Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language by Paula Blank

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language by Paula Blank Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language. By Paula Blank. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 213. $80.00, cloth. Paula Blank’s work is timely, and she is dearly missed by many colleagues, friends, and family members. In fact, after Professor Blank’s passing in 2016, so many people were moved by her work that the author’s manuscript was shaped into this 2018 publication. In the spirit of “Spanglish,” Paula Blank coined the term “Shakesplish” to account for the way we may occasionally experience Shakespeare’s language as a hybrid English. As modern English readers, speakers, and listeners, at first we invariably understand some, but not all, of Shakespeare’s Early Modern English. Blank informs us that there can be great value in what we don’t understand, or as she puts it, “We might discover that ‘Shakesplish’ may be composed of errors in comprehension, but that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in Shakespeare’s language today” (xii). Blank’s book is arranged in chapters according to how we often perceive Shakespeare’s language—as “Beautiful,” “Sexy,” “Funny,” and “Smart” and book-ended with “Shakespeare in Modern English” at the beginning and “Shakespeare as Modern English” at the end. Blank’s book is full of exhaustive, pains-taking, and impressive examinations of what words and expressions meant in Shakespeare’s time compared to the words and expressions that are closest to those in today’s world. Yet amid Blank’s formidable research on two areas of conflict—Early Modern English words compared to our Modern English words and what characters are saying compared to what we think they’re saying—are acknowledgments that traditional scholars and practitioners can all get behind. In her first chapter regarding “Shakespeare in Modern English,” Blank writes, “Speaking Shakespeare leads us to the sources of our own power because we find a language which expresses the depth of our experience more fully, more richly, more completely than our own words can” (11–12). The author makes clear in her second chapter, “Beautiful,” that as we appreciate the occasional difference between what Shakespeare’s characters are saying and what we think they’re saying, we get a deeper understanding of how we experience Shakespeare’s language. Shakesplish is what we think Hamlet is considering, why we think Falstaff is funny, and how we admire Henry V to some extent. Shakesplish involves what we bring to Shakespeare as much as what Shakespeare brings to us. Rather than being preoccupied with what’s “right” [End Page 268] and “wrong” in someone’s understanding of a scene, the author encourages us to embrace what seems to be happening in a scene or within a Shakespearean character, as well. Of course, we need to be accurate about what’s taking place in a scene, but by not dismissing all of the interpretive errors, we can better prepare our productions of Shakespeare. Blank explains: “My focus, here, will be on English that has become strange over time. Shakespeare’s ‘alienation effects,’ moreover, sometimes draw us closer to the plays, rather than distancing us from them, even when we aren’t entirely sure we get what his characters are saying. As Nehamas writes, ‘The art we love is art we don’t yet fully understand. . . . Beauty always remains a bit of a mystery . . . more like something calling me without showing exactly what it is calling me to.’ Shakespeare’s unusual language can produce, in an important turn of phrase by scholar Ruth Morse, ‘alienation effects which do not alienate.’ It somehow invites us in” (33). In chapter 3, “Sexy,” Blank reminds us that the word “sexy” didn’t come into use until the end of the nineteenth century (93). Nevertheless, modern audiences enjoy any hint of sex in the plays, which often takes the form of characters expressing their desire for sex more than the act itself (93). With “Funny,” Blank’s fourth chapter, the reader will again, no doubt, smile and nod in agreement with the author’s assertion that we sometimes react before we...