different question of whether plays should be read as literature rather than enjoyed as stage performances as they were intended. Perhaps this is part of the "high school ruins literature" problem.
I will be forever grateful to my 11th grade English teacher who insisted that Shakespeare wrote plays, not novels, which were meant to be seen, not read. We watched MacBeth in class, and if we chose to write a report on one of Shakespeare's plays, we had to watch it either on stage or on screen. Because of this, I no longer fear Shakespeare. While I have difficutly reading the plays, I love watching them. I never understand a word of the first 15 minutes or so of a Shakespearian play, but then it is like my brain suddenly kicks itself into gear, and I understand everything from there on out.
The experience is similar to watching a foreign movie with subtitles. At first, it is very annoying trying to read the dialog and watch the action at the same time, but by the time you are half-way through the movie and get up to go into the kitchen for more popcorn, you are startled to realize that you no longer understand Italian now that you are not looking at the screen.
Posted by imogen (Member # 5485) on :
I think I agree with KidB.
And while I don't think OSC did a bad job by any means I question the idea of 'translating' Shakespeare into "the Shakespearean 'feel'."
If you want to adapt Shakespeare's works to fit modern day language well and good. Many have done it, and some have worked well.
But why 'translate' the work into a mock-Shakespearean lexicon? If you want the authenticity, stick with the original. If you want to make it accessible by modern English standards, translate it into modern English. I guess I just don't get the (what seems to me) faux-Shakespeare approach.
Posted by Orson Scott Card (Member # 209) on :
It's worth pointing out that productions of Shakespeare in Victorian times had CHANGED ENDINGS - Romeo and Juliet are interrupted just in time; Cordelia doesn't die; Othello finds out the truth without killing Cordelia; etc. It was considered quite revolutionary when the original endings were restored.
Church productions invariably change all the jokes that the church community will consider offensive - at least all those that the director GETS.
When directors are "cutting for length" how do you think they decide what is expendable? Bawdry is often the first to go, along with jokes that nobody will get. In other words, the usual solution is to cut so much humor and risque material that what is left is NOT the play Shakespeare intended; the lightening effect of the comedy is purged, and the result is much heavier (and longer-seeming, I might add) than the uncut version.
There is no "cutting for length" that is not also cutting something else; it always involves a judgment of what is expendable; and it is usually a confession of what the director does not wish to try to make intelligible to the audience.
As for the bawdry, let's remember that Shakespeare lived in a coarser time. Language and subject matters that were relatively mild in his time are far more indecorous today. The result is that some of his material is shocking in a way that he never intended; things his audience would have viewed merely with delight and a bit of pleasure at the discomfiture of the strait-laced Puritans now seem quite crude (though he didn't use words that we routinely use - words that were known and used in his day, but he chose not to; so he DID have limits and was careful about his decorum).
In particular, in the opening of R&J, when the servants "joke" about raping the women of their defeated foe, this wss NOT as socially appalling as it is now. Not that anyone approved, but it was recognized as a common event in war, AND the idea of forcing a woman was considered "rough sex," not "unspeakable violence" as it is today. This has actually changed in my lifetime - plenty of dirty jokes when I was a kid used the word "rape" almost interchangeably with "f---" - as a euphemism, in fact. (And look how Gerard Depardieu got into trouble with the same mistake.) It's a mistake to think that Shakespeare intended his words to have the effect they have in OUR culture. He didn't know our culture; you have to know enough about HIS culture to judge how his words were meant to be received, and then translate the jokes and wordplay etc. so they have the SAME effect today, relative to our culture. So as our culture changes, the translations must also change.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Oh, sure. When performing Shakespeare,the Victorians messed with endings, or performed only individual scenes in sideshows, all kinds of changes. I don't think that this was the case for reading Shakespeare - my understanding is that the orginal texts were available in book-form. If I'm wrong about this, please source me. All I noted before was that the Victorians did not need Shakespeare "translated."
But, OSC, I think you're conflating seperate issues that I've already tried to separate out here. I've already left behind any objection to making the play "church-appropriate". Certain jokes are offensive to certain audiences - that's all that needs to be said on that subject. Which is why I'm confused that you continue to make an unnecessarily problematic (and to me objectional) argument about cuts that I concede are defensible on "audience" grounds alone.
Specifcally:
quote: As for the bawdry, let's remember that Shakespeare lived in a coarser time. Language and subject matters that were relatively mild in his time are far more indecorous today. The result is that some of his material is shocking in a way that he never intended; things his audience would have viewed merely with delight and a bit of pleasure at the discomfiture of the strait-laced Puritans now seem quite crude.
He didn't know our culture; you have to know enough about HIS culture to judge how his words were meant to be received, and then translate the jokes and wordplay etc. so they have the SAME effect today, relative to our culture. So as our culture changes, the translations must also change.
My question - why should Shakespeare's plays be made reflect our cultural sensibilities? To me, the fact that they do not is one of the most exciting things about them.
Nobody in their right mind would today write, for popular entertainment, a play in which two teenagers fall in love and kill themselves. Imagine the outcry! For that matter, no writer wishing anything other than total obscurity and professional failure would write a play, or a movie script, or a novel in metered verse.
Everything about Shakespeare's plays signals that they are a product of a different time and a different sensibility. Sure, attitudes about rape were different. Then again, so were attitudes about Jews (Merchant of Venice), women (Taming of the Shrew), authority (Henry V), and a host of other issues. If I were to apply the same "adjustments" to these plays that you are suggesting for the dialogue concerning rape, the above plays could not be performed in anything like their original form - entire storylines would have to be drastically altered.
When you sit down to read/watch Shakespeare, the first thing on your mind should be "I am leaving the present day behind." The idea that certain lines were not meant to be "shocking" because his contemporary audience had a thicker skin is all the more reason for us to keep them. Aren't we adults enought to see past our initial "outrage" and enter, even if temporarily, into a different sensibility?
I suppose what I really have a problem with is the idea that an audience must be "protected" from unpleasant aspects of the past.
quote: So as our culture changes, the translations must also change
That's much more than just cleaning it up to make it church-friendly for a spceific production. I don't think you really mean what that statement implies, because it essentially implies the erasure of cultural history - accomodating modern impatience and prudery by sacrificing the bits we don't like, forever.
More tomorrow, re: victorians. Other work calls today.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Oh, sure. When performing Shakespeare,the Victorians messed with endings, or performed only individual scenes in sideshows, all kinds of changes. I don't think that this was the case for reading Shakespeare - my understanding is that the orginal texts were available in book-form.
How is this much different from what's happening here? OSC's translation is intended not to be read, but to be seen in a performance, and the original texts are still avilable in book form.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
mr. ph,
It is intended to be read. He put it on his website so people could read it. (And no disclaimer about "church-friendly version" is included.)
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: When you sit down to read/watch Shakespeare, the first thing on your mind should be "I am leaving the present day behind."
Why? Why do you believe literature becomes more important as a relic of history?
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
That's not what I said, Tom.
If you want a hyperbolic answer to your hyperbolic question:
"Relic" implies death, and I consider great literature to be living. How much can you dismember a living thing before it dies?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:"Relic" implies death, and I consider great literature to be living.
I mean it more in the specific sense of "artifact." If the first thing on your mind when reading Shakespeare is that you're attempting to experience his time and place, the literature itself becomes secondary to its anthropological value.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
This is silly, Tom. You're trying to box me into saying something you can easily disagree with.
I'm just saying that you have to be willing to be transported to be receptive to what literature has to offer. I'll elaborate more tomorrow.
Remember, the play was not only written in the past, it is also set in the past. Therefore, imagining and/or understanding the past is a crucial first step to entering into the world of play. Not that you have to understand all of it - just that you must be willing to accept that it occupies a different world. That is what makes the "universality" of the story even more moving.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: Remember, the play was not only written in the past, it is also set in the past.
But -- and this is also key -- it's set in a highly Anglicized medieval Italy that not only never existed but was massively altered for Shakespeare's audience. Do you believe this ruined the play for people, when he made this decision?
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
I don't have anything to add, but I'm really enjoying this discussion. Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Okay. The first thing I'd like to say today is that, had the "adapted and translated" R&J been described from the outset as a version produced for a local church-based production, I would not have even begun this discussion. Since it was not presented that way, and since I mistakenly thought the major changes in the opening scene were representative of what was done with the play as a whole - an impression furthered by posts at the beginning of the thread which noted a marked difference - I responded accordingly.
Now, I'm still defending those points I initially made because I think they are valid in general, even if not all of them are applicable to this case. So we are now largely arguing more in the abstract.
Onto Tom's comment:
quote: But -- and this is also key -- it's set in a highly Anglicized medieval Italy that not only never existed but was massively altered for Shakespeare's audience. Do you believe this ruined the play for people, when he made this decision?
Any setting or any narrative is more or less imaginary. Ursula K. LeGuin has made the point that the world of Jane Austen's novels is every bit as much a product of the imagination as Middle-Earth or her own Gethen. Shakespeare's plays are no different - they occupy imaginary worlds.
However, these imaginary worlds are constituted from reality - the reality in which the author lived. Everything about Romeo and Juliet is a product of Elizabethan sensibility.
For one thing, it is a tragedy. What is a tragedy? Our age produces very, very few of them - some would even argue none. We have plenty of stories with sad endings, but their status as genuine "tragedies" is arguable, as they often produce a sentimental reaction, or a sense that the tragic event was produced with a particular social condition, rather than a universal condition of reality. In a real tragedy, the tragic event is inevitable. The fact that a "minor accident" of timing produces it is, in fact, an indication that the universe will always find a way to frustrate mortals. R & J eroticizes death, and produces catharsis. The "feeling" of the play, a mixture of Greek/Aristotalian ideals filtered through Elizabethan understanding and its own concerns, is what produces that unmistakeable "Romeo and Juliet" feeling, in which delerious intoxication slides irrevocably into horror.
That's what the feeling is - but how is it produced? It is, of course, assembled out of langauge. The meter has powerful effect in and of itself. Additionally, Shakespeare was drunk on language, and his style - very much in keeping with his time - was meant to intoxicate and overwhelm. The wordplay was part of the visceral "thrill" of going to the theatre. Hence, characters are often ribald and raw. Some things "shock" us in the was that they would not have shocked Shakespeare's audience, but you do not restore the experience of Shakespeare's audience by removing the modern shock - that is an adjustment that cannot be made. No linearity of experience exists from one age to another. You may need to cut something from play to perform it for a particular crowd - but one should delude oneself that it is possible to compensate - in some mathematical sense - for changing sensibilities. Rather, it is better to be honest with what's happening - we prefer not to be shocked in this case. Personally, I think it is better to experience the shock - actually adding to the text for the specific purpose of producing comfort for the audience where none is intended runs the risk of altering more than just the scene in question. It begins to upset the delicate balance of characterization, poetry, etc.
For instance, two changes I have noted - in aformentioned opening scene, and Juliet's monologue at the beginning of Act 2. I give Card kudos for preserving the sense of worldplay, but in both cases the eroticized elements have been removed. Again, church-version, got it - but just as an example of how small changes can have larger overall effect, by removing the virginity/vulnerability idea in both cases, you are hewing away at the overall erotic charge of the text, which is a crucial element to the cathartic element - the tragic "feeling" - at the end. This is a play about young love, ideal but physical also, not just spiritually pure "platonic" love. Eros is ever present. Card's changes take some of that out. I'm not judging him for that - I'm just pointing out that it happens to make my larger case here.
More than anything else, I'm arguing about what one's intentions should be. Pruning a play to keep it alive, and give it power in performance, that's one thing. Pruning a play with the idea in your head that the play must be made "modern" to adjust for changing attitudes is another thing entirely, and will lead to different kinds of changes.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:Our age produces very, very few of them - some would even argue none.
Hm. I wouldn't argue that we produce no tragedies. Would you? Who would?
I would agree that, with the exception of horror movies, we produce very few works that imply the hand of fate, but I don't consider that to be an essential element of tragedy.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
quote: I would agree that, with the exception of horror movies, we produce very few works that imply the hand of fate, but I don't consider that to be an essential element of tragedy.
In the classical definition of "tragedy", it is essential. That was the definition I was speaking of.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I know. But I think the definition is flawed.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Baloney!
That's part of the classical definition of tragedy as it has been understood for centuries. This is not an arbitrary designation - there are very many good reasons why "Tragedy" is one specific thing and not another.
Tragic drama came into existence as a warning and a reconciliation of society to what humanity cannot control. It is a reminder that the gods, fate, etc. are more powerful than we are, and also, paradoxically, that our outrage at what occurs is important and needs an outlet.
[ February 06, 2006, 04:56 PM: Message edited by: KidB ]
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: Tragic drama came into existence as a warning and a reconciliation of society to what humanity cannot control.
As someone who neither believes in gods nor fate, I understandably find this a particularly worthless reconciliation. A cop-out, if you will. Again, it's worth appreciating for its anthropological value, along the lines of "ancient peoples sometimes wrote plays about the futility of human choice," but it seems odd to shackle an entire genre to what is, at the end of the day, only one of its historical conventions. You might as well say that comedies require marriages.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
quote: As someone who neither believes in gods nor fate, I understandably find this a particularly worthless reconciliation. A cop-out, if you will. Again, it's worth appreciating for its anthropological value, along the lines of "ancient peoples sometimes wrote plays about the futility of human choice," but it seems odd to shackle an entire genre to what is, at the end of the day, only one of its historical conventions. You might as well say that comedies require marriages.
You're joking...right? Because that argument is preposterous.
Of course you are free to believe whatever you wish. "Tragedy" as we know it was invented by the Greeks, and revived by western theatre. This is not me saying this - this is established history.
Besides, Shakespeare come right out and TELLS YOU at the beginning of the play:
quote: PROLOGUE Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. 5 From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life; Whole misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents' strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, 10 And the continuance of their parents' rage, Which, but their children's end, nought could remove, Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
He tells you that it's going to happen, that they are "marked" for death, and that this is the only way to mend the social rift. Fate! FATE!!!
Whether you believe in "the gods" is totally irelevant. I don't believe in ghosts. So "Hamlet" says nothing to me? Besides, many Greeks and Elizabethans did not take the supernatural literally - it was as much a symbolic expression of the condition of life (whose limitations must be respected). Sex was much more dangerous, possibly deadly, in Shakespeare's time than it is now - does this not result in a very real kind of "fate?"
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:He tells you that it's going to happen, that they are "marked" for death, and that this is the only way to mend the social rift. Fate! FATE!!!
Sure. *shrug* Why should I care? And why does that make something any more "tragic" than, say, the actual events of the play, in which the failure of the post office results in the death of three people?
Again, I'm hearing this "as it was, so shall it always be" thing from you, and I'm not sure why you feel that must be the case.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Dude.
This has nothing to do with "how I feel." I'm not going to spend any more time trying to fill in your education gaps here.
Google "Tragedy". Start with Greek tragedy, followed by Elizabethan theatre. Read Aristotle's poetics. Go to the library and learn something about the history of Western drama, and its connection to philosophy.
From my perspective this is like asking why I "feel" that gravity has something to do with the motion of the Earth around the sun.
Fate is integral to classical tragedy . The notion of events being beyond mortal control is part of the very essence of the experience. Tragedy is about our relationship to the cosmos, as seen by the ages that produced it. It's not just about a couple of kids who happen to die by accident. If their death is accidental, then it is also arbitrary, and has no dramatic meaning. Can you grasp that? Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote: Fate is integral to classical tragedy.
Perhaps you're new enough here to not realize that I'm intimately familiar with classical literature. Please do me the favor of assuming that I have in fact had a decent education in the arts.
My point is that while Fate may have been important to classical tragedy, it is far less so to modern tragedy -- which, despite your insistence to the contrary, remains tragedy nonetheless. And Romeo and Juliet, while paying lip-service to classical tragedy, certainly fits well into the mold of modern tragedy -- in which the actions of the protagonists result in their own destruction, even without the Hand of Fate intervening. From the modern perspective, Romeo and Juliet didn't die "by accident;" neither, however, was their death fated.
Now, sure, you can make the argument that Elizabethan theater was heavily indebted to classical theater, and thus it's impossible to "properly" appreciate Shakespeare (or, and I'd actually consider this a valuable argument, Marlowe) without also keeping classical dogma in mind. But I think you're actually doing to wind up damaging the plays by locking them in that box.
Your definition of "tragedy" plays out as if it's the only one in town.
Seriously, I understand where you're coming from. But your very narrow and academic focus is, I submit, absolutely akin to pinning Shakespeare under glass.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
No, you are wrong.
As I mentioned before, their death is inevitable, and is intended as such. You go into it knowing they are going to die. You are TOLD that they HAVE to die in the prologue to mend the feud. Your knowledge of their impending death hangs over every scene they have together. Lust and death are braided around one another repeatedly. The audience is not thinking "oh, gee, I wonder if they'll make it.." No, they are dead from the outset. Dead lovers walkin'. That is why the "heads of maidens/maidenhead" wordplay is more than just a joke - it establishes a theme. Sex/death - a very Elizabethan preoccupation.
It is much closer to classical tragedy than modern. Sure, Shakespeare was a precursor to many things modern, and you can argue that the hand of the author is part of the "fate" in this case. But if you claim that R & J "self-destruct" then you are totally missing the point of classical tragedy. People always do it to themselves! Usually without even realizing it! Hubris does not come into play in Shakespeare, so it is markedly different from Greek tragedy. Some would say more moralists. But claiming that R & J just represents an unfortante event and nothing more is wrong, wrong, wrong. Their love/lust is so great that it can only end in annihilation.
I have never heard R & J called a "modern" tragedy. Endgame by Samuel Beckett is a modern tragedy. You are a few centuries off.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
"Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night; For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back. Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun."
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:But claiming that R & J just represents an unfortante event and nothing more is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Hm. I'm not sure how you go from "it wasn't fated" to "it was just an unfortunate event." Any particular reason why you don't see a grey area there? As you observe, Shakespearean tragedy is moralistic tragedy -- as is, it's worth noting, most tragedy in the modern era, where people's problems are consequences of their own mistakes but not necessarily single, overarching Tragic Flaws. I consider it an oversimplification to say that Romeo and Juliet is a play in which excessive Eros is a "Tragic Flaw;" while passion plays a role, the reason it remains accessible to a modern audience (in a way that Greek tragedy does not) is that the motives of its leads are more realistically rooted in character, not Archetype.
My personal belief -- and I'm glad you brought this up -- was that the Elizabethans still felt a strong debt to earlier influences and incorporated elements of classical tragedy (and comedy) without sincerely believing in those elements. They got included because that's what plays were, and that's what plays did, and people appreciated having someone sum up what the play was "about" at the beginning and the end.
To be honest, I can't help wondering if you're coming off too recent a course on Theme. You're reminding me of some college classes that took themselves way too seriously. *grin*
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
"That one short minute gives me in her sight: Do thou but close our hands with holy words, Then love-devouring death do what he dare; It is enough I may but call her mine."
Posted by tms (Member # 9017) on :
Suicide, important here, in a discussion about 'fate' also runs through the heart of Jacobean theatre, the concious choice to snuff oneself out, the final rip-cord. I thought that worth mentioning because I always enjoyed the two concious though ill-timed, star-crossed suicides in R&J and the way suicide (that lonely, depressing paradox) resonates through all kinds of theatre.
I have enjoyed this thread immensely.
In debating the accessibility of Shakespeare's folios, his actual language, we musn't forget that they are written for actors to say. Will was a genius, in my opinion, unrivalled by any writer before and after.
Martin Amis, a believer that drama is 'handily inferior' to poetry and prose: 'I find it very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright... it's one of God's best jokes.'
While I have a sneaking suspicion he may be right about the handy, dialogue-driven nature of drama, Shakespeare himself remains a brilliant, poetic teller of stories through action and dialogue. This dialogue may be battered by current ignorance, indeed just casting one's eyes over any Shakespearean text can be exhausting, but SAY IT OUT LOUD and suddenly words that you never knew the meaning of (words the cat made up, oh the beautiful arrogance of that) fall into lists of possible meanings, even feelings. Get Kevin Kline or Ken Branagh to deliver these same words OUT LOUD and acessibility ceases to be a problem. Don't forget the actors, gang.
I completely understand, and accept OSC's reasons for his edits and changes. You gotta play to your audience. Every production of R&J will sex up one thing or tone down another, it always happens, as OSC pointed out it was happening before Shakespeare adapted the story and continued after his opening night.
Understanding Shakepeare is key, is elemental to everything that's important to me.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE for those who find it so impenetrable and tough-going: START WITH THE SONNETS. Just one, and pick your way through each word and line (take as long as you want, they are sometimes complex to unravel, sometimes not, always deeply evocative), until you come to the last couplet, then read it and re-read it until you have a handle on a possible meaning (there are unplumbable varieties of meanings in Will's words, don't try and catalogue them all, you'll go insane) and then when you have a thread on it, start SAYING IT OUT LOUD.
John Barton's televised series (c. 1970's), a Shakespeare workshop (spot a young Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart etc) is very good at explaining how to acess and ride the Bard's majestic, infinitely variable rhythms, all with actors, you guessed it, saying it out loud.
Yay for Will.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Eros and death is the heart and blood of the play.
No, they are not "tragic flaws" as in Oedipus. But they are inescapable conditions of life. Rooted in character, sure, but the characters are "accessible" because they encapsulate a universal aspect of love.
quote: My personal belief -- and I'm glad you brought this up -- was that the Elizabethans still felt a strong debt to earlier influences and incorporated elements of classical tragedy (and comedy) without sincerely believing in those elements. They got included because that's what plays were, and that's what plays did, and people appreciated having someone sum up what the play was "about" at the beginning and the end.
I'll buy that halfway. Theatre was young in Shakespeare's time.
quote: You're reminding me of some college classes that took themselves way too seriously. *grin*
I think you enjoy goading me on. Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Dude, KidB, you don't need to quote the play to me. I'm familiar with the use of foreshadowing.
I just don't get how you go from "their deaths are foreshadowed extensively" to "without thinking of their deaths as fated, the tragedy becomes meaningless."
Note that there ARE works of literature that I DO think function in this way. Many Hindu pieces are quite explicit about man's submission to Fate, and many older Greek dramas use characters purely as archetypes to exhibit this "reality."
But what makes Shakespeare better than either is that he does not, in general, fall into this lazy trap.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Dude!
That's not just "foreshadowing." That's the moral of the play. That's what it's about!
"These violent delights have violent ends And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness And in the taste confounds the appetite: Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
I have to call it a night - other duties, etc. On the 'morrow, Tom!
Posted by tms (Member # 9017) on :
The moral? I think it is time for bedtime amigo. I always thought Will very adept at giving his characters morals and not his stories. That way the audience asks itself what is MY moral opinion of what just happened. Play's should never tell people what to feel, it should bring something out of them. The best plays are the ones where the audience are still arguing in the car on the way home as to exactly what the play was 'about'. Your defence however, KidB, has been admirable, modern, spot on, oh and entertaining.
Posted by WntrMute (Member # 7556) on :
Shakespeare acted by professional actors can be a nearly ecstatic experience. Shakespeare acted by amature actors has the ghastly appeal of a mangled car on the side of the road surrounded by emergency workers: it's a horrorshow that you can't help but watch, though you hate yourself for watching it.
To quote Romeo after he slew Tybalt: PWND!!!1
Ahhhh, the poetry of it.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
Ill-kept in company. Symphony.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:Shakespeare acted by professional actors can be a nearly ecstatic experience. Shakespeare acted by amature actors has the ghastly appeal of a mangled car on the side of the road surrounded by emergency workers: it's a horrorshow that you can't help but watch, though you hate yourself for watching it.
Nobody should be allowed to play the violin until they have mastered it.
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
quote: Shakespeare acted by professional actors can be a nearly ecstatic experience. Shakespeare acted by amature actors has the ghastly appeal of a mangled car on the side of the road surrounded by emergency workers: it's a horrorshow that you can't help but watch, though you hate yourself for watching it.
Nobody should be allowed to play the violin until they have mastered it.
spake the disharmonious.
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
quote: [QUOTE] I would agree that, with the exception of horror movies, we produce very few works that imply the hand of fate, but I don't consider that to be an essential element of tragedy. [
What are you smoking?
Our literature, theatre, and movies are made up of almost nothing else. Name any movie and I'll tell you that movie's take on fate. We relish, and we revel in the ironic turns and funny twists that bring events along to a fitting conclusion. What movie have you seen lately where you didn't get the sense that what was MEANT to happen, was indeed happening?
The whole point of dramatic irony is that when a set of circumstances goes against what the audience knows to be the fate of the characters, we are aware of it, and it makes us respond sympathetically.
I would argue that we are constantly gills-deep in implications about the hand of fate.
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
quote:Originally posted by clod: [QB] [QUOTE] Nobody should be allowed to play the violin until they have mastered it.
I assume your being ironic.
On the off chance that your not... WHAT??????????
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:We relish, and we revel in the ironic turns and funny twists that bring events along to a fitting conclusion.
This is not fate. This is narrative convention.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:I assume your being ironic.
Pretty much. I thought it was a similar sentiment to what I was quoting.
quote:This is not fate. This is narrative convention.
Tom, the whole idea is that you know the character is fated to succeed, or fated to die. When the villain gets his just deserts, I think we definetly chalk that up to the hands of fate.
edit: and by the way tom, using you logic, nothing in a peice of literature is ANYTHING except a manipulation by the author, everything is "convention," this is pretty cynical if that's what you meant.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
To play Devil Tom's advocate, he might be trying to argue for a distinction between "character as fate" and "fate as fate," the former of which he considers "modern." Put another way, "modern" drama posits that characters individual traits are the subject of individual destinies, rather than archetypes subject to universal destinies.
Tom is also claiming that Shakespeare, while owing a debt to precedent - drama based on archetype - nontheless moves towards modern individualism in his work.
That's his argument as I understand it. But is seems an odd argument to make about R & J, two of the most overtly archetypical characters in all of Shakespeare's work. Unlike, say Hamlet, whose individualism is obvious, R & J deviate not one whit from the "young love" archetype. Everything they say and do embodies love/lust/youth as a concept, taken to it's utmost extreme - there is nothing unique or individual about their personalities at all. Most of the secondary characters are more individuated that the very archetypical young lovers.
Shakespeare, after all, did not include a prologue in every one of his plays. In fact, I believe most are without one. Putting one at the beginning of R & J was therefore an artistic choice, meant to emphasize the notion of ill-fated lovers.
"Foreshadowing" is not what happens in Elizabethan drama - that's for Hemingway novels and film noir.
No, the poignancy of R&J derives greatly from the certainty of the outcome of their love.
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
Our perspective is WAY too skewed to interpret Shakespeare's intentions. Because of course, ALL of his characters were turned into archetypes by the hands of thousands of later writers; perhaps the majority of all English writers to follow.
Was he trying to escape archetypes that were stultifying and dull in the plays of his time... I'll buy that, if only because we know that what resulted from his work was anything but dull.
However what was yesterday's cream is today's stinky old cheese, and we see everything Shakespeare does (quite unfortunately for us) through the vail of a thousand inferior immitations. Every original idea in Shakespeare has been so thoroughly plundered by the best and the very worst (watch plan 9 outer space , if you don't believe me) that everything in his plays now seems fateful.
Given the evolution of that last paragraph, I am reversing myself and agreeing with Tom. Wierd, but it happens to us all.
Posted by KidB (Member # 8821) on :
Except...many of Shakespeare's characters were already archetypes before Shakespeare even wrote about them, and many of his plots retreads of familiar storylines. His originality is in the language, the poetry, the dramatic nuance, and the ideas to which his characters give voice.
And...we may not be able to discern Shakespeare's intentions, but I think we can certainly discern the play's intentions, if you get my meaning. Eh?
Posted by clod (Member # 9084) on :
que?
Forthwith, without and with nuance, the play would render to no mean interpretation - save one common theme.
Posted by Katarain (Member # 6659) on :
I think the translation is great. Despite what KidB and others might think, we do NOT speak the same language as people in Shakespeare's day. Language changes daily--that is simply the nature of language.
Shakespeare was not intended to be a chore, and for most people struggling to understand the written play in a foreign language (albeit, not as foreign as most languages, since there are many similarities) is a chore. If you find that sort of experience fun and fulfilling, more power to you, but everyone doesn't have to be a literature-buff.
The question here is certainly not a replacement of original shakespeare in our classrooms with a translation. The original language IS still similar enough to be studied. In another hundred years or maybe more, though, when the language changes even more, I would be in favor of such a substitution. High schools typically don't study original Chaucer, but they do study original Shakespeare. Colleges and Graduate schools do study original Chaucer, however, and someday Shakespeare might need to be treated in the same way.
When I was in High School, I loved the version of Romeo and Juliet with Claire Danes. Purists must have hated that movie, but it kept the original language and I was able to understand certain parts I never "got" by reading it, simply by watching the action. I think all people deserve the chance to understand and ENJOY Shakespeare's plays in their own language (in THEIR version of the language), and I also think that part of what makes Shakespeare so great that it is translatable and its worth is in more than individual words.
This is not an Either/Or situation.
And by the way, I don't find the thought tragic that someday (that 100 or more years in the future scenario I imagined above--not anytime soon) many people/students would not be exposed to original Shakespeare. I also don't find it tragic that many French and German and Spanish speakers never read Shakespeare in its original language either. Somehow, I was able to enjoy a translated version of Candide.
I find the idea just as distasteful that only the King James Version of the Bible is acceptable for reading. (For serious study, yes, the KJV is invaluable--but so is the original Greek/Hebrew and a good dictionary.) English-speakers are the only ones (that I know of) that have largely been denied a Bible in their own language through guilt from members in their church simply because they think that older is automatically better. Other language speakers don't have that problem.
(Edit: I know that there are MANY translations and paraphrases of the Bible in English that are widely-read and widely-popular. I was talking about a controversy common in many churches, including mine, in which people state that only the KJV is acceptable--sometimes only said by members, but sometimes the idea comes from higher up in the churches.)
Saying that English speakers must only read Shakespeare in the original language is as ludicrous as saying that anyone who wants to read Shakespeare must learn English first.
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Again, it's worth appreciating for its anthropological value, along the lines of "ancient peoples sometimes wrote plays about the futility of human choice," but it seems odd to shackle an entire genre to what is, at the end of the day, only one of its historical conventions. You might as well say that comedies require marriages.
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