English schools dumb down Shakespeare

UK Daily Mail ^ | June 6, 2006

[Sam_Damon]

"Here, we compare the original works of Shakespeare with their modern day translation.

ROMEO AND JULIET

Act One, Scene One - confrontation between the Capulets and Monatgues

Shakespeare:

Tybalt: What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds? Turn thee, Benvolio, look upon thy death.

Benvolio: I do but keep the peace, put up thy sword, Or manage it to part these men with me.

CGP (modern-day UK-speak -- ed.):

Tybalt: Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

Benvolio: Leave it out, big nose."

[Sam_Damon]

Ahh, yes. Some more bits from the Museum of Anglo-Saxon Culture as it reorganizes into God-knows what. To Shakespeare's credit, he wrote well enough that we can still recognize this gibberish as one of his plays.

[KarlInOhio]

I bite my thumb at the author of the rewrite.

[mikemach5]

The whole thing reads like a Monty Python sketch. Squid-for-brains? Good God! Does Mark Athony say he farts in Brutus' general direction?

[GOP Poet]

ping

[Mikey_1962]

Elizabethan English is difficult, I still remember looking up what a bodkin and petard was in the dictionary.

So I'm ok with some changes so long as it does lose the poetry or start sounding like Ludacris.

[scouse]

So I'm ok with some changes

What a rogue and peasant slave thou dost appear to be...In the words of the Bard, "Speak the speech .....As I pronounced it to thee...:^).

[brothers4thID]

The Bard was a master of the double entendre, so changing even a single word can lose some of the meaning of a sentence or even the play.

[bannie]

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

[bannie]

The kids don't get "carrying coals" and "coliers" bit. Neither do they get the pushing of the servant girls against the wall: THAT is a good thing!

[ArrogantBustard]

Hmmm ... so reading The Bard induced you to drag out a dictionary and learn something. Excellent!!! That't part of the reason for teaching English Literature.

Now, you want to spare the next generation the awful strain of thinking? Pathetic. This is indeed the very definition of 'dumbing down'.

[dmz]

Were you damaged by your having to look up those words?

Leave Shakespeare the hell alone.

[CatoRenasci]

It's not that Elizabethan English is difficult, just that it uses constructions we have dropped - the second person familiar (thee, thou, thine) for example - and rythms that are unfamiliar (iambic pentameter in which Shakespeare abounds), as well as having a vocabulary that differs from modern usage in many respects.

When I was a youth and student, in the 1950's and early 1960's, children learned much of this as a matter of course: almost everyone in the English-speaking world (Protestants of all stripes at least) read the Authorized Version (King James) Bible, even if the Revised Standard was also around. The Catholic English Bible used similarly archaic langauge, even if it differed in many ways. Most of us read Shakespeare, beginning in 5th or 6th grade, in the original, though with vocabulary notes. Shakepeare continued through high school at (for us anyway) 2 plays per school year. In my junior high English classes, perhaps because we had very senior teachers who'd started teaching in the '30s, grammar study included at least an introduction to the use of the now archaic second person familiar.

[Mikey_1962]

Hmmm ... so reading The Bard induced you to drag out a dictionary and learn something....

I HAD to read it: listening to it was a waste of time. It was written in the language of the time for the people of the time.

And I did learn some words like: bodkin, petard, russet, periwig-pated, all of which to this day, unlike other things I learned simultaneously, differential equations or thermodynamics for example, I have never used again.

Will I demand my children read it? Absolutely.

[Mikey_1962]

Were you damaged by your having to look up those words? Leave Shakespeare the hell alone.

You miss understand me: I believe more children were reached by watching "Forbidden Planet" than trying to read "The Tempest".

[VOA]

The teacher that helps me to actually "get" Shakespeare is David Alan White,
the West Point instructor that appears periodically on The Hugh Hewitt Show..

[ArrogantBustard]

And I did learn some words like: bodkin, petard, russet, periwig-pated, all of which to this day ... I have never used again.

Sad. You've never had cause to lie low, make haste, or screw you courage to the sticking point when you were in a pickle? As good luck would have it, I read much of Shakespeare ... some many times. Noone could turn a phrase quite like him ... I'm glad to know that your children will read him. Perhaps they will learn to love the Queen's English.

Oh, yes ... I, too, studied Differential Equations, and Thermodynamics, and Quantum Mechanics, and much else. Even though I work as an engineer, I think perhaps I 'use' the Shakespeare more often.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Seriously.  What's the f*cking point of doing this?

And why stop with Shakespeare?  Why not remove all the polyphony and modulation from Bach while they're at it.

And make all of Byron's poems rhyme.

 

[El Gato]

Assigning kids to read Shakespeare is an abomination. I hated it, but like to see performances of it, using the exact same language. It was written to be performed and watched, not to be read.

It's the same, almost, as reading a screenplay, rather than watching the movie.

[El Gato]

I HAD to read it: listening to it was a waste of time. It was written in the language of the time for the people of the time.

I felt the opposite, reading it was a waste of time, but watching it performed was another thing entirely, and was actually enjoyable even for anti "Literature" and "Arts" me. Even if that performance was recorded on celluloid (This was way before VHS and DVDs).

Will I demand my children read it? Absolutely.

Better that they watch it first, with written copy available for examination afterwords. The Barb did after all write it to be performed, to a contemporary audience, who would pay to see it. He had to eat, and there was no National Endowment for the Arts, although one could sometimes get some Royal to pony up a little up front money.

[Dumb_Ox]

"Every effort was made to encourage the children at the public schools to "think for themselves." When they should have been whipped and taught Greek paradigms, they were set arguing about birth control and nationalization. Their crude little opinions were treated with respect. Preachers in the school chapel week after week entrusted the future to their hands. It is hardly surprising that they were Bolshevik at 18 and bored at 20."

-Evelyn Waugh

Plato had choice words for teachers who flatter their students. The Bard read Ovid in Latin in grammar school. These stultifying teaching fads are almost consciously designed to prevent education.