To truly know that a word is a thing ever in flux can help us understand the language of the past—or why the language of the past can be so hard to fully understand. Shakespeare is, again, a useful demonstration: "reduce" is hardly alone in his work in throwing the modern listener or reader. Have you ever attended a Shakespeare play and kept to yourself, as everyone around you was exclaiming about how wonderful it was, that you missed so much of what any of the characters were saying that you’d be hard-pressed to say you took in the plot in any detail? My sense over the years has been that asking people about this creates precisely the same discomfort as asking if they floss every night.
Commonly we are told that Shakespeare’s language is “high,” such that the challenge can be met by making a certain effort. Related to this is the idea that Shakespeare’s language is poetic, requiring more effort to process than the phraseology of Neil Simon. Then someone will say that the language comes across best with careful acting technique, ideally wielded by British people.
All claims except the one about Brits are true. However, many will be nagged by a feeling that there is more to the story, and there is. When, in "Hamlet," Polonius opens his farewell speech to Laertes (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”) with “And these few precepts in thy memory / See thou character,” rising to a challenge can take us only so far. We can indeed process "precepts," "thy," and "thou" with the aforesaid rising. But what does Polonius mean by "character"? Neither intonation, facial expression, being British, nor rising will get across that in Shakespeare’s time [character] meant “write,” as in the characters that one writes. Polonius is telling Laertes, in short, “Note these things well.”
At the very start of "Measure for Measure," Duke Vincentio announces:
Of government the properties to unfold,
Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse;
Since I am put to know that your own science,
Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice
My strength can give you; then no more remains . . .
The reason we could grasp almost no meaning from this when spoken in real time, and might get little more even reading it on the page, is not that the language is poetic. There isn’t a Wordsworthian word in the passage. Yet one “rises” to this only to bump one’s head. The problem is that so many of the words no longer mean what they did four hundred years ago.
And that is exactly what we would expect. Shakespearean text looks and sounds like the language we speak. Skim a text and usually no word leaps out as utterly unexpected. This is much of why we are told the task is simply to buck up. However, lurking behind the familiarity are many “false friends,” of the kind students are warned about in learning French. "Sensible" means “sensitive” in French rather than “levelheaded.” (“Sensible” is "sensé.") If you hear or read "sensible" in French thinking it refers to common sense, you’ve missed something basic without even knowing it. In the same way, in the "Measure for Measure" passage, "affect" for Shakespeare meant “to make a pretense of,” while "science" meant “knowledge.” Thrown by both those when hearing this in real time, not to mention the now unconventional use of "unfold" in reference to speaking, we end up lost. Not because we are uncultured or incapable of effort, but because language is always moving. It’s done a lot of that since 1600.
Another example is Edmund’s cocky speech about his origins in "King Lear":
Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother?
To know that "wherefore" meant “why” is hardly a stretch, and we can likely agree that moonshines for “months” is poetic. All “rise”! However, why "curiosity"? [Wherefore should I permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me?] With our poetic hats on we are poised to interpret it as meaning “something peculiar,” but that meaning makes no sense here. “The curiosity of nations” can’t mean that nations are a peculiar concept, since they aren’t. But if "curiosity" more immediately reminds us of a healthy interest in matters outside oneself, then why is Edmund implying that curiosity is a bad thing? Because in Shakespeare’s time, "curiosity" meant “care” in the sense of close attention.
In 1664 someone we would now call a scientist wrote about the resolution power of lenses, exclaiming that if the state of the art in his time “could attain to that curiosity as to grind us such Glasses . . . we might hazard at last the discovery of Spiritualities themselves.” But was this man implying that astronomers of the time simply lacked sufficient interest in their own subject to bother to fashion more powerful lenses? It’s weird little things like this that make antique prose so often seem a tad off, as if people then were incapable of expressing themselves quite as lucidly as we do. Actually, though, this writer was quite lucid: if we read "curiosity" in the passage as meaning “carefulness” or “precision,” then all is clear.
By "curiosity," then, Edmund means “fine distinctions,” such as the kind that would label him as inferior for not being the eldest brother. To make such distinctions implies a certain interest, and over time that interest became the core meaning of the word itself, such that today we associate curiosity with schoolchildren, museums, and cats. However, in our times, the word has morphed into connoting not just interest, but something more specific: the positive kind of interest. Before things had gone that far, however, the curious person’s interest could also be of a less welcome kind: in 1680 a bishop mentioned that “the opposition of Hereticks anciently occasioned too much Curiosity among the fathers.” This is the flavor in Edmund’s use of "curious," and the issue is less poetry than the mere passage of time and its effects on arbitrary linkages between word and meaning.
Way back in 1898, the Shakespearean scholar Mark H. Liddell argued in the "Atlantic Monthly" that these false friends in Shakespeare were such an impediment to understanding his language delivered live that it was time to include instruction in Elizabethan English in America’s national secondary school curriculum. Of course, given the dazzling array of problems with public education in America, few could be under any impression that this could ever happen today or in any kind of foreseeable future. As such, others have argued that after four hundred years, because of normal processes of change, Shakespeare’s language has become different enough from ours that the time has come to offer new versions of the plays translated into today’s English.
Yes, I have been one of those people, and have experienced resistance (and even dribbles of vitriol) in response. However, most of this resistance has been based on the idea that the difference between our language and Shakespeare’s is only one of poetry, density, or elevation. The reason Shakespeare’s prose sounds so “poetic” is partly because it is. But it is also partly for the more mundane reason that his language is now, to a larger extent than we might prefer to know, inaccessible to us without careful study on the page.
Many assume that the translation I refer to would have to be into slang. I suspect this is because it can be so hard to perceive that the very meanings of even the most mundane of words have often changed so much—if one thinks the difficulty of the language is merely a matter of “poetry,” then it’s easy to think that no translation in neutral current English could be at issue, and hence the notion of “Yo, whaddup, Calpurnia?” as a serious literary suggestion.
But I, for one, intend no such thing. The translations could easily be better termed adjustments. Here is Macbeth planning to kill Duncan:
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking-off.
English, yes—but let’s pause for a bit: just how does one “bear one’s faculties” or be “clear” in one’s office? “Taking- off”—where to? And remember, this is about hearing these lines spoken live.
What follows is the passage in Conrad Spoke’s translation, changing only those words that can no longer speak to us (about 10 percent, according to the linguist David Crystal and his son, the actor Ben Crystal, who have advised the Globe Theatre in London on the original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s plays):
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne authority so meek, hath been So pure in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his knocking-off.
This is hardly a desecration. The language is still challenging and even beautiful, especially since most of it is the original. The difference is simply that words that today only a scholar can hear live and understand have been replaced with ones that all educated people can hear with meaning. The translation is not “pure Shakespeare,” but there is an argument that the trade-off is worth it: quite simply, changing "faculties" to "authority" and "taking-off" to "knocking-off" allow us to understand what the man is saying.
Neither I nor anyone else wants to see the original plays withdrawn from circulation. However, a world where the usual experience of a Shakespeare play outside universities was in today’s English would be one where, quite simply, more people were capable of truly understanding and enjoying the Bard’s work rather than genuflecting to it. Seeing
Shakespeare shouldn’t be like eating your vegetables—even tasty vegetables. Nor is it much more inspiring for us to treat Shakespeare as a kind of verbal wallpaper or scent that we sit back and allow to “wash over” us. I highly suspect Shakespeare himself, hearing so many today espousing this approach to his words, would have been at best bemused and at worst disappointed. Shakespeare translated into today’s English wouldn’t be exactly Shakespeare, no. But given a choice between Shakespeare as an elite taste and Shakespeare engaged the way Russians engage Chekhov and Americans engage Scorsese films and Arrested Development, some may judge Shakespeare that isn’t always exactly what Shakespeare wrote as less than a tragedy.
I have been pleased to see that since the 1990s, when I first laid down my own case for the translation of Shakespeare, the notion seems to have gained a certain amount of traction. Mr. Spoke, as well as Kent Richmond of California State University, Long Beach, have actually executed translated versions of the plays, and as I write, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned modern translations of the entire corpus. To the extent that the approach gathers steam, many will certainly decry it as desecration, a symptom of the dumbing down of American society. However, others will feel that translating Shakespeare is a pragmatic response to the fact that language always changes, and that when it comes to Shakespeare, quite simply, it’s been a while.
That was a lightly edited excerpt from John McWhorter's book "Words on the Move: Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally)" reprinted here with permission.
Shakespeare image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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