All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players
I've been trying to read Shakespeare's plays, but I won't deny I find them extremely hard to understand!
I've been reading too much of what could be considered "junk fiction", so, to score a few points with my snobish conscience, I've been reading Shakespeare as well. The thing is that most of the time I have trouble understanding what I'm reading.
I tried reading his text alone, but wasn't successful, so I resorted to reading the plays from sparknotes.com, where they have the original text with a "modern" (more like "for stupids") version of the text on the side. Sometimes I get excited 'cause I'm reading the original text and I'm understanding everything just to get thwarted right afterwards and have to read the "translation" for a particularly nasty part, languagewise.
Reading that simplified version of the text makes me feel like I'm cheating, but I try really hard to understand the original text before I move on to the modern one.
Something else that comes to mind is: reading this sparknotes version, am I reading Shakespeare? The answer is no. I'm reading what the plot is about, not the play itself, so, in a sense, I'm really reading a translation, 'cause that's exactly what a translation is about, taking the essence of a text and putting it into another form so people can understand.
So far, I've read The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night like this. I think next I'll read As You Like It. The problem is, the ones I'd like to read - All's Well That Ends Well and Love Labour's Lost - don't have simplified versions! @_@
As of now, I'll keep reading with the help of these simplified versions, but I have as a debt to myself that one day I'll read Shakespeare's plays entirely as he wrote them. Old English and all.
I've been reading too much of what could be considered "junk fiction", so, to score a few points with my snobish conscience, I've been reading Shakespeare as well. The thing is that most of the time I have trouble understanding what I'm reading.
I tried reading his text alone, but wasn't successful, so I resorted to reading the plays from sparknotes.com, where they have the original text with a "modern" (more like "for stupids") version of the text on the side. Sometimes I get excited 'cause I'm reading the original text and I'm understanding everything just to get thwarted right afterwards and have to read the "translation" for a particularly nasty part, languagewise.
Reading that simplified version of the text makes me feel like I'm cheating, but I try really hard to understand the original text before I move on to the modern one.
Something else that comes to mind is: reading this sparknotes version, am I reading Shakespeare? The answer is no. I'm reading what the plot is about, not the play itself, so, in a sense, I'm really reading a translation, 'cause that's exactly what a translation is about, taking the essence of a text and putting it into another form so people can understand.
So far, I've read The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night like this. I think next I'll read As You Like It. The problem is, the ones I'd like to read - All's Well That Ends Well and Love Labour's Lost - don't have simplified versions! @_@
As of now, I'll keep reading with the help of these simplified versions, but I have as a debt to myself that one day I'll read Shakespeare's plays entirely as he wrote them. Old English and all.