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Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read

• dwighttk 2y ago
  I think it’s already been hugged to death and no one has even started talking about it
  • IndySun 2y ago
    >I think it's already been hugged to death... FWIW, I upvoted your benign and completely true comment. Why on earth should it be downvoted? I consider anyone that downvoted your comment as petty and small minded. But I am outnumbered. The fact is it happens here as often as any online public forum. So despite it's apparently admiral lofty ideals of mature debate, this public forum is overrun, like every online public forum, and detrimentally so, by what can mildly be described as immature, petty, and small minded white males, eager to be the first to remark, eager to 'score' more points, and be admired in this narrow arena. I am certain of this stance (as I am on occasion one of those immatures, though I would never sink to down vote such a benign remark).
    • dwighttk 2y ago
      Thanks… I was mildly confused but I guessed it was just that I didn’t add anything to the discussion But I couldn’t! Because I couldn’t see the site! I guess I could have directly asked anyone who could see it to post any alternate links they found.
      • IndySun 2y ago
        Yep, the site was down. And for quite a while. One can only ignore, roll eyes, and move on. There you go. Thanks for replying too.
• pvg 2y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240519050125/http://elizabethandrama.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240519050125/http://elizabetha...
  • mordechai9000 2y ago
    I wonder, what is a good free CDN service for hobby sites like this? A quick web search shows a lot of them have a free tier. The only one I am familiar with is Cloudflare.
• hprotagonist 2y ago
  "OP" (original pronounciation) can help bring out some of the original bawdiness; it makes the puns pop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQc5ZpAoU4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQc5ZpAoU4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2QYGEwM1Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2QYGEwM1Sk Staging, blocking, and competent acting can make the jokes a lot more explicit (and also, explicit!) Our ancestors, on the whole, weren't highfalutin capital-A Art people, and certainly not where common entertainment is concerned! Beyond that: being a reasonably educated viewer helps; certainly about word use. Knowing that "much ado about nothing" is a sexual triple entendre really helps! The political jokes are going to whiff, though; there's really not too much to be done about that level of extremely tightly scoped reference, it doesn't age amazingly well. Not a play, but https://pepysdiary.com https://pepysdiary.com is a wealth of information and context.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • aidenn0 2y ago
    That As You Like It pun on hours/whores ripe/rape and rot/rut was new to me; thanks for sharing.
  • joshstrange 2y ago
    The explanation in that first video is more interesting to me than all of the Shakespeare I was ever taught in school.
• arduanika 2y ago
  Cool project! I'm conflicted about this sort of thing. It seems like the goal of someone approaching early modern English -- the earliest iteration that's roughly intelligible to us today -- should be to learn how to read it comfortably, and that with effort, that it should be feasible. Like, that's one major point of reading Shakespeare in school: so that you can get used to the feel of the language (and become a well-cultured, lifelong, paying audience member). On the other hand, there's so much "should" already around reading at all, much less reading difficult old texts, that I suppose that helper notes are a public service -- and even after reading & seeing lots of Shakespeare, I still need notes for some of the obscure idioms and references. And I suppose there's no real reason why someone has to start with Shakespeare, particularly if you're coming to this era in midlife after dozing off in English class. It's a weird thing about the canon that we pick out one or two authors from every period, and completely forget about all the others. Like, what's the chance that the bottom 10th percentile of Shakespeare's plays are better than the top 10th of Marlowe, or of this guy Chapman who I'd never heard of? And it makes you wonder, who are the artists today who will be idolized through the ages, and who will be totally forgotten? Like, it's cool to study the compleat works of an exemplary figure like Shakespeare, but maybe if we learn to study his contemporaries and cultural context, we'll gain a better understanding of the life and times, and be less prone to wild theories about how he couldn't have possibly written the plays, how it must have been some other figure with a fancier education, or even a group effort. The group effort was the whole flourishing Elizabethan playwriting scene, and he was merely the best among them.
  • mordechai9000 2y ago
    If the annotations help explain the cultural context and references to current events and recent history, this is the kind of resource I've wished for when reading pre-modern literature. Even just explaining the classical allusions will go a long way to making the modern reader more comfortable with the text.
    • arduanika 2y ago
      Yes, absolutely -- I think that was my point? And looking at some of their pdfs, it looks like their notes have similar quality to the better annotated Shakespeare editions, all for free, and with more breadth in terms of authors. This is the sort of passion project that renews my faith in the internet.
• recursive 2y ago
  Link is down. Reading Shakespeare in high school put me off it for life. I had to look it up just now to check if he's "Elizabethan". I knew what most of the words meant, just not in that order. I couldn't make sense of what was happening in the plot, or even the smaller scale of individual lines. I never thought I was particularly bad (or good) at English, but all my classmates seemed to understand it. I just could not. People rave about Shakespeare, so I'm sure there is something there. I wish I could have been able to get that.
  • zug_zug 2y ago
    Yeah it's an interesting question. Of course these days since it's public domain you could have chat GPT give you every sentence with a modern translation alongside. It's sometimes hard to tell when people advocate for something esoteric if they are being hipster (e.g "Goldplated audiocables on a record player") [i.e. advocating for something monetarily/intellectually inaccessible as a form of flaunting wealth/intellect] or if it's a genuine recommendation. I bet a clever person could come up with some ways to test each hypothesis.
  • onemoresoop 2y ago
    I was the same as you. Now I think I didn't care enough about it to put in the effort.
    • recursive 2y ago
      This definitely describes me as well. I'm not sure how much effort it would actually take. I never managed to gain so much as a foothold on anything. So I guess I have some idea of a lower bound. But probably, I would not consider it to be worth the effort. It's interesting to me thinking back on high school from decades ago. I remember so few of the details. But I distinctly remember trying and failing to read Shakespeare. I remember my sense of resentment for being asked to read such an incomprehensible word salad. But yeah, at this point, I have a lot of other stuff going on. It's not a priority for me. I would need to have it spoon-fed to me, and quickly. That's probably not even possible.
• beardyw 2y ago
  If you extend this to Restoration, Pepys went to the theatre several times a week. About 50% he was unimpressed by.
• kens 2y ago
  The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak. "Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak." "'But translated Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare!' one might object. To which the answer is, to an extent, yes. However, we would never complain a translation of Beowulf 'isn’t Beowulf'—of course it isn’t, in the strict sense, but we know that without translation, we would not have access to Beowulf at all." His full discussion is here, and is worth reading: https://www.americantheatre.org/2010/01/01/its-time-to-translate-shakespeare-into-contemporary-english/ https://www.americantheatre.org/2010/01/01/its-time-to-trans...
  • lordleft 2y ago
    I can see his point. That being said, part of what is fun about reading Elizabethan literature in a relatively original style (with helpful annotations) is that I can see configurations of English I’ve never encountered before, configurations that are alien and yet familiar because they are the ancestor of the very words and phrases I use today.
    • comex 2y ago
      Yep. To me it feels like foreign language learning on easy mode. To be clear, I'm not good at foreign languages. I've never become fluent in one. But I studied Latin back in high school, and Japanese more recently, enough to slowly read some works written in those languages. When doing so, there's a real thrill in seeing a familiar idea expressed in a way that's grammatically totally alien. Using sentence structures that aren't allowed in English. Using a vocabulary that marks out a different lattice in the space of possible meanings, connecting some ideas that are disconnected in English, or splitting apart ideas that English connects. Or just using idioms or cultural references that don't exist in English. Meanwhile, in the case of Latin, the vocabulary is full of words that are the ancestors of English words, with meanings that are sometimes the same, sometimes subtly different, and sometimes seemingly totally unrelated, making it feel mind-expanding just to consider the series of semantic shifts that let one meaning evolve into the other. Reading Shakespeare is like that, just… less so. Grammar, vocabulary, and idioms are all familiar enough that you can understand their meaning with just some helpful glosses, yet foreign enough to reproduce some of the same thrill. Sometimes they're more thrilling because they're familiar – because they could be plopped right into modern English and fit into the existing scaffolding, filling in what can now be recognized as a gap. So in a way I agree with John McWhorter. When I read Shakespeare's plays, the foreignness of the language does distract me from the content. But it's in a good way, a fun way. To have an experience that's more about the content, in contrast, I can watch performances of the plays. When performed, the dialogue usually goes by too fast for me to understand the unfamiliar bits, but the way the actors speak it helps get the meaning across. There does still tend to be a risk that I miss out on part of the meaning and get confused about a plot point… but it's not the end of the world. Still, I'm sympathetic to people who find it hard to get into Shakespeare because of this. Not everyone has to share my interest in language. Some may find it difficult; some may just dislike the tradeoff of language distracting from content. If translation helps those people, I'm in favor of that being an option. But reading poems in translation has its own massive cost. A translation of Beowulf isn't Beowulf; it's something related but new and different. Same goes for the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey, the Bible, et cetera. That's just the bitter truth.
• mike-the-mikado 2y ago
  Does anyone have a recommendation of a good starting point, outside the works of Shakespeare?
• keepamovin 2y ago
  Aren’t they already both those things? I know it’s not entirely the language that we speak but it’s still intuitively understandable. Sometimes maybe you have to let it work on you a bit and sometimes it’s Shakespeare’s brilliance in his word playing / metaphor, and other times it’s just a different way of expressing than we use today. Some strange words and phrases are normally footnotes to add to the enjoyment heh :)
• botanical 2y ago
  This is how we did Shakespeare in school; left side original text and the right side, an explanation. It made it much more bearable than trying to decipher what's being said. Great project! I just wish it were in epub format to read on a smaller screen.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• GolfPopper 2y ago
  I do not think the difficulty with understanding Shakespeare is that they are "written in a language we no longer speak" but rather that they are written for a culture much different than our own. Shakespeare is loaded with wordplay, sly and overt references, callouts, contemporary jokes and in-jokes. How do you "translate" that? He references a Western cultural history that we don't spend a lot of time learning anymore. As someone around a half-century old, I've noticed that most of my younger co-workers no longer "get" many references to bits of classic myth and history that were near-universal when I was growing up. Imagine trying to "translate" all the cultural baggage of a very dense modern action-drama-comedy. It's not a matter of language, it's a matter of cultural familiarity. Sure, you can re-write Shakespeare for a different time and place, but you're not "translating" it, you're re-writing it, and producing a substantially transformed work by doing so.
  • Suppafly 2y ago
    Honestly, I bet the bulk of his audiences, aka the common folk, didn't grasp all of his references and allusions, but you don't need to when watching a play. Consuming Shakespeare as a play vs reading it is a very different experience.