Abstract
With over four hundred years separating today’s millennials from Shakespeare’s plays, it is little wonder that students and teachers have pegged Elizabethan English as difficult—if not impossible—to understand. Generally, the motivation for students who seek such resources or for teachers who furnish them comes from a shared assumption that Shakespeare’s language is indecipherable to today’s audiences—or, just too difficult to grasp. There are even some students (and, teachers) who operate under the false premise that Shakespeare’s plays are composed in Old English, a language that thrived centuries prior to Shakespeare’s earliest works. To make visible the troubling implications of so-called “modern” or “contemporary” translations of Shakespeare’s works, I will look to Shakespeare’s most academic play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, to propose how today’s students are complicit in dismissing Shakespeare for his words as much as audiences of Shakespeare’s time laughed away Holofernes. In addition to surveying a critical history of supplementary resources designed to ease the burden of Shakespeare’s language, an analysis of Holofernes’ stage presence will offer a natural opportunity to explore what happens if we willingly replace Shakespeare’s English for English that is perceived as easier—or, according to some outlets, even truer. This article sets out to complicate the facility and pervasiveness of such contemporary translations by calling attention to the language lessons Holofernes teaches through his folly, revealing that such work is, “not generous, not gentle, not humble” (Love’s Labour’s V.ii.617).
Highlights
As part of my duties within my university’s concurrent enrollment program—an arrangement that allows qualified teachers to deliver credit-bearing university courses—I encounter sections of introductory literature that are “doing” Shakespeare, as students and their teachers sometimes put it
Popular lore has cemented Shakespeare as nearly impossible to understand—even though his words, characters, and stories have been prominently featured within everyday culture in the form of various media adaptations like the teen film comedies Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) and She’s the Man (2006)
This cultural proliferation does little to cut through the “gibberish” students may encounter when studying Shakespeare’s works in their original form
Summary
As part of my duties within my university’s concurrent enrollment program—an arrangement that allows qualified teachers to deliver credit-bearing university courses—I encounter sections of introductory literature that are “doing” Shakespeare, as students and their teachers sometimes put it. While these translations and resources have provided new ways to understand and appreciate Shakespeare’s Early Modern English, I argue that there are attendant losses that must not escape our attention as students, educators, or critics of Shakespeare.
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