A friend dropped me a note about No Fear Shakespeare and thought I would be horrified by it. I leafed through a few plays in the bookstore to see them for myself; they’re also available for free on the website.

If the language of the plays is your barrier to reading them, by all means pick up a copy. No Fear Shakespeare prints the “original” text on the left-hand pages and “translated” text on the right; the “translation” is engaging, easily readable, and not dumbed down. Much like Loeb Classical Library books, the reader can match translated to original text or skip either page entirely and read only in one or the other language.

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news:

Shakespeare’s plays are in modern English and they are readable by anyone with patience, a dictionary, and a willingness to read footnotes. Not everyone has all three — though anyone reading this post has access to dictionary.com — and thus No Fear Shakespeare fills a niche. Pronunciation and understanding rhymes, puns, and wordplay may be difficult, but many editions of Shakespeare footnote or gloss these precisely so that readers can more fully understand them. I maintain that Shakespeare, while intimidating, is accessible to the average reader in almost any edition off the bookstore shelf.

“Translating” the text, however, strips out so much of that wordplay. It denudes the plays of art and they become bare walls. Does “Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way” have the power of “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”? Do the sonnets retain their very poetry when stripped of their meter? Does “She would have died anyway” carry all the possible meanings of “She should have died hereafter”? The editors must necessarily take a position on ambiguous lines such as the last, neatly skipping over decades of scholarship.

Naturally, the editors do not intend to publish a text for the student of Shakespeare; as far as I can tell, they intend to make Shakespeare accessible to people who are intimidated and frustrated by the text as they have so far encountered it. They publish these editions for many of the same reasons that the Bible is available in more than the King James Version (first printed in 1611; Shakespeare died in 1616).

If you have never been able to make it through “King Lear”, try No Fear Shakespeare, and you will get the plot and you will understand which character is which.

But you are so missing out.

Shakespeare’s birthday is coming up (April 23). The Languages & Literature department at my alma mater is hosting its annual party on Thursday, with readings of selected sonnets and speeches. Also I was told there would be cake.

My husband’s favorite is the “bastard” speech from Lear:

Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? …

My favorite sonnets are 116 (”Let me not to the marriage of two minds…”) and 130 (”My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;”). Most people are familiar with 18 (”Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and thus the internet gives us Thee vs. Summer’s Day.

In moving news: So. Many. Boxes.

New link on the sidebar: Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

I have not laughed this hard in days.

“SCIANT PRESENTES ET FUTURI and alle those who maye linke to thys page, I Geoffrey Chaucer in the presence of the internette knowlechede thes wordes and typede them wyth myn owene fingres and thus I hereof appeale myn erstwhile freende and companioun Johanness Gowere that he ys a wanker.”

The whole blog is in Middle English, but the “flayme werre” with Gowere is the best part. (Be sure to check out the picture.)