I felt dumb after assuming so much and rereading your posts and seeing my error. I'm not sure if you were clear on the word definitions, so I decided to put up the technical versions. He wrote Twelfth Night, which was from some Italian story, and the setting was somewhere in Italy, but he wrote it in English. CHAN: Shakespeare was not, strictly speaking, an original writer. He was definately a Modern English speaker and writer. SHEIR: In fact, translator Rupert Chan points out, Shakespeare’s stories themselves are often adaptations. Modern English is the result of the Great Vowel Shift, and it is our language in common with Shakespeare. That's the first five lines of the Bath's Prologue in the Canterbury Tales. Were in this world, is right ynogh for meįor, lordinges, sith I twelve yeer was of age, During this time, the principle change is that the vowel pronunciation changed radically. Middle English - 11th Century till about the 13th or 14th - This is English that has lost most of its inflectional attributes and has had its vocabulary worked over by the Norman Conquest. I've been trying to reverse engineer it.but I'm going to have to break down and get a grammar. I replaced the letters Thorn and Aeth with modern equivelants. That's the first three lines from Beowulf. It's an inflectional language with an all-together different vocabulary, because it predates the Norman Conquest. Old English - before around the 11th century - It is highly inflectional and incomprehensible. I'm now guilty of eisogesis on this thread. "But with that said, there are still going to be passages, images, that you need a footnote to begin to unpack.I feel dense now, since you never said "Chaucer." I inferred it from the "Old/Modern" statement. "When you've got the power of a great actor and a great director the original language can burst into life with great clarity," he says. The festival's artistic director, Bill Rauch, agrees there's no match for the Bard's language. And by changing the language in this modernizing way, it's basically shifting to Bud Light." "It's like the beer I drink I drink 8.2 percent IPA. "Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language," says James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar and English professor at Columbia University. Nonetheless, she jokes that messing with Shakespeare's language could be a career-ender.Īnd the project has been met with cries of blasphemy. Most cut difficult passages and scenes for length, to say nothing of changing the settings to every time period imaginable. We hope you enjoy exploring Shakespeares works like never before.
But language has changed from 400 years ago."ĭouthit is quick to point out that all Shakespeare productions are adaptations of some sort. "I want a certain kind of rigor and a certain sense of language.
Gujarat over a span of more than a century. "So I don't want everything closed up nice and neat, and I don't want everything to be sort of literal or paraphrased," Douthit says. considered herein pertains to a set of translations of Shakespeares plays undertaken by various translators in. She's working with such renowned playwrights as Luis Alfaro, Amy Freed and Jeff Whitty - and their dramaturgs - to help them unpack the meaning behind Shakespeare's word choice. Theater Wildfire Smoke Can Be A Show Stopper At Oregon Shakespeare Festival That's saying a lot after all, it's Douthit's job to understand these plays. "I'll just be really honest to say I can't understand all of it all the time," says Lue Douthit, Oregon Shakespeare Festival's director of literary development and dramaturgy. The goal is to leave the settings and the structures the same, and not to touch any language that's understandable to modern ears. (Below, you can read and listen to both the original of Timon and Cavander's translation.) The ambitious and controversial experiment, called Play On, will commission 36 dramatists toward that end over three years - beginning with playwright Kenneth Cavander, who has drawn up a pilot version of Timon of Athens. That's why the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has launched an unprecedented project to translate the Bard's entire canon from his original style into contemporary English. What is debatable, however, is just how much today's audiences actually understand what he was saying. Charles Erickson/Courtesy of Oregon Shakespeare Festivalīy now, it's pretty much settled: No one debates that Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers in the English language.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Allen Elizabethan Theatre, featuring a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
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