Modern English is a big language, sprawling over roughly 500 years of literature, and many different structures, dialects and styles, including some that brought back even older forms, the gothic thees and thous, the license poetic to rearrange where go the nouns, verbs and adjectives, the words resurrected or repurposed because they sounded more medieval and Germanic; it welcomes and absorbs words from every language, every trade, every sport; it very well contradicts itself; it contains multitudes.
And we need to keep that big language alive and predominant, to have people of average education able to converse with Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Milton, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Jefferson, Gibbon, Austen, Byron, the artificially archaic language of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, the Hebraic rhythms and devices of Whitman’s free verse. It isn’t hard; it comes naturally so long as students still read them and worship still includes the classic wording. But if that stops, we’ll lose access to those incomparable classics: they’ll first start to sound difficult, and then like a foreign language.
But the new effort to “translate” 39 Shakespeare plays is being done for all the right reasons; preserving the old whenever it has value, but finding replacements when it’s so decrepit that it serves no purpose but confuses and deadens the lines. And finding a way for the replacements to do the most important things that Shakespeare’s language did originally. In the hope that an audience that isn’t straining so hard to follow the language will react more immediately and fully to the words, the acting and the action, more like the original audiences did. So far, it seems to be succeeding better than anyone hoped. As productions begin, sometimes the audiences and actors haven't been able to tell that anything is new, or have mistaken Shakespeare's words for contemporary updates.
We need to keep using historic words, historic literature, historic places and historic items as long as possible; but they best connect us to history when we actually use them, and interact with them, instead of putting them in glass cases and treating them as curiosities, trivia, and markers of leisured elitism.
How Play on! came to be: The backstory of Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s translation project