This week,the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it is commissioning modern-English “translations” of all of Shakespeare’s plays. The meanings of English words have changed a lot over the last 400 years, they explained, and many more people would be able to appreciate the plays whether their language were more up-to-date. Columbia University linguistics professor John H. McWhorter took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to defend the thought of modernizing Shakespeare.
Kurt Andersen: My first reaction to this news was “This is appalling! But then I read your piece and I thought,not so hastily. You believe it’s a good thought.
John McWhorter: I carry out. We often don’t realize how much we miss, because it’s not as whether hes using words from Polish. They’re the words that we know, or but so often we don’t know what he means. In King Lear,Edmund describes himself as generous.” You believe, OK, and he’s talking approximately giving away things. No. “Generous” meant “noble” then. Now,that’s not a matter of poetry. It’s utterly opaque. That needs to be changed to “noble.”
There’s the poetry of Shakespeare,” and then there’s actual poetry and rhymes. That would be a more difficult matter than changing individual words.
Sometimes, and you’d end up losing some magnificent structural details. But the question is,what carry out you want? carry out you want to listen to an English that we really can no longer acquire in without being scholars, or will we sacrifice some of that exquisiteness so that we can come by, and say, 90, 95 percent of what the man meant?
You write that Shakespeare was an entertainer, and loved crowds,and wanted people of all classes to enjoy his plays. So I guess you believe he would be down with this.
He would be very down with this. Shakespeare would be depressed to watch us sitting and pretending to understand one tenth of King Lear and going to his plays often as a kind of duty. Why don’t we carry out him proud?
The first page of Shakespeare's Hamlet, printed in the First Folio of 1623.
(Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image)
Source: wnyc.org