IS POLONIUS’S ADVICE LOST ON US?

IS POLONIUS’S ADVICE LOST ON US? There is another argument for using a good translation of Shakespeare in addition to quickness of comprehension of sentence structures and of words like “thee” and “thou.”. Anybody who, like me, relies on the footnotes when he reads Shakespeare is acknowledging that changes in vocabulary over 500 years make Shakespeare hard to understand without assistance. McWhorter cites an article from 1898 which argued that, without education in Elizabethan language, Americans could not understand Shakespeare. The author took Polonius’s advice to his son as an example, and McWhorter does also.

Polonius: “And these few precepts in thy memory/ Look thou character.” McWhorter explains: “Character” then meant “to write.”

“Polonius; “”The French are of a most select and generous chief.” McWhorter explains: “chief” was used to mean “rank.”

Polonius: “For loan oft loses both itself and friend / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” McWhorter explains that “husbandry” meant “thrift.”

I would generally prefer to read a Shakespeare play just before going to the original, but it seems to me that McWhorter is right. There would be a lot of people who would get more out of a translation that, at a minimum, updated the vocabulary.