|
|
|
|
Professor David Crystal and his son Ben at Hay Festival 2015
Photo: Jay Williams
7:00AM BST 31 May 2015
2 Comments
Studying Shakespeare for exams is made
far more confusing than it ought to be for a generation which has
unwittingly adopted the Bard's own language devices, one of the world's
leading experts on linguistics has suggested.
Professor David Crystal said only a tiny selection of the million words making up the canon of William Shakespeare were markedly different to the language of 2015, making it much easier to understand than many people think.
Young people today, he said, had even adopted some of Shakespeare's own
linguistic traits without realising, with the Facebook generation
creating the word "unfriend" just as the playwright used "unsex, unsound
or uncurse".
Prof Crystal, who has written a Shakespeare dictionary with his actor son Ben,
added the huge number of notes accompanying plays on the exam syllabus
gave the impression that the text was far more complicated than is
necessary.
Speaking at Hay Festival,
Ben Crystal added even he had disliked Shakespeare at school, pointing
out the curriculum requirement to "study" it rather than learn to enjoy
it gave children the wrong impression.
"You open one of the typical editions of Shakespeare at Act 1, Scene 1,
Page 1, and there are just two lines of text and all of the rest of the
page is notes," said Prof Crystal, who has written and edited more than
100 books on language.
A likeness of William Shakespeare (Alamy)
"If you're looking at that, Shakespeare must be difficult then mustn't he? Otherwise what are all these notes doing?
"And so when you're looking at Shakespeare on the page, certainly you get the impression that Shakespeare is different. Almost a different language from the present day.
"But in actual fact it isn't as different as all that. It's early modern English, not late Middle English.
"When you actually go through all the words in Shakespeare - and there are nearly a million words in Shakespeare - there are only just around 20,000 different words altogether.
"And when you go through all of those and compare them with the modern day, for words in Shakespeare that are different in meaning from the words you and I speak today, the answer is surprisingly small.
"Only five per cent are really, really different."
Professor David Crystal, speaking at Hay Festival (Jay Williams)
Of those, he said, around 1,000 are "false friends" such as the word naughty, which appear to be familiar but have a slightly different meaning.
He told an audience Shakespeare was particularly fond of using the prefix "un", such as "unshout", "uncurse" and Lady Macbeth requesting: "Unsex me".
"Leave it like that and it's a different language" said Prof Crystal. "But point out that 'friend' has now become 'unfriend' and the kids go 'oh yeah, that's right'.
He added he had recently heard other examples in modern life, including "unChinese-y", "unpoliceman-life" and "unyoung".
Ben, who has performed 'original pronunciation' versions of Shakespeare to show how the first audiences understood it, said students should be taught to love the plays, then introduced to the linguistic tools to get the most out of them.
Ben Crystal (Jay Williams)
"I didn't like Shakespeare when I was in school and it didn't make sense to me until I started acting it," he said.
"I don't like the idea that the curriculum says that our younglings must have studied two Shakespeare plays by the age of 14.
"Shakespeare started not as a man of literature but as a man of the stage: he was a playwright rather than a novelist or author.
"Where in the curriculum or our school studies are we giving them a chance to play with Shakespeare? Or learn to love Shakespeare?"
The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary is out now.
A likeness of William Shakespeare (Alamy)
"If you're looking at that, Shakespeare must be difficult then mustn't he? Otherwise what are all these notes doing?
"And so when you're looking at Shakespeare on the page, certainly you get the impression that Shakespeare is different. Almost a different language from the present day.
"But in actual fact it isn't as different as all that. It's early modern English, not late Middle English.
"When you actually go through all the words in Shakespeare - and there are nearly a million words in Shakespeare - there are only just around 20,000 different words altogether.
"And when you go through all of those and compare them with the modern day, for words in Shakespeare that are different in meaning from the words you and I speak today, the answer is surprisingly small.
"Only five per cent are really, really different."
Professor David Crystal, speaking at Hay Festival (Jay Williams)
Of those, he said, around 1,000 are "false friends" such as the word naughty, which appear to be familiar but have a slightly different meaning.
He told an audience Shakespeare was particularly fond of using the prefix "un", such as "unshout", "uncurse" and Lady Macbeth requesting: "Unsex me".
"Leave it like that and it's a different language" said Prof Crystal. "But point out that 'friend' has now become 'unfriend' and the kids go 'oh yeah, that's right'.
He added he had recently heard other examples in modern life, including "unChinese-y", "unpoliceman-life" and "unyoung".
Ben, who has performed 'original pronunciation' versions of Shakespeare to show how the first audiences understood it, said students should be taught to love the plays, then introduced to the linguistic tools to get the most out of them.
Ben Crystal (Jay Williams)
"I didn't like Shakespeare when I was in school and it didn't make sense to me until I started acting it," he said.
"I don't like the idea that the curriculum says that our younglings must have studied two Shakespeare plays by the age of 14.
"Shakespeare started not as a man of literature but as a man of the stage: he was a playwright rather than a novelist or author.
"Where in the curriculum or our school studies are we giving them a chance to play with Shakespeare? Or learn to love Shakespeare?"
The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary is out now.
