by Ben Crystal
There are parts of Shakespeare that we’re beginning to lose touch with, that we have to work at: certain aspects of the language (which we’ll look at in Act 3) and some of the cultural references – the context – need a little getting to grips with.
Looking at these things, and taking ourselves out of the mindset of the 21st century, will help us understand (perhaps even, dare I say it, laugh at) some of those 400-yearold jokes …
Scene 7
Walford, home of the God of Love
Shakespeare’s inventiveness (remember the 1,700 new words he coined), his ability to play with language and his poetic skill are some of the greatest innovations the English language has ever seen. But that doesn’t get round the fact that many people struggle with his writing.
So here’s the thing: if Shakespeare found himself practically forced to write to earn a living, and the stage, the setting – everything – helped him create such a vividly dramatic world, why did he write in what many people now think of as an ‘awkward and incomprehensible’ way? O for a muse of fire and whatnot?
Many people think they talked like that in Elizabethan England on a day-to-day basis, and to be honest, for a while I thought they did too. I was really rather surprised (and a little disappointed) to find that although the way people talk in Shakespeare’s plays was similar to how Elizabethans spoke, it would have been rare for your average Elizabethan to speak in such a flowery way.
So if we find Shakespeare’s language a bit unusual, and the audience that went to see his plays would have found it a bit unfamiliar too, why on earth did he write like that?
The answer is surprisingly straightforward: by heightening his language he made it more dramatic. It’s too easy to forget that his language is not of the book, but of the theatre and of the stage …
Back on the stage in the Elizabethan theatre, watching Elizabethan actors acting out situations we’d never live in, looking wonderful, speaking in this slightly unusual way – and everything so different from ‘us’. Would they ever speak like us?
Well maybe, because sometimes in all the madness we need to hear something reassuringly familiar, to let us know Everything Is Okay. And, it must be remembered, this is supposed to be entertaining, a story is being told, so common speech will help everyone pick up the plot if they get lost.
But should a king speak like us? Or the God of Love? Or an Italian? Surely it wouldn’t sound right. Now we’re on the subject, how do you make kings, dukes and princes sound different from ‘us’, while using regular 17th-century London speech?
Putting on another accent wasn’t an option: nowadays, if we want to make someone sound like a king, we can put on a posh accent. But people didn’t start thinking of someone’s accent as being indicative of their intelligence or their social status until relatively recently. The so-called ‘posh’ accent we know of today is only 200 years old. Not only did this accent simply not exist in Elizabethan times, the ideology of it being a thing you could use to segregate yourself from others didn’t exist either.
* * *
Original pronunciation
We have a fairly good idea of what Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded like. There have been two ‘original pronunciation’ experiments at the Globe in London, and the accent they used is thought to be about 80 per cent right.
How did they work it out? Well, if you go to see a Shakespeare play, you might notice that not all the rhymes actually rhyme when they should. This is because English pronunciation has changed since Elizabethan times, and one of the ways we can work out what the Elizabethan accent would have been like is by looking at the rhymes.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 118–19), Puck says:
Then will two at once woo one –
That must needs be sport alone.
In modern English pronunciation, one and alone don’t rhyme, so we know, because it’s supposed to be a rhyming couplet, that in Shakespeare’s time the pronunciation must have been different. In fact, we know that one would have sounded more like the modern English pronunciation of own (so rhyming with alone) – and so the couplet works.
Likewise, in the prologue of Romeo and Juliet (lines 9–12):
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents’ rage
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hour’s traffic of our stage …
From the rhyme scheme, we can work out that remove would have been pronounced [ree-muv], rhyming with love [luv].
There are pronunciation dictionaries written at the time that can help give us an idea of how their speech sounded. Plus, the Elizabethans spelt their words more closely to how they spoke them. Film is spelt philome in Romeo and Juliet, so we know it was a two-syllable word, like the Irish pronunciation [fil-um].
Kings and peasants, lords and commoners all would have spoken like this, though their vocabulary and word ordering would have been quite different from each other, depending on the amount of education they’d received.
There’s a popular myth that the early colonists of America, having left England around Shakespeare’s time, continued to speak in Elizabethan English, but it’s most definitely a myth. While language does move slower when isolated from other languages, the Pilgrim Fathers had too much contact with other peoples and accents for any real trace of Elizabethan pronunciation to have survived into modern American speech.
* * *
Using a country accent to show that someone wasn’t very clever wouldn’t have made sense to Shakespeare’s audience. As we’ll see in the next Act, in King Lear the character of Kent disguises himself by shaving his head and dressing as a commoner, and at one point goes out of his dialect (in this case, dialect means the type of words he uses and the way he uses them), but at no point does it say that he changes his accent to make himself appear more common.
So if you can’t make your characters show social status by getting your actors to use different accents, how can you do it?
Shakespeare did it with poetry, and we’ll deal with how in Act 4.
But before we get to that good stuff, some issues with the language need to be taken care of.
Act 3
Listen Carefully
Scene 1
The year 2001
Here’s a line from the King James Bible (1611):
The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak
(Matthew 26:41)
A friend of mine works on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Apparently, one of the biggest problems with successful AI is Natural Human Language Processing – in other words, getting a computer to tell the difference between, for example, the economic sense of the word depression and the psychological sense. A good way of testing an AI’s language processing ability is to get it to trans late a phrase from language A into language B, and back again. In one of my friend’s experiments, the computer took the line above from the Bible, translated it into Russian, then translated it back into English. It came out with:
The whisky is great, but the steak is terrible
It’s good, but it’s not great. I know next to nothing about AI, but I do know that translation is an incredibly difficult thing for a computer to do – even an artificially intelligent one. It still made me chuckle. What would it do with Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be …’? I know it would be hard (though not impossible) to translate into Chinese Mandarin – a language that doesn’t have the verb ‘to be’ in its system.
Shall I live, or shall I kill myself? just doesn’t cut it somehow. It misses the beauty of the poetry, and part of the beauty comes from the not knowing, the way the meaning slips and slides in and out of your reach.
KLINGON CHANCELLOR GORKON: You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.
KLINGON: Tak Pah, Tak Beh …
ALL: (laughter)
from the 1991 film Star Trek VI:
The Undiscovered Country
That’s the problem with translation and adaptations. They try to make something easier to digest, but can end up taking the heart out of it. When it comes to Shakespeare, faced with the peculiar-looking poetry and the 400-yearold words, many people will turn to translated copies of the plays; indeed, adapting or translating Shakespeare into ‘modern’ English has become a bit of a fad in recent times.
There’s a growing number of people who feel that you can get rid of the Olde language, make it all fresh and modern, and it’ll stay the same.
It won’t, of course. Part of the problem with Shakespeare’s plays is, as we saw earlier, that the stories aren’t original. Nor are they flawless. Translate, update, adapt Shakespeare’s writing, and all you’re really left with is the story. Take the poetry away, and you very quickly realise you’re pulling at a piece of string that will make everything unravel.
Shakespeare didn’t seem to care so much about the actual stories he was telling as much as he did about the characters and the language he used to tell them. There are plot holes in Hamlet you can drive buses through. Shakespeare is the poetry and the language, pulled together by the man’s wit and his take on old stories, and all of it driving towards one end: creating some truly terrific drama.
More to the point, a lot of Shakespeare’s writing doesn’t actually need translating. The English language the Elizabethans spoke is known as Early Modern English (as opposed to the English spoken 200 years before – Middle English, which was the English of Chaucer). Just from a vocabulary point of view, Early Modern English isn’t really that different from Modern English, the language I’m using now; as I said in Act 1, only 5 per cent of all the words Shakespeare used are difficult enough to need a definition.
There are parts of Shakespeare that do need work to under stand them, but by completely rewriting the poetry, the beauty of what is being said is often lost. And Shakespeare without the poetry is The Beatles’ ‘Long and Winding Road’ covered by Cher. Sure, you could listen to it, I suppose, but the heart of the song lies with Paul’s delivery.
Most modern adaptations and translations don’t encourage us to learn how to understand the original texts. There are some that do. A new series of graphic novels published in November 2007 provides three versions of the same play: an original text, a plain (modern) text, and a ‘quick’ text. I’m not sure about the other two, but at least they’ve used the original text as well as the updated versions.
I have a Manga graphic novel adaptation of Hamlet which also uses the original text. Like the Baz Luhrmann film of Romeo + Juliet, the play is heavily edited down, but the fact that they’re using the original text at all, rather than updating it, is fabulous. The original words next to the crisp Manga drawings, just like the freshness of Luhrmann’s Mexican settings, makes the play sing.
But go to an edition of Shakespeare that does away with the original text and has been translated into Modern English, and you lose the impact of Shakespeare’s choice of language. But what does that mean exactly?
Language is made up of choices – choices of grammar, of words, and of sound patterns. All of these things can come together with great effect, and Shakespeare was one of the first writers not only to realise this, but to openly acknowledge it. How do we know? He tells us through one of his characters.
Look at this extract, from King Lear. Kent is King Lear’s faithful servant who’s been banished from Lear’s service but returns disguised as a commoner, under the name of Caius, and convinces Lear to employ him again.
He is accused by Cornwall (Lear’s son-in-law, and one of the rulers of the land) of not being able to flatter, so Kent speaks as poetically as he can. Cornwall asks him why he’s suddenly started to speak so differently. Kent switches back to his ‘low’ speech, and replies that he changed his dialect because it seemed Cornwall didn’t like it:
KENT
Sir, ’tis my occupation to be plain.
I have seen better faces in my time
Than stands on any shoulder that I see
Before me at this instant.
CORNWALL
This is some fellow
Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he!
An honest mind and plain – he must speak truth!
And they will take it, so; if not, he’s plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends
Than twenty silly-ducking observants
That stretch their duties nicely.
KENT
Sir, in good faith, in sincere verity,
Under th’allowance of your great aspect
Whose influence like the wreath of radiant fire
On flickering Phoebus’ front—
CORNWALL
What mean’st by this?
KENT To go out of my dialect which you discommend so much. I know, sir, I am no flatterer.
(Act 2, Scene 2, lines 90–108)
Kent’s use of high vocabulary, complicated words and sentence structure, and the classical allusion to Phoebus (the god of the sun) which Cornwall interrupts, is a risky thing for him to do: it could betray the fact that he’s in disguise, and isn’t really a commoner at all. Kent is punished for the clever way he uses his language – it seems to surprise and embarrass Cornwall, who wouldn’t expect a commoner to speak so articulately – but he proves his point well.
All this would be lost, in translation.
As for this idea of difficult Olde words …
* * *
Am I a coward …?
Boy, but Shakespeare knew how to insult someone. These days, we don’t seem to be nearly so creative with our insults as the Elizabethans were, for the most part sadly limiting our exchanges to a repetitive series of swear words. Shakespeare did it so much better, from the picturesque cockscomb (the crest on the top of a cock’s head = fool, halfwit) to the very commonly used whoreson (son of a whore = bastard), to this incredibly colourful outburst from Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1:
You starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish.
(neat = ox, stock-fish = dried cod, pizzle = I’ll leave to your imaginations)
Calling someone base (= dishonourable) would usually upset them a fair bit, but in King Lear, Kent really lets rip when he calls Oswald a base football player. Not a particularly great insult nowadays, but football in Elizabethan times was a real game of the gutter, described by a writer of the time as a game of ‘beastly fury and extreme violence’ (so not that much has changed) and to be ‘utterly abjected by all noblemen’. If you played football, there really wasn’t any lower you could sink. Kent outdoes himself, though, a little later in the play (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 13–22), and really lets rip at Oswald, with a tremendous diatribe:
KENT: Fellow, I know thee.
OSWALD : What dost thou know me for?
KENT: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy-worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson glass-gazing super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
Son and heir of a mongrel bitch … Classy.
* * *
Scene 2
A library
The Ghost of Olde Englishe rears its ugly head. I know a lot of people think the hardest thing about Shakespeare is the difficult words.
Rather wonderfully, I can tell you it’s not a big problem. I know (because I’ve counted them) that only a very small number of the words found in Shakespeare’s works are difficult to understand.
&
nbsp; Of the 900,000-odd words in Shakespeare, as we’ve seen, only 5 per cent of them would give someone wandering around the 21st century a hard time. What’s more, you could go through life never understanding what they mean, this 5 per cent, and still love every one of Shakespeare’s works.
Well hang on, you might say, 5 per cent is still an awful lot of words. But that total includes words used dozens of times, like bootless (= useless). There are long stretches of text where we don’t encounter any difficult words at all, or one of the easier ones, like morn.
If you look at the vocab as you would a foreign language – spend a little time learning, to stretch the analogy, how to ask for a drink in Shakespearian – then another level of his plays will open up to you.
The language he uses is something we need to take care of. We can’t ignore the fact that Shakespeare is over 400 years older than us, after all, and he used different slang words, different swear words, had different ways of saying I love you. Not only that, but he went through a completely different education system from us, read different books as an adult, and so made different cultural references in his plays.
He would have studied Greek and been fluent in Latin (he would have had to speak Latin at school every day). If you studied a foreign language like French, German or Spanish at school you probably had about 1,500 hours of study. Shakespeare would have had over 20,000 hours of Greek and Latin study, which is at least part of the reason why there are so many references to Greek gods and bits of Latin scattered throughout his plays. That was a fairly common education in those times, so a lot of his audience would have understood these references without having to think too hard about them.
The words I used that were cool when I was younger are so out of date now. No one says ‘cool’ any more. Actually, I don’t think anyone says ‘so out of date’, or so anything any more, either. Whatever. No one says ‘whatever’ any more, and I’m sure that word was still being used last year. How, though, would you explain the meaning of ‘whatever’ to someone in ten years’ time? In 100 years’ time? How about in 400 years’ time …? And you’d have to use their language and their cultural references. You couldn’t. At least not with out a couple of books, a flip-chart, and maybe some diagrams.
