Pater Familias » Shakespeare

SHAKESPEARE’S EDUCATION (COMMENT).

Philip — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:05:40 +0000

SHAKESPEARE’S EDUCATION (COMMENT). When I questioned the claim that a commoner could not have written Shakespeare’s plays in this post, Nick commented: “I wish I knew more about education that could be available at the time.” Simon Schama, in this critical review of Anonymous (“idiotic misunderstanding of history and the world of the theater”), describes Shakespeare’s education: “By the time he was 13 or so, Shakespeare would have read (in Latin) works by Terence, Plautus, Virgil, Erasmus, Cicero, and probably Plutarch and Livy too.” I quoted Victoria Kahn here on the rhetorical education of the Renaissance grammar school which “produced the great flowering of English literature” that included the works of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Shakespeare would have had a very good education in school.

I also think that the genius who wrote the plays could have picked up the learning he needed on his own.

ANONYMOUS—ONLY ARISTOCRATS CAN CREATE LITERATURE.

Philip — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:05:21 +0000

ANONYMOUS—ONLY ARISTOCRATS CAN CREATE LITERATURE. We saw the new movie Anonymous at the New Yorker festival about a month ago. After the screening, there was a discussion with the scholar James Shapiro and the director of the movie. Shapiro’s criticism of the movie was devastating. The movie is opening this week, and the advance reviews have been scathing. The movie relies on contempt for commoners as evidence that William Shakespeare could not have been the author of the plays. Shakespeare is portrayed as a buffoon. The movie has a difficult argument to make because Oxford died before a number of Shakespeare’s plays were performed. However, once you accept that Queen Elizabeth was the mother of the Earl of Oxford and later became the Earl of Oxford’s lover, it all follows….

ON COPIA—IS THIS HOW SHAKESPEARE, DONNE AND MILTON LEARNED TO WRITE?

Philip — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:49:23 +0000

ON COPIA—IS THIS HOW SHAKESPEARE, DONNE AND MILTON LEARNED TO WRITE? I posted here about Stanley Fish’s book HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE which show students and others how to model good sentences on good sentences from great writers. Victoria Kahn in the Times Literary Supplement (September 9) writes about the rhetorical education of the Renaissance grammar school which “produced the great flowering of English literature” that included the works of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. The grammar school education was devoted to what Erasmus called “copia”—”rhetorically pleasing persuasive and fluent writing on all variety of subjects.” Victoria Kahn cites “Erasmus’s manual, On Copia, [which] includes hundreds of ways of saying ‘I was so happy to receive your letter’….” Hundreds of variants. Posting on this blog often reminds me of how stilted my sentence choices are. Victoria Kahn suggests writing ten different versions of Erasmus’s sentence, and I can see the value in the exercise.

IS SHAKESPEARE UNIVERSAL? —THE CASE OF FRANCE.

Philip — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 02:53:37 +0000

IS SHAKESPEARE UNIVERSAL?—THE CASE OF FRANCE. I think of Shakespeare as universal—admired in all cultures. Here is a review (by Lenard R. Berlanstein) of a book by John Pemble, SHAKESPEARE GOES TO PARIS: HOW THE BARD CONQUERED PARIS, which argues that the French had a great deal of trouble acknowledging Shakespeare’s greatness. Shakespeare was not translated into French until 1746, over 100 years after he died. Pemble says that Shakespeare was “crucial to the long and painful adjustment of French consciousness to a world in which France and the French were no longer paramount.” Victor Hugo was a supporter of Shakespeare, but Shakespeare’s work was considered excessive and not in good taste. Voltaire referred to Shakespeare’s “pearls… in this enormous dung heap.” In 1947 Jean-Louis Barrault is quoted as saying: “Opinions have not changed since Voltaire. In the name of taste, Shakespeare is reproached for triviality; in the name of rules, for long-windedness and implausibility.”

HOW WOULD SHAKESPEARE FEEL ABOUT CUTTING HIS PLAYS?

Philip — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:35:56 +0000

HOW WOULD SHAKESPEARE FEEL ABOUT CUTTING HIS PLAYS? How would Shakespeare feel about cutting his plays to please a modern audience? My friend Don Doub observed almost 50 years ago that Shakespeare sought a large audience and claimed that if Shakespeare were writing then (in the 1960′s), he would be writing for the movies. I think that Shakespeare would understand and sympathize with all the various efforts to make his plays accessible to a wider audience. I also think that if he were writing today, he might well create works that were longer and more complicated and richer…. Think of boxed DVD’s…or videogames.

HOW DO I FEEL ABOUT ABRIDGING SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS?

Philip — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:32:33 +0000

HOW DO I FEEL ABOUT ABRIDGING SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS? My feelings about abridging Shakespeare’s plays are the same as my feelings about translating Shakespeare into modern English. As I posted here, there are many people who like me are happy with a performance of the entire text of a Shakespeare (recognizing that any text is only a best guess). But I am in favor of any version of Shakespeare which increases the audience for his plays.

DO CRITICS KNOW BETTER THAN PLAYWRIGHTS?

Philip — Tue, 24 May 2011 23:23:09 +0000

DO CRITICS KNOW BETTER THAN PLAYWRIGHTS? It’s tempting to make the argument that Tony Kushner and Shakespeare know what they’re doing more than critics do. Kushner seems to like “lengthy digressions and superfluous subplots.” Shakespeare’s subplots seem always to be important; in Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare chose to make the Beatrice/Benedick story a subplot. Yet critics can help playwrights, and the out-of-town tryouts for Broadway plays back in the day permitted comments by critics that previews do not. Neil Simon gave credit to the Boston critic Elliot Norton’s advice for fixing the third act of The Odd Couple. Norton’s suggestion: Bring back the Pigeon sisters. Simon says here: “Brought back the Pigeon sisters, and the play worked.”

IS WRITING A PLAY LIKE MAKING LASAGNA?

Philip — Mon, 23 May 2011 21:39:22 +0000

IS WRITING A PLAY LIKE MAKING LASAGNA? The Terry Teachout aside that most Shakespeare plays should be cut in performance was made in his review of Tony Kushner’s new play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures. In the review, Teachout says that Kushner’s play should have been cut just as Shakespeare’s plays should be cut: “Even if ‘The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide’ were 15% better than ‘Lear,’ Mr. Kushner’s play would still have profited from being stripped of its lengthy digressions and superfluous subplots, most of which serve only to obscure the play’s good parts.” Teachout’s proposal that Kushner’s play should be streamlined stands in sharp contrast with Kushner’s idea of writing a play. Jesse Green has a wonderful quote from Kushner in this article from New York magazine: “He [Kushner] has compared the process [of writing a play] to making a proper lasagne: ‘All the yummy nutritious ingredients you’ve thrown into it have almost-but-not-quite succeeded in overwhelming the design. A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.’”

SHOULD SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS BE CUT FOR MODERN AUDIENCES?

Philip — Sun, 22 May 2011 23:33:14 +0000

SHOULD SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS BE CUT FOR MODERN AUDIENCES? Terry Teachout begins this post by noting something that I posted on here in commenting on the great television series The Rockford Files. (“Those were simpler times. The show had charm, but the plot was simple compared with the multiple plot lines that we are accustomed to today.”) Teachout points out how slow-moving the sitcoms of the 50′s and 60′s were and says that audiences have changed: “The leisurely expositions of yesteryear, it turns out, aren’t necessary: You can count on contemporary audiences to get the point and see where you’re headed….”

Teachout then throws in a provocative aside: “Just as most of Shakespeare’s plays can and should be cut in performance….”

I’ll give my response to this aside and tell how I think Shakespeare might respond in a couple days.

IS 1700 THE CUTOFF DATE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?

Philip — Wed, 04 May 2011 17:28:19 +0000

IS 1700 THE CUTOFF DATE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE? As a linguist, John McWhorter points out that language change is “a gradual process with no discrete boundaries.” Yet, he says, Congreve writing in 1700 is readily understandable by a modern audience, but that the English of 1600, when Shakespeare was writing, “has changed not only in terms of a few exotic vocabulary items, but in the very meaning of thousands of basic words and in scores of fundamental sentence structures.” It seems to me an important question. When did the English language become the one we use? McWhorter is probably right. The answer is likely 1700; it is not 1600.

IS POLONIUS’S ADVICE LOST ON US?

Philip — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:23:41 +0000

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.”

“For loan oft loses both itself and friend / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”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.

A TRANSLATION OF A PASSAGE FROM MACBETH.

Philip — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:33:22 +0000

A TRANSLATION OF A PASSAGE FROM MACBETH. Kent Richmond has been translating Shakespeare into modern English following what seem to me to be conservative guidelines. Here is the website (http://www.fullmeasurepress.com/). There are examples of his translations at the site. Here is part of his translation of a passage from Act 2, Scene 1 of MacBeth:

MACBETH

Is this a dagger that I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Here, let me clutch you.

I do not have you, yet I see you still.

Are you not, fatal vision, evident

To touch as well as sight? Or are you but

A dagger in my mind, a false illusion,

Emerging from an overheated brain?

And yet this form looks just as tangible

As this one I now draw. [draws his dagger]

Here is the original:

“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.”

I think the changes, such as changing “thee” to “you”, would make a big difference to a lot of people in understanding the language.