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Post by newt5996 on Oct 13, 2017 3:09:11 GMT
This is a question that I have had in my mind for a while as I've never struggled with understanding Shakespeare, but have always been told that it's this completely different language. I mean I've been listening to Hamlet (With Alexander Vlahos as an excellent lead and Terry Molloy standing out as Polonius), and it's so easy to follow.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Oct 13, 2017 4:09:50 GMT
Hmm... There's a lot of answers to this one. I think it's because the language itself is incredibly emotive, far more than contemporary English can typically be. Shakespeare looks and feels incredibly clunky when its written down on the page, but it can be some of the most fluid and moving dialogue one can ever hear. You can see the problem with translation in practically every high school English class who read Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. Stilted, fumbling and arhythmic because what they see on the page doesn't quite connect with what they feel. It's carried quite a lot by that speaker's emotion.
Another hurdle is also likely cultural. I know it's a word that I use almost ad nauseum, but it has a very pertinent impact on how texts are interpreted. More tellingly, you can see the shift in language, not just over the course of centuries, but in mere decades as well. Moreover, the emphasis is usually placed on culturally specific slang. For example, how many middle class, native English-speaking people living forty years ago (circa 1977) would have wondered if senpai noticed them? How many of them would have seen "Dewey Defeats Truman" in the context of what's now known as a meme? Shakespeare, sharing a trait with quite a lot of speculative fiction, has similarly his own cant. "Bodkin" for dagger, "slugabed" for someone who sleeps in, "facinerous" for evil and so forth.
The latter isn't so much a problem exclusive to Shakespeare though. If you read something like Neuromancer by William Gibson, there's a lot of local language that you have to absorb by the context it's in. "Jacking into your deck" means linking your mind to cyberspace through a mind-hardware interface. It takes some getting used to, but it's manageable because the majority of that futurespeak is couched in Modern English. Shakespeare adds another layer of difficulty on top of that by having wordplay and worldbuilding in an earlier version of the dialect. It stops being like trying to read Iain M. Banks and instead becomes like trying to get the play-on-words of Asterix in the original French.
Knowing the purpose of adjectives, nouns and verbs can help quite a bit with deciphering Shakespearean language, I think. Just knowing the structure of Modern English can help with the structure of the plays considerably.
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Post by pawntake on Oct 13, 2017 7:20:29 GMT
"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion" I defy anyone to tell me that they would know what this means on first encountering it,by either reading or hearing the spoken word. I thought it meant I am spending too much money on Big Finish Audios. Apparently it means "No one remembers what you once did". You could have fooled me.
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shutupbanks
Castellan
There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you.
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Post by shutupbanks on Oct 13, 2017 11:04:39 GMT
Shakespeare is difficult because he's writing in an idiom that's over 400 years old. Once you get used to that, he's great. I mean, some of the jokes have aged badly but no more or less than some comedy from more recent years. His stories are great and are can constantly surprise new audiences: Henry V has some really great ideas about what it means to be a leader in times of conflict; Much Ado About Nothing is still hilarious; we still argue about whether or not Shylock is a sympathetic character or not; and Julius Caesar is a great political thriller.
That language is the barrier, but it doesn't take much to get over it.
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Post by jasonward on Oct 13, 2017 11:18:44 GMT
I once saw a Shakespeare play before it started we were given a short introduction to some of the language (words no longer in use in English) and some of the background politics at the time of writing. Having received that, the play itself was even more funny, as suddenly jokes we would have missed came to life.
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Post by muckypup on Oct 13, 2017 11:46:36 GMT
Like opera, its best to read a synopsis of the story first.
Then you can sit back and enjoy with trying to work out and keep pace with the plot.
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Post by sherlock on Oct 13, 2017 13:28:57 GMT
The words of Shakespeare's time are quite phonetic so to a modern reader can be quite confusing when written down, but hearing them tends to convey the meaning better. Also the rhymes and rhythms he uses in the structure of sentences makes them fun to hear if nothing else, even if the meaning's lost in translation occasionally. I tend to read a synopsis first to grasp the plot (most productions I've been to provide one in their program) and then just sit back and enjoy. His language may be that of 400 years ago, but the ideas and themes Shakespeare used transcend that barrier.
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Post by fingersmash on Oct 13, 2017 13:42:27 GMT
People always say Shakespeare isn't meant to be read, it's meant to be heard. It's true. Look at BFs Hamlet and within a couple weeks, King Lear. I can't say anything for Lear but Hamlet is one of the best things BF has put out in recent years.
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Post by fitzoliverj on Oct 13, 2017 18:22:54 GMT
It's because he uses a lot of high-falutin' language with poetry that suddenly Enjambs onto another line and stops. Where it stops is often the middle of the line, So that's confusing. And much of the imagery might not be familiar. But watch it performed, and listened to it said, and while you may not pick up every little thing, you'll get the general idea. There's actually a lot of Shakespeare that's pretty straightforward.
(And I still reckon 'Pompion the Great' is a good joke. I bet Linus laughed).
(I suspect his reputation for clarity might have been improved if he'd written more prose).
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Post by charlesuirdhein on Oct 13, 2017 21:09:34 GMT
It's been said above, they're meant to be listened to, seen, not particularly read. He was a playwright and a poet, not a novelist (although the concept hardly existed) or an essayist. And even if he had been an essayist the style of the time wouldn't necessarily have given him greater clarity, it might even have decreased it! Since plays needed to be understood by the mass of the groundlings and not just those who could read.
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Post by glutamodo on Oct 13, 2017 21:30:35 GMT
I have to admit that while I bought BF's Hamlet, I haven't listened to it yet. (I've never had any real experience with the play before) I listen to audio stuff primarily on my long drive to work, and have been afraid that it would just be "archaic bafflegab" to my ears and that it wouldn't be something I could follow in that environment. What I need to do is go for a long walk sometime and cue that up on my MP3 player, it might go better that way.
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Post by mrperson on Oct 25, 2017 17:54:23 GMT
It can be easy to understand basic plot, but one really does have to read quite carefully and perhaps also watch a performance or two. There are double and triple meanings scattered throughout, at times.
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Post by theotherjosh on Oct 25, 2017 19:04:13 GMT
I can't believe how badly the previous answers missed the point.
You see, Shakespeare is difficult to understand because the Carrionates kept manipulating him into inserting bizarre references into his plays.
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Post by mark687 on Oct 25, 2017 19:38:39 GMT
I can't believe how badly the previous answers missed the point. You see, Shakespeare is difficult to understand because the Carrionates kept manipulating him into inserting bizarre references into his plays. Or that Temp he hired when he sprained his wrist writing sonnets had terrible handwriting.
Regards
mark687
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Post by J.A. Prentice on Oct 29, 2017 4:36:04 GMT
Anyone saying Shakespeare is hard to understand should have to read Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" for comparison. Same time period, but the language is so (deliberately) archaic, and the verse form makes it difficult to muddle through.
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Post by whiskeybrewer on Oct 30, 2017 12:26:16 GMT
He went on a bit lol. He had some good one liners lol
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Post by iainmclaughlin on Nov 8, 2017 0:33:18 GMT
I'm a big Shakespeare admirer. I have been since... must have been about second year at school when we started studying him. I'd have been about thirteen or fourteen. I'd always liked reading and loved people who used words in a clever way. The first play we looked at in-depth was The Merchant of Venice. We followed that with King Lear the following year. I really liked the Merchant of Venice with the politics and indeed race politics but I think it was Lear that really made me love Shakespeare. Everybody in the play was rounded out. Even the villains had understandable motives. They had a reason for their behaviour. There are plays I like more than others. The like the tragedies and Much Ado About Nothing is a glorious comedy. I've never really struggled to understand the language, but I have always gone in with the expectation that I'm going to like the play so I think that positive attitude probably buys me a lot when it comes to one of his plays.
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