“Et tu, Brute?”
Not anymore.
“And you too, Brutus?” is what students read in a new genre of study guides that modernize the Elizabethan English found in “Julius Caesar” and other plays by William Shakespeare.
These guides move beyond the plot summaries found in other study aides by providing line-by-line translations in modern-day English.
Here, let me try: “Yo, Romeo! Where you at? ‘Cause peep this: Juliet’s in the hizzouse.”
Has a certain contemporary ring to it, sure.
Once barred from school, the new translations now are being used in classes across metro Atlanta.
But not everyone thinks they belong there. Some educators say the beauty of Shakespeare rests in the writer’s eloquence and poetry — something missing in the translations.
Some educators say so? What about the rest of ’em? They’re still allowed to call themselves “educators”…?
Damn, Yorick. That’s all fucked up.
Listen: The beauty of Shakespeare rests precisely with the prose, and teaching Shakespeare for plot alone is a lot like teaching Plato for spelling. Which is not to say Shakespeare’s work doesn’t make for interesting contemporary fare, properly “translated” (it can and often does). But c’mon: when you change the language you’re essentially re-writing the text, and “Hamlet” without Shakespeare’s prose is a Thomas Kyd revenge tragedy. In short, you’re no longer teaching Shakespeare once you’ve replaced his words.
I don’t think I’d be averse to texts that place modern translations alongside the original Elizabethan English. But without the original prose, what you’re left with are really long Cliff’s Notes.
And I for one would never use those things. Cough.
[via Joanne Jacobs]
Makes you wonder if they’ll translate the bawdy stuff or leave it alone.
“Bust a nut in you” might be considered a bit more risque than “to die in your lap”.
“Now is the winter of our discontent” = “it’s all fucked up up in here”
“All the world’s a stage…” = “you just frontin’. We ALL just frontin’.”
Or how about the sonnets?
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” = “She got hit by the ugly stick, but she’s like, down, you know?”
Some fun quotes about Shakespeare:
Shakespeare, the rendevous of an axe and a rose.
— E. M. Cioran, _Syllogismes de l’amertume_, 1952
Fantastic! And it was all written with a feather!
— attrib. Samuel Goldwyn
It is just because Shakespeare insists on leaving matters in the mist in which they are born that his thought endures. Persons who schematize the Unknowable codify themselves, and pass by with the age they live in.
— John Jay Chapman, _Greek Genius and Other Essays_, 1915
Ah, Shakespeare! He would have been an inventor, a wonderful inventor, if he had turned his mind to it. He seemed to see the inside of everything.
— Thomas Edison, quoted in Paul Israel’s _Edison_, 1999
Explaining Shakespeare is an infinite exercise; you will become exhausted long before the plays are emptied out. Allegorizing or ironizing Shakespeare by privileging cultural anthropology or theatrical history or religion or psychoanalysis or politics or Foucault or Marx or feminism works only in limited ways. You are
likely, if you are shrewd, to achieve Shakespearean insights into your favorite hobbyhorse, but you are rather less likely to achieve Freudian or Marxist or feminist insight into Shakespeare. His universality will defeat you, his plays know more than you do, and
your knowingness consequently will be in danger of dwindling into ignorance.
–Harold Bloom, 1998
[If Shakespeare had died at the same young age as Christopher Marlowe, then] We all of us might be gamboling about, but without mature Shakespeare we would be very different, because we would think
and feel and speak differently. Our ideas would be different, particularly our ideas of the human, since they were, more often than not, Shakespeare’s ideas before they were ours. That is why we do not have feminist Chapman, structuralist Chapman, and environmentalist
Chapman, and may yet, alas, have environmentalist Shakespeare.
–Ibid