Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English.
The backlash began immediately, with O.S.F. devotees posting their laments on the festival’s Facebook page. “What a revolting development!” “Is there really a need to translate English into Brain Dead American?” “Why not just rewrite Shakespeare in emoticons and text acronyms?”
Beneath the opprobrium lay a shared assumption: that Shakespeare’s genius inheres not in his complicated characters or carefully orchestrated scenes or subtle ideas but in the singularity of his words. James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, used a regionally apt analogy to express this opinion: “Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “It’s like the beer I drink. I drink 8.2 per cent I.P.A., and by changing the language in this modernizing way, it’s basically shifting to Bud Light. Bud Light’s acceptable, but it just doesn’t pack the punch and the excitement and the intoxicating quality of that language.”
I
don’t disagree with Shapiro, but, as a literary historian who studies
the way Shakespeare has been reinvented, I’m struck that so many serious
Shakespeareans over the centuries have argued the opposite: that
Shakespeare’s genius had to be salvaged from the obscure, indecorous,
archaic, quibbling mess of his language.
For poets, playwrights,
editors, and actors from the seventeenth century through much of the
nineteenth, Shakespeare’s language wasn’t intoxicating so much as
intoxicated: it needed a sobering intervention.
These days, we tend to
assume that productions can change anything about Shakespeare (the
setting, the period, the characters’ race or gender), as long as the
script stays intact—cut or reordered, perhaps, but not rewritten.
This
is a fairly recent notion. Until the late Victorian era, stage
performances usually observed the setting and period implied in the
play, but they transformed the language. Shakespeare’s script was the
first problem that a production had to remedy.
At
the end of the English Civil War, when the restoration of the monarchy
reopened the theatres, Shakespeare’s fifty-year-old plays looked, to
many, out of date. Playwrights polished up his rusty parts for
performance, pruning his unruly plots to fit a French-fuelled demand for
dramatic unities, tweaking his politics to suit an age wary of further
unrest, recasting his roles to accommodate newly licensed female actors,
and rewriting the rough bits that violated neoclassical decorum.
John
Dryden and William Davenant introduced their adaptation of “The
Tempest,” in 1667, as Shakespeare resurrected for the present: “from old
Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day / Springs up and buds a new
reviving Play.”
Restoration playwrights treated Shakespeare much as he
had treated his sources: as fertile soil ripe for tilling. John Crown
found “Henry VI” full of “old gather’d Herbs”; he added a dressing of
“oyly Words” along with “a little vinegar against the Pope” to pique the
taste of his Protestant audience.
Shakespeare was seen as an untutored
poet of nature who was, as John Milton memorably put it, apt to “warble
his native wood-notes wild,” and who lacked the art—and knowledge of
classical precedent—to shape his fancy. (The prohibition against ending a
sentence with a preposition stems, in part, from Dryden’s attack on
this “common fault” in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.)
“There are
Lines that are stiff and forc’d, and harsh and unmusical,” the
playwright John Dennis complained as he tuned up “Coriolanus.” “There
are Lines in some Places which are very obscure, and whole Scenes which
ought to be alter’d.”
The Irish poet Nahum Tate cast “King Lear” as “a
Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht”; his notorious resetting of
those smudged gems modernized the language, cut the Fool, and added a
happy ending in which Lear survives to see Cordelia marry Edgar—an
anathema to our current judgment, but popular enough to hold the stage
for the next hundred and fifty years.
Even
the eighteenth-century vogue for printed editions of Shakespeare, which
often sought to rescue the plays from the perceived travesties of the
playhouse, found his work faulty. Nearly all the editions modernized the
plays’ spelling and punctuation; some went further.
Striving to
refashion Shakespeare as a more genteel poet, Alexander Pope, in the
preface to his 1725 edition, acknowledged his subject’s shortcomings:
“It must be own’d that with all these great excellencies he has almost
as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better so he has
perhaps written worse than any other.”
Pope’s solution was to flag the
excellencies with a comma in the margin—or, if they were particularly
“shining” examples, with a star—whereas “excessively bad” passages were
“degraded to the bottom of the page.”
Although Pope blamed these faults
on Shakespeare’s need to please the debased taste of his audience,
another poet-editor, Samuel Johnson, thought Shakespeare’s defects could
not be excused by the “barbarity of his age.”
He disdained the comic
characters, whose “jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry
licentious”; he deplored the labored tragic writing where “the offspring
of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity”; he
criticized narrative scenes for “a disproportionate pomp of diction and a
wearisome train of circumlocution”; and he lamented Shakespeare’s
wordplay, sighing that a pun or “quibble was to him the fatal
‘Cleopatra’ for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.”
Although Johnson regarded Shakespeare as the greatest modern writer to
depict our “general nature,” he preferred Tate’s “King Lear” for the
poetic justice of its ending.
As
the scholar Michael Dobson has argued, canonization fuelled adaptation:
if Shakespeare was the newly minted national poet, his plays had to be
improved to be worthy of his stature. (That impulse spurred Henrietta
and Thomas Bowdler’s expurgated “Family Shakespeare” edition, which
advertised that it removed “from the writings of Shakespeare some
defects which diminish their value.”)
In 1838, the great actor-manager
William Macready restored Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” complete with the
Fool and the original body count, but he could not persuade his
audiences to accept Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”
Colley Cibber’s trim
Restoration adaptation, with its popular lines like “Off with his head!
So much for Buckingham,” was preferred until 1877, and even Laurence
Olivier’s 1955 film kept some of Cibber’s alterations.
“The Taming of
the Shrew,” frequently revived in adaptations throughout the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, was not performed in Shakespeare’s version
until 1887, almost three hundred years after its Elizabethan début.
So
what changed? How did Shakespeare’s original texts regain their
popularity? German Romantics had something to do with it. They rebelled
against French neoclassical restraint and cited Shakespeare’s unruliness
as a liberating precedent.
British critics in the nineteenth century
followed suit, celebrating Shakespeare’s capacious characters and poetic
imagination instead of worrying whether his plots fit Aristotelian
unities or if his style matched Augustan decorum. Rather than subject
Shakespeare to critical standards, Shakespeare became the standard.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge apologized for importing the clunky term
“psychological” from the German, but he said that English lacked a word
to capture Shakespeare’s “Philosophy of the Human Mind.”)
Then,
with the rise of English as an academic discipline in the Victorian
era, scholars took over the business of editing Shakespeare, working to
establish more historically authentic texts, rather than correcting
poetic defects—an editing goal matched by the nineteenth-century taste
for spectacular antiquarian stage productions.
(John Philip Kemble
inaugurated a tradition of playing Macbeth in a Scottish kilt.)
Shakespeare’s plays entered the new compulsory public education system
in 1870; the national assessment standards required classes to recite
Shakespeare passages for an examiner.
Shakespeare stocked the cultural
arsenal for Britain’s overseas campaign as well, getting a push in the
colonies from the British Empire Shakespeare Society, whose motto read,
“Using no other weapon but his name.”
Even the Oxford English Dictionary
helped secure Shakespeare’s status as the source of the imperial
tongue; one editor instructed researchers to stop looking for earlier
instances once they found a word listed in the concordance to
Shakespeare. George Bernard Shaw feared that the Victorian tendency to
see Shakespeare as immune from criticism verged on “Bardolatry,” warning
that “it is false admiration to worship him as an infallible demi-god.”
But Shakespeare was well on his way to becoming secular scripture. In
the twentieth century, New Critics enshrined Shakespeare’s plays as
complex poetic art, unified through patterns of metaphor, irony, and
paradox, and generations of students were compelled to write exegeses of
his linguistic richness. If witty intricacies appeared opaque, that was
the fault not of the poet but of the audience who failed to grasp his
genius.
Even in a climate of
reverence for Shakespeare, the authentic text of his plays remains
elusive. No manuscripts for the plays survive, so contemporary editions
and performance scripts cobble together the most plausible passages from
early quartos and folios, modernizing the spelling and punctuation and
relying on the history of editorial emendations to clarify obscure
cruxes.
(There is also the tricky business of attribution for scripts
that appear to be collaborations between Shakespeare and other
playwrights.) Most editors of “Hamlet,” for instance, silently translate
“porpentine” to “porcupine” without incurring outrage, though whether
the porcupine is “fretful” or “fearful” depends on whether you follow
the folio or the second quarto.
Every printing of an early modern book
was slightly different; hence the oddity of the Norton Facsimile edition
of the First Folio, which reproduced the cleanest version of each page
from different copies, generating the facsimile of a volume that never
existed.
The Norton edition of Shakespeare’s complete works that I
helped edit when I was a graduate student printed three different texts
of “King Lear” (the quarto, the folio, and a conflated version of the
two).
At the Internet Shakespeare Editions,
you can find seven different texts of “King Lear,” along with ten
facsimiles. If Samuel Johnson were asked today whether he preferred
Nahum Tate’s version to Shakespeare’s, he would have to answer: Which
one?
In
light of this history, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s translation
project seems fairly conservative. The translations are billed as
“companion pieces” for Shakespeare’s originals, not replacements.
According to the O.S.F. Web site,
the playwrights are charged not to cut, not to edit, not to add
personal politics, not to change the setting or time period or
references. “First, do no harm,” the commission states.
Instead, O.S.F.
wants its writers to “limit their efforts to updating the more
antiquated language in the plays” while putting the “same kind of
pressure on the language”—rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric—“as
Shakespeare put on his.”
Although accessible, stylish play scripts could
offer handy entry points for Shakespeare newbies, one almost wonders
why O.S.F. needs thirty-six playwrights (and supporting dramaturgs) to
do the sort of clarifying work that annotations to modern editions have
been doing for years. In its combination of updating and deference,
O.S.F.’s commission looks like an eighteenth-century project couched in
nineteenth-century terms.
What
is genuinely radical in the commission is not the process but the
people involved. Under the leadership of O.S.F.’s director of literary
development and dramaturgy, Lue Morgan Douthit, more than half of the
selected playwrights will be women, and more than half will be writers
of color. Shakespeare’s scripts have always resulted from collaborations
among playwrights, actors, and editors.
For most of the history I have
traced, those collaborators were white men. Updating Shakespeare isn’t a
new business, but now its ranks will reflect the rich diversity of
artists who, four centuries later, both relish and renew his language.
