2nd Year English Studies

Comprehension 2004-5

Sentell, Storey, Whyte

 

 

Does Shakespeare's English need translating?

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s691493.htm

The renowned linguist David Crystal on why we don't need modern English translations of Shakespeare.

 

Prelistening

 

1. What do you think: does Shakespeare's English need translating?

 

2. Language preview: match the quotation to the play

 

We are such stuff as dreams are made of.                             Romeo and Juliet

Venus smiles not in the house                                                   King Lear

super-serviceable, finical rogue                                                               Hamlet

To be or not to be; that is the question                                  The Tempest

 

 

Listening

Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

1. What did a recent article claim about Shakespearean English?

 

 

2. How did David and Ben Crystal tackle the question?

 

 

3. When their database was complete, what did it show?

 

 

4. What two examples does Crystal give to show that a new glossary of Shakespeare is needed?

 

 

5. Why have previous attempts to resolve the translation issue failed?

 

 

6. What is the basic question, according to Crystal?  What other problem can cloud the issue?

 

 

Postlistening

 

a) People are more ignorant nowadays; we need to return to classical teaching methods.

 

b) Language change is irresistible - we cannot and should not try to preserve the language of our ancestors.

Answers

 

Prelistening

 

We are such stuff as dreams are made of.             The Tempest

Venus smiles not in the house                                   Romeo and Juliet

super-serviceable, finical rogue                                               King Lear

 To be or not to be; that is the question                                 Hamlet

 

Listening

1. What did a recent article claim about Shakespearean English?

language has changed so much it's like a foreign language and should be translated

 

2. How did David and Ben Crystal tackle the question?

examined texts to highlight words which had changed since 16thC

 

3. When their database was complete, what did it show?

50,000 out of 1,000,000 words had changed

 

4. What two examples does Crystal give to show that a new glossary of Shakespeare is needed?

people no longer know Latin

the word 'goth' has a different meaning nowadays

 

5. Why have previous attempts to resolve the translation issue failed?

people don't use statistics

 

6. What is the basic question, according to Crystal?  What other problem can cloud the issue?

how many words have changed their meaning

some words are just difficult

 

Transcript

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s691493.htm

 

This week another chance to hear renowned linguist David Crystal, co-author with his son, the actor Ben Crystal, of a Glossary of Shakespeare's Words, on why we don't need modern English translations of Shakespeare.

 
Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Jill Kitson: Prospero, ending the masque performed by his spirits in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest.

Hello and welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: Does Shakespeare’s English need translating? The renowned linguist, David Crystal, co-author with his son, the actor Ben Crystal, of a Glossary of Shakespeare’s Words, on whether we need modern English translations of Shakespeare.

David Crystal: To modernize or not to modernize, that is the question. Well, I’m talking about Shakespeare of course, where every year or so, someone makes a splash by saying that Shakespearean English is largely unintelligible and needs translation to make sense to a modern audience or reader. It happened again this year, mostly recently in an article in a magazine called ‘Around the Globe’, a splendid periodical published by the London theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe. The writer was arguing that the English language has changed so much since the time of Shakespeare, the early 16th century, that he’s now a foreign language to most people. So the best we can do is translate him into modern English - get a modern author to do it, like Tom Stoppard or Seamus Heaney.

Well, when this article appeared, I thought I’d take a look at the question from a linguistic point of view. And Shakespeare was very much on my mind at the time, because my actor son Ben and I had just published a new glossary and language companion to the bard: it’s called Shakespeare’s Words. This was a two-pronged attack on the topic. I looked at the vocabulary from a linguist’s point of view, and Ben looked at it from the theatrical angle. What we did was work our way through all the plays and poems, line by line, and every time we came across a word or phrase which presented even the slightest degree of difference in meaning or use from that found in Modern English, we highlit it, worked out its meaning and put it into a database. It took us quite a time to complete the job, as you can imagine - three years in fact, and we ended up with about 50,000 words highlit. That may sound like a lot, but when you consider that there are nearly a million words in the whole of the Shakespeare canon, it’s not as many as it seems. But more on that in a moment.

It was certainly time for a new glossary. The last big one - the one I used when I was studying Shakespeare at college - was compiled by the Victorian lexicographer, Charles Talbot Onions, and that was nearly a hundred years ago. Since then, times have changed. Take all the Latin words in Shakespeare, for instance - in Victorian times, educated people had studied Latin in school - not so today, so they need to be carefully glossed. Or take the words which have changed their meaning - like Goths. There are Goths in ‘Titus Andronicus’, referring to the South European Germanic tribe; but to a modern youngster, Goths are people with black eye make-up and a weird taste in music. And of course we mustn’t forget that in the past century new plays have been added to the Shakespeare canon - mostly recently ‘Two Noble Kinsmen’, which had a production at the Globe a couple of years ago, and ‘King Edward III’, which is playing in Stratford this year.

If we use the data in our book, I think we can shed some light on the modernization question, which is usually debated with very few statistical facts on either side. And it is all a question of fact. Modernizers make their case by finding difficult examples like ‘super-serviceable, finical rogue’ - from ‘King Lear’ - while people who don’t believe Shakespeare needs modernizing use examples like, well, Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be; that is the question’. To my mind, the question is very simple: how much of Shakespeare’s language is like the ‘King Lear’ example, and how much is like the ‘Hamlet’? If most of his words are genuinely difficult because the language has changed, the modernizers win. If they aren’t, their opponents do. So I’ve been doing some counting.

The basic question is: how many words are there in Shakespeare which have changed their meaning between Elizabethan English and now? Notice I say ‘changed their meaning’. Shakespeare uses plenty of words which haven’t changed their meaning but are still difficult: Classical references are a good example. Do you remember in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ the sentence which Paris uses to explain why he hasn’t mentioned his feelings to the grieving Juliet: ‘Venus smiles not in a house of tears’? Well, it makes no sense until you know who Venus is. And she turns out to be the same goddess of love today as she was 400 years ago. In other words, this isn’t a linguistic problem, it isn’t a matter of language change. It’s a matter of general educational knowledge. People ought to know who is the Greek goddess of love, jut as they should know what is the capital of Turkey, or who is the Prime Minister of Russia.

So, back to the real question: how many words are there where there is a difficulty of understanding because of the way the language has changed between then and now?