[tptacek]

This calls to mind a lot of what McWhorter says about Shakespeare --- that it's an emperor's new clothes situation, we're only pretending we can understand 16th century English, but really not getting any of the original intent because none of the references make sense, and that if we really want to understand what those works mean, we need to update the language.

If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the impression that she's read all basically all the translations (apparently Tolkien makes it sound just like Lord of the Rings), so it's interesting to see where she's taking it.

[patio11]

There are a lot of people whose single recollection of Romeo and Juliet is the garden scene, and who understand that scene to have Juliet aware that Romeo is present in the garden because of "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", due to simple confusion in not knowing that "Wherefore" means "Why?" and that Juliet goes into an extended meditation on why Romeo was born as Romeo, in the rival family, and therefore off-limits to her despite the urges of her heart.

And that sort of thing repeats on a line-by-line basis through most of Shakespeare. I tend to think one gets better at reading it relatively quickly, even as a high school student, but there is a reason why the best way to read it is with one page of the historical text and one with extensive notes.

This skips a long discussion on "Should we teach Shakespeare?", "To what degree should we allocate resources to decoding Shakespeare given competing demands for resources to establish baseline proficiency in modern written English?", and "Is a production of Shakespeare in historically representative English a service to the broader community or is it a service to the class which already knows the story and therefore does not need the actors words, which they mostly will not understand, to impart it?"

[at_a_remove]

The "Wherefore" bit is actually an OKCupid question due to how commonly misunderstood it is.

When I tutored Shakespeare to kids, I always prepped the vocab for each scene, got extra copies ready, and made the parents act out bits. All out-loud. It really helps.

[tptacek]

McWhorter's argument, distilled, is that we should not teach Shakespeare. :)

[pvg]

Is it? I've read some of the articles he's written about this and it seems to be mostly 'watching performances of Shakespeare's plays does not magically make you understand Early Modern English'.

[tptacek]

I'm probably blurring stuff he's said on Lexicon Valley with stuff he's written.

[pvg]

I guess I'll have to listen to those now to hunt down your weaselry!

[aptwebapps]

I remember the first time I read a heavily-footnoted Shakespeare play and discovering that for every word or passage I thought I needed to look up there were two or three that I did as well but did not realize simply because the language has changed so much. I.e., the modern meaning made enough sense that I would have been none the wiser without the footnote.

But while an updated Shakespeare might be good thing if well done, to me it would be a new thing, and not Shakespeare.

[goto11]

Shakespeare have a lot of references to biblical and classical mythology which was common shared knowledge at the time but less known today. I wonder what would be an appropriate translation to a modern context. WWII? Start Wars or Lord of the Rings references?

(I'm not being sarcastic, I think it is a genuinely interesting question.)

But in general the strength of Shakespeare is the language and poetry, so it will be difficult to modernize without losing what makes him great in the first place.

[billfruit]

That is the express reason with which Thomas Bulfinch wrote his "Mythologies", because his pupils were having trouble understanding English poems because they couldn't figure out allusions to mythology. Reading that small book could "unlock" a lot of English literature for one.

[JJMcJ]

This is true of much English writing before the 19th Century, and poetry even to a later date. No knowledge of the Bible or mythology and a lot of the writing loses its punch, even if you understand it in the literal sense.

[simonh]

I think it may be more accurate to say that Tolkien intended Lord of the Rings to sound like Beowulf, but I'm not qualified to comment on how successful he was or what biases he may have introduced in his translation.

[libraryatnight]

I generally find updated language versions to be more interesting to those who are familiar with the original works. People only versed in modern language adaptations are useless for conversation about the piece.

[autisticcurio]

I sometimes wonder if some of the references to the mythical beasts like fire breathing dragons are simply, some now extinct species of animal with embellishments like fire breathing. Lets face it, oral tradition came with a certain degree of embellishment and we know dinosaurs used to exist, but what's the chances of finding the remains of an extinct animal if we tried to look for it? Perhaps the Dodo would be an exception as, iirc, they last lived on an island somewhere killed by sailors for food, but hopefully you get my point. I doubt many skeletal remains would be found with Anglo-Saxon remains because none have been found so far, but do archaeologists looking for Anglo-Saxon remains ignore animal remains during the dig process? Its not something I'm familiar with.

[goto11]

I think you are messing up the timescales. Beowulf is about a thousand years old, while dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years ago.

[aptwebapps]

Dinosaurs were not around during the period in question, but their fossils were, as were the crocodilians and large monitor lizards. So if dragons are based on a real thing, I prefer one of those things. But I also think it's a mistake to discount the imaginations and creativity of previous generations. They might simply have imagined a scaled up garden lizard, adding fire-breathing at some point along the way.

[arethuza]

My understanding is that modern archaeology is extremely meticulous about examining pretty much every aspect of materials found during excavations.

Here are some resources from Historic England on the subject:

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/ani...