I know. It’s been forever and a day since I’ve
written a piece for my “There Ain’t No Sanity Clause” blog. The main reason for the hiatus was that I
didn’t really have a purpose for it.
Skip to the end, 4 years later and I still don’t know if it’s worth
posting my insights and musings. Suffice
to say I feel like posting now, so I hope that you find my post(s) entertaining
and informative. I would encourage you
to read my Ben Franklin for President blog and give me your feedback on
it. I am also considering publishing
what I call erotic Rand fiction (it’s erotic fiction for fans of Ayn Rand and
basically it’s just a bunch of people jerking off, cause why should anyone help
you get off, they owe you nothing!). Did
you find that joke funny? Have you ever
heard of an Ayn Rand sex joke? If not
then maybe there’s a market for the genre.
So this blog is just basically thoughts to page, brain to blog, blog to reader,
reader to enlightenment, and fringe jokes.
So now to the main event; I have seen
lately several articles about a project to re-write Shakespeare’s plays into
modern day English. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is commissioning 36
playwrights to modernize the text for the stage. The main argument is that the Bard’s
vocabulary is over four hundred years old and barely comprehensible to
contemporary audiences. There is no
doubt that Elizabethan English can be difficult to understand, but for this to
truly work you can’t just “modernize” the language. You have to change archaic references from to
modern, and there are all of the little innuendos and commentary on the society
of that time, which have no relevance, so what happens to them? There is a good possibility you risk losing
more in the translation than you gain.
Modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s already exist. “West Side Story” is “Romeo and Juliet”, the
movie “Big Business” is “Comedy of Errors” Suffice to say it is an
interesting experiment and an enormous endeavor, and I look forward to seeing
the outcome. But let’s not go to far in lowering “bard” so to speak instead of
underestimating an audience. Given the
world of “tweeting”, “Instagraming”, and emoticons, which erode our vocabulary
and lexicon, a rich dose of “wherefores”, “yon”, and “anon’s” offer up a nice bulwark
and remind us that language, poetry, and prose are worthy of our time.
You
can read the NPR article here
