Until the late Victorian era, stage performances usually observed the setting and period implied in the play, but they transformed the language. These days, we tend to assume that productions can change anything about Shakespeare (the setting, the period, the characters’ race or gender), as long as the script stays intact-cut or reordered, perhaps, but not rewritten. For poets, playwrights, editors, and actors from the seventeenth century through much of the nineteenth, Shakespeare’s language wasn’t intoxicating so much as intoxicated: it needed a sobering intervention. I don’t disagree with Shapiro, but, as a literary historian who studies the way Shakespeare has been reinvented, I’m struck that so many serious Shakespeareans over the centuries have argued the opposite: that Shakespeare’s genius had to be salvaged from the obscure, indecorous, archaic, quibbling mess of his language. Bud Light’s acceptable, but it just doesn’t pack the punch and the excitement and the intoxicating quality of that language.” I drink 8.2 per cent I.P.A., and by changing the language in this modernizing way, it’s basically shifting to Bud Light. James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, used a regionally apt analogy to express this opinion: “Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “What a revolting development!” “Is there really a need to translate English into Brain Dead American?” “Why not just rewrite Shakespeare in emoticons and text acronyms?” Beneath the opprobrium lay a shared assumption: that Shakespeare’s genius inheres not in his complicated characters or carefully orchestrated scenes or subtle ideas but in the singularity of his words. devotees posting their laments on the festival’s Facebook page. The backlash began immediately, with O.S.F. All Rights Reserved.Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. The Earl of Southampton: Shakespeare's PatronĪlchemy and Astrology in Shakespeare's Day King James I of England: Shakespeare's Patron Stratford School Days: What Did Shakespeare Read? Life in Stratford (trades, laws, furniture, hygiene) Life in Stratford (structures and guilds) More to Explore Why Shakespeare is so Important The Royal Patent that Changed Shakespeare's LifeĪesthetic Examination Questions on Macbeth The Metre of Macbeth: Blank Verse and Rhymed LinesĬontemporary References to King James I in Macbeth Shakespeare's Language Shakespeare Online. (The Man of Law's Tale)īy about 1450, Middle English was replaced with Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare, which is almost identical to contemporary English. Here is an example from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the most famous work in Middle English: Ye seken lond and see for your wynnynges,Īnd tales, bothe of pees and of debaat. Middle English is easier but still looks like a foreign language much of the time. With the arrival of the French-speaking Normans in 1066, Old English underwent dramatic changes and by 1350 it had evolved into Middle English. Old English was spoken and written in Britain from the 5th century to the middle of the 11th century and is really closer to the Germanic mother tongue of the Anglo-Saxons. Oft Scyld the Scefing from scathers in numbers. How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle. The folk-kings' former fame we have heard of, Lo! the Spear-Danes' glory through splendid achievements Take, for example, this passage from the most famous of all Old English works, Beowulf: Hwät! we Gâr-Dena in geâr-dagum Once you see a text of Old or Middle English you'll really appreciate how easy Shakespeare is to understand (well, relatively speaking). In fact, Shakespeare's works are written in Early Modern English. Shakespeare's complex sentence structures and use of now obsolete words lead many students to think they are reading Old or Middle English. Are Shakespeare's works written in Old English?
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