by Kirk Woodward
[Taking
off from a recent announcement from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that it has
commissioned modern-English “translations” of all of Shakespeare’s plays, Kirk
Woodward, who’s contributed frequently to ROT on various topics (most recently, “Four
Worthies” on 5 January), is taking up Shakespeare’s language. Kirk’s discussion is a kind of book
report/review since he’s using
Frank Kermode’s 2000
Shakespeare’s Language—which Kirk told me “really is wonderful”—as his guide. Many theater pros, especially actors and
directors, declare that they rely on the language of Shakespeare’s plays, both
his diction and the prose’s and poetry’s rhythms, to be their guide for
performance. Kirk and Kermode here show
us some of the reasons that’s both a valid and practical tactic. After all, did the Bard’s Hamlet not advise
the players: “Speak the speech , I pray you, as I pronounced it to you . . .”? Who are we to reject Shakespeare’s own
advice?]
The
announcement by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival on September 29, 2015, that it
has commissioned thirty-six teams of playwrights and dramaturgs to “translate”
the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) into modern English has generated
a great deal of comment. It is a little unclear exactly what results are
expected. The official press release says:
In approaching the task OSF has established two
basic rules. First, do no harm. There is language that will not need
translating and some that does. Each team is being asked to examine the play
line-by-line and translate to contemporary modern English those lines that need
translating. There is to be no cutting or editing of scenes and playwrights may
not add their personal politics. Second, put the same kind of pressure on the
language as Shakespeare put on his. This means the playwright must consider the
meter, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric, character action and theme of the
original. These translations are not adaptations. Setting, time period and
references will remain unchanged.
The
Festival does not say it intends to produce the results of the project, beyond
workshop productions. It does report that four “translations” already have been
or are scheduled to be produced; one was Timon
of Athens, at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2014. (The A.S.F. set Timon in New York City, but whether that
was the “translator’s” intention is unclear.) That same theater is also scheduled
to produce a translation of The Tempest,
the first “major” play of the translation series to have a production. (The
others scheduled so far are Pericles
and Two Noble Kinsmen, neither
generally considered masterpieces.)
The
Festival undoubtedly welcomed the controversy its announcement caused, on the often
repeated principle that “any publicity is good if they spell your name right.”
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, writing in The
New Yorker on October 6, 2015 (“Why We (Mostly) Stopped Messing With
Shakespeare’s Language”), provides an historical perspective on the
discussion: adapting Shakespeare’s
plays, he points out, was the rule rather than the exception for 300 years, so
the O.S.F. project “seems fairly conservative.” In fact,
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.
(Pollack-Pelzner
points out that over half the “translators” are female and/or members of
minorities, a welcome development.)
In
all this discussion, I have not yet seen one of the apparent assumptions of the
“translation” project questioned. That assumption is that although we don’t
readily understand Shakespeare’s language, his original audiences did.
There
is an alternate possible assumption sometimes raised, one that as far as I know
is not widely held by scholars: that, contrary to the first assumption,
Shakespeare’s audience wasn’t really very bright (a bunch of illiterate rowdies
and orange peddlers), and that Shakespeare basically wrote over their heads.
And
neither of these assumptions considers a third possibility: that there were
times when Shakespeare, while presumably respecting his audience, wrote without
regard for whether his audience understood every word or not.
These
reflections came to mind as I read Shakespeare’s
Language (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000) by Frank Kermode (1919-2010). I first
leafed through the book while visiting Stephen Johnson, author of the
outstanding novels The Book of Squirrels
and Those That I Guard, and an avid
reader. The little I saw of the book encouraged me to get it for myself.
At
the time I knew nothing about Frank Kermode, who, I have since learned, was
born on the Isle of Man, taught at many universities in both Great Britain and
the United States, including Cambridge, Harvard, and Columbia, and is widely
admired for his criticism and book reviewing. Richard Howard, quoted on the
jacket of Shakespeare’s Language,
says that Shakespeare’s Language “is,
and will doubtless remain, the first book one should read about Shakespeare’s
plays, and with those plays.”
That’s
a bold claim considering how many books have been written about Shakespeare,
but I’m not certain Howard isn’t correct. Here are some reasons:
First,
Kermode is sane. One has hardly opened the book before encountering the
following, which I think is worth quoting at length:
There are modern attitudes to Shakespeare I
particularly dislike: the worst of them maintains that the reputation of
Shakespeare is fraudulent, the result of an eighteenth-century nationalist or
imperialist plot. A related notion, almost equally presumptuous, is that to
make sense of Shakespeare we need first to see the plays as involved in the
political discourse of his day to a degree that has only now become intelligible.
These and other ways of taking Shakespeare
down a peg seem, when you examine them, to be interesting only as evidence of a
recurring need to find something different to say, and to say it on topics that
happen to interest the writer more than Shakespeare’s words, which are, as I
say, only rarely invoked.
The tone of these novelties is remarkably
self-confident. The critics need to value their own opinion above that of many
predecessors whose qualifications they might not in general wish to dispute.
They have to treat as victims of imperialistic brainwashing Johnson, Keats, and
Coleridge, to name only three.
Of course if you can rubbish Shakespeare you
can also rubbish these and comparable authorities; respect for them is merely
another instance of our acceptance of unexamined bourgeois valuations. But in
the end you can’t get rid of Shakespeare without abolishing the very notion of
literature.
I
could not agree more, particularly with the last sentence, which reflects what
many of the critics he describes seem to want to do.
Second,
he writes as a human being – the book is intended, as he says, for “intelligent
readers rather than specialists” (thank you!), and occasionally his own personality
shines through, as in this (Kermode served in the British Army during World War
II):
Since the principal characters [in Othello] were soldiers, the setting
couldn’t be other than military in character. Shakespeare had plenty of
experience doing the military – the life of various kinds of soldier is amply
recorded in the History plays and All’s
Well, and is not absent from Hamlet
– but he had not hitherto attempted that almost invariant type, the
foul-mouthed N.C.O. I myself have memories, happily remote, of Iago-like
warrant officers, sycophantic self-seekers, the main difference being that Iago
has a surprisingly educated vocabulary.
Then,
as a reader of Shakespeare’s plays, Kermode amplifies the meaning of many
passages and words in a grounded and helpful way. He balances alternatives and
credits those who have different opinions, but his own choices of equivalent
words are splendid. He sees in Coriolanus
that “voices” is Shakespeare’s word for “votes;” that Macbeth shows evidence that Shakespeare was familiar with the Confessions of Augustine (who in his Confessions writes “How long? How long?
Tomorrow and tomorrow?”); that Timon of
Athens “likely… was sketched out in advance, and… some sections were
written in a final form while others were not. … [For example] Apemantus’s
announcement of the arrival of the Poet and Painter (IV.iii.351) would
presumably have been altered in any final version, since it occurs eighty odd
lines before they turn up.” These and numerous other insights fill the book.
Next,
Kermode is by no means an apologist for Shakespeare. In many of the books about
the Bard, one gets the impression that he can do no wrong. Kermode seems to take
seriously the fact that Shakespeare was a working playwright, with a theater
company always demanding more “product,” and that he did his best, but not
always with a consistent result. For example, in Kermode’s report on the early Henry the Third Part VI (written in
1590-91?), he sees how “the heat of battle cannot prevent Richard of York from
expressing himself in similes” (I.iv.3-21), and goes on,
To a modern ear this seems, as a report on a
military defeat, to be on the lazy or languid side. . . . It is hard not to
think it absurd that in such a desperate extremity the Duke should seek out two
comparisons with ships and lambs to describe the flight of his army, and even
explain why the wolves were in pursuit. Likewise, the more far-fetched comparison
of a swan swimming against the stream. An Elizabethan audience would not have
thought these conceits useless ornaments; they were an accepted way of making
one’s points, of decorating, of enforcing pathos, and so on. Yet it is plain
that as the stage developed its own habits of language these rhetorical devices
came to seem inadequate.
Understandable,
then, since Shakespeare is still practically in his apprentice period as a
writer. But of Measure for Measure
(1602-04?), a product of Shakespeare’s astonishing middle period, Kermode can
write:
Much has been written in defense of the
second half of Measure for Measure,
but it surely is a muddle. There are fine things in it, of course . . . but it
tends to be prosy and incredible . . . interest, as I see it, is sacrificed to expediency
. . . .
And
in The Tempest, a late (1611?) and
very great play, Kermode nevertheless points out that in Prospero’s expository
speech in Act One, Scene two,
with some agitation and some bad-tempered
admonitions to Miranda, of which the primary purpose is to prevent his having
to deliver an unbroken monologue, he then describes the plot that overthrew him
[I.ii.777-87] . . . . The general sense is not in dispute, [but] all this in a
single sentence, and the unwieldiness of a paraphrase arises from the
repetitiveness of the original, the hurry and disconnection of its metaphors.
One
can count on Kermode, then, to candidly describe the strengths or weaknesses of
a particular passage without fearing that he is somehow slandering Shakespeare.
Even better, though, his examination of Shakespeare’s language leads to an
exciting discovery: that in around 1600, something happened in Shakespeare’s life
– Kermode does not attempt to say what – that led to a significant development
in the way he wrote:
Shakespeare became, between 1594 and 1608, a
different sort of poet; as in the study of all artists, connections between
early and late remain detectable, but the manner and purpose of his activities
is transformed . . . in a context altogether more complex and ambiguous.
In
Kermode’s analysis, the change he describes can be seen in Hamlet (1600-1?), in particular in a remarkable linguistic feature:
a steady stream of “doubles” of both word and action. Once noticed, it is hard
not to see this feature remarkably often in Hamlet
and other middle and late plays, for example in this speech by Polonius
(II.i.61-65):
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses
and with assays of bias,
By
indirections find directions out;
So my former lecture and advice
Shall you my son…
Similarly
Claudius (I.ii.10-13):
As ‘twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious,
and a dropping eye,
With mirth
in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole…
Shakespeare’s
doublings can contain two of the same thing (“Angels and ministers of grace”),
or two contrasting things (“spirit of health, or goblin damn’d”), or an
ambiguous relationship called a hendiadys,
“marked by identifiable tension or strain, as if the parts were related in some
not perfectly evident way” (“a cutpurse of the empire and the rule”). They contribute
to what Kermode calls the “melody” or the “tune” of the words of Hamlet and the other plays of its
period. (I think immediately of Macbeth’s “So foul and fair a day I have not
seen,” an opposition that sets in motion a vast series of contrasts that
continue through that play.)
What
is all this doubling about? Kermode, sticking to his analysis of language,
doesn’t draw a moral, but my sense of it is that Shakespeare has come to detect
a profound ambiguity in personality that expresses itself, for example, in a
contrast between good and evil, between honest and dishonest, between valuable
and worthless, between open and guarded, between a “public self” and a “shadow
self.” The doubling reinforces the ambiguity that Kermode sees as an element of
all Shakespeare’s later work, as Shakespeare refuses to settle for a simple
explanation or judgment of behavior, or for that matter for an easy answer for
anything. Under such examination, a difficult play like Troilus and Cressida begins to seem coherent, because doubling and
ambiguity of personality is in fact its subject.
Reinforcing
(should I have said doubling?) Kermode’s observation about “doubling” is the
equally important observation that after 1600 Shakespeare tends to repeat key
words throughout a play, with a close to subliminal effect. Examples include
“honest” and “think” and related words in Othello,
“see” and “look” in King Lear, and “done”
and “blood” in Macbeth. It is not
only that Shakespeare uses such words repeatedly, but that he sets them in
shifting sets of contexts, so that the different usages almost serve as
comments on each other. Kermode calls this a subtle
change, from the simpler expressiveness of the
early plays to an almost self-indulgent, obsessive passion for particular
words, their chimings and interchimings, their repetition.
I
have only described a few of Kermode’s many insights about Shakespeare’s
language. I want to present one more. In Kermode’s words,
we have more to deal with dramatic language
that was almost certainly difficult to the audiences for whose pleasures it was
originally written. . . . It is simply inconceivable that anybody at the Globe,
even those described by Shakespeare’s contemporary, the critic Gabriel Harvey,
as “the wiser sort,” could have followed every sentence of Coriolanus. Members of an audience cannot stop the actors and
puzzle over some difficult expression, as they can when reading the play. The
action sweeps you past the crux, which is at once forgotten because you need to
keep up with what is being said, not lose the plot by meditating on what has
passed.
After
considering several such passages in Coriolanus,
Kermode tells the following story:
Once in Stratford I asked a well-known actor
how he would deliver some lines in The
Tempest that still baffle commentators: “But these sweet thoughts do even
refresh my labors, / Most busil’est when I do it” (III.1.14-15). He said he
would try to speak them as if he
understood them perfectly. The idea was to prevent the audience from worrying
about the meaning, the next best thing to making the meaning clear.
(Kermode
adds that “I myself, when editing The
Tempest, wrote a note of about a thousand words on the passage, to nobody’s
great benefit.”)
Often
complexity and even obscurity of thought matches the anguish of a character’s
mental processes, as for example in Claudius’ soliloquy (Hamlet, III.iii.56-64), of which Kermode writes:
Here we have the energy, the flurries of
oblique association, that characterize Shakespeare at his best. The play of
figures, echoing one another, the failure or refusal to follow the old course
of milking similitudes, the changing depth of focus . . . the colloquial
roughness . . . the persistent but not expansive legal references testify not
only to a different range of metaphorical usage but to a different, dramatic
manner of representing a man thinking, under the stress of guilt or fear.
Complexity
and even obscurity of language becomes for Shakespeare a tool for (among other
purposes) mirroring the complexity and obscurity of a character’s thoughts and
feelings.
One
final observation about Kermode’s book is that Kermode, unlike many an academic
writer, never loses sight of the fact that Shakespeare’s language is meant for
the theater. Not the Sonnets and the long poems, of course, although Kermode
makes interesting observations about their relation to the plays. But the plays
were written as performance pieces – by a poet. The language, Kermode
demonstrates, is not something added on to a plot; it is the dramatic substance
of the piece.
An
analogy, mine, not his, is that you can’t pull a turtle out of its shell; the
turtle and the shell are one. Try to take the turtle out of the shell, or pull
the shell off the turtle, and you kill it.
And
with that we arrive where we began, with a discussion of the Oregon Shakespeare
Festival’s project to “translate” Shakespeare’s plays. Is it appropriate to
clear up the ambiguities in Shakespeare’s plays, if he intended them to be
there, or if their presence is an important characteristic of his writing? And
is there a prospect of success for the project, if Shakespeare’s language is the movement and the meaning of the
play, or will translation kill the plays?
I
for one would have already concluded that the Oregon project is doomed, if it
were not for the fact that translations of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly
into German, have been successfully performed. I am not qualified
to determine how much of the essence of the plays, as we think of it, carries
over into another language. Did the translations of, say, August Schlegel
(1767-1845) and Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) give the Germans the same Shakespeare
that we know? And how did they handle, as Kermode calls it, “the increasing
obscurity of Shakespeare’s language?” Did they try to straighten out passages
that Shakespeare left obscure, in which
we register the pace of the speech, its
sudden turns, its backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and
disappearing before we can consider them. This is new: the representation of
excited, anxious thought; the weighing of confused possibilities and dubious
motives; the proposing of a theory or explanation followed at once by its
abandonment or qualification, as in the meditation of a person under stress to
whom all that he is considering can be a prelude to vital choices, emotional
and political.
It
would be ironic if the main result of the Oregon project were to straighten out
what Shakespeare had deliberately left crooked.
Whatever
the results of the Oregon project, one suspects that Shakespeare’s work will
survive them. And all, no matter what play by Shakespeare they read or see and
in what version, will find the experience of the play deeply enriched if they
keep at hand Frank Kermode’s invaluable book.
[For
the record, my next post on ROT
will be a compilation of articles, including OSF’s original press release,
covering the translation project. Interested ROTters are encouraged to return to the blog to
see what the theater said for itself and what the New York Times and the New Yorker said about the plan.
[I can’t speculate on how a German spectator “hears”
Shakespeare when he sees a German rendering of the Bard’s plays, anymore than I
can tell you whether I hear the same Schiller or Molière when I see translations of their plays in English. But I can say that when I’ve
read an original-language text of a play I’m working on in English (for example:
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette, and Jacques Deval’s Tovaritch in French and Sologub’s Petty Demon and Chekhov’s Wood Demon in Russian), there are all kinds of things
that are lost, as it were, in translation. Some are significant, some
merely useful, some are inconsequential (though interesting); some can be
restored, some are irretrievable. One problem, of course, is that if you
don’t know both the original and the translation, you don’t realize what’s
missing. (When My Fair
Lady was translated
into German for the Berlin stage, the translators didn’t even try to
render Lerner and Loewe’s and Shaw’s cockney-infused London speech and characters
into German; they transferred the whole thing to 19th-century Berlin and
used a Berlin dialect for the Doolittles. On the other hand, when Fiddler on the Roof was produced in Tokyo, spectators were
quoted as exclaiming, “It’s so Japanese!”) I
have no idea how this connects with Kirk and Kermode’s point.
[By
the way, this suggests something that amused my dad from when he was a young
student of German in high school back in the ’30s, reading German versions of Shakespeare
and other English classics. On the title page there was an annotation for
the translator that read “Übersetzt und verbessert” by whomever. The
German means “translated and improved .
. . .”
[Kirk’s
remark about straightening out what Shakespeare deliberately left crooked
reminds me of a comment my former dramaturgy teacher Cynthia Jenner
said about a production of a play by the then-novice Heather McDonald,
whom Jenner liked and thought was unique and promising as a young writer.
The production, Jenner lamented, had “ironed out all the quirks” of
McDonald’s script.
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