I have seen bored teenagers slouching into their Official Pittsburgh Steelers Dilly Dilly Shirt at the beginning of a performance and leaping to their feet in a standing ovation at the end. Especially true of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and London. I am American and have never had any trouble understanding what was happening. Barring that, PBS has had some very good performances of Shakespeare, but there’s nothing like being there in person. You know that his works can actually be well translated into other languages and still be great works of art.
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Many translations into European languages, for example, keep the subtle metaphors intact. But I agree that the best way to understand and enjoy his opus is through the original language and not through “modernization” which strip all poetry and meaning out of it. that was my first thought as well.
I am German, so English is not my first language, but whenever I see a play on stage, it takes just a few minutes to understand what it’s about. From my teenage years I’ve loved Shakespearean language. As a non-native English speaker, I find sometimes it is not so hard to follow the Bard’s certain ancient words or expressions, or guess at their meaning.
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As they are Latin-related and not so much Anglo-Saxon. On top of that, in Spanish we are normally used to analogies and metaphors, and to routinely use words that have different meanings. Indeed, we have a lower total number of words than modern English and sometimes we use the same word in different contexts serving a number of purposes.
In these non-univocal situations, people understand utterances via other words in the message, reading into the context itself and grasping both nonverbal and paraverbal cues. Chaucer wrote in a technically different language – middle English – but Shakespeare used the same that we do today, albeit with, as the article says, some different meanings.
For sure sometimes it’s difficult to understand a passage the first time one hears it, but Shakespeare invented so many new words that audiences in his own time wouldn’t have known what they meant except by context. This is why good, well thought-out, live performances are so important. It’s the actor’s job to make sense of the language and deliver that Official Pittsburgh Steelers Dilly Dilly Shirt to the audience.