Shakespeare's language

[kidvisions]

Hello,
I'm a non native English speaker (English is the third language I've

learned and I've known it for 9 years),I have chosen to study the English literature, I had no problems until we started studying Othello (I'm a second year)
I read a lot of amazing things about Shakespeare but when I started

reading it it didn't seem as interesting as I thought it would be.
First ,the language is very difficult and second the content does not seem interesting (well it may be too soon to judge that's the impression it gave me)
I find the book extremely boring and I hardly read a few pages, but I

think it's because I don't understand the language--even with an

excellent version,one that explains all the difficult words I still can't understand it properly --but I really want to learn how to appreciate it, --at least for my teacher who has made a lot of efforts and whom I love and respect so much--and because I think it's important to read Shakespeare as a student of English literature.
I don't want to make this post any longer, so I'm just going to ask you what you think about Shakespeare and Othello in particular?
Do you think that Shakespeare's language can be understood? and how??
Thank you!

[hdw]

Hello,

I don't want to make this post any longer, so I'm just going to ask you what you think about Shakespeare and Othello in particular?
Do you think that Shakespeare's language can be understood? and how??
Thank you!

Remember that Shakespeare was born in 1564, so his English is difficult for native speakers of English, let alone foreign learners. Teaching Shakespeare in schools is a perennial problem - how to make his plays interesting and comprehensible to teenagers?

The most obvious comment to make is that the plays are meant to be acted and seen, not read in the study, and if you see a good stage production or film of a Shakespeare play, that will make it come alive for you, even if you don't understand every word.

Re Othello specifically, there is a famous film of the play made by Orson Welles in black and white. As usual with Welles, he was busy with more than one project at a time, and was always short of money. There is a very atmospheric scene in a bathhouse with two of the characters wrestling, clad only in towels, which was hailed as imaginative and ground-breaking by the critics. In a TV interview years later, Welles revealed that the towels were because he had no money for proper costumes, and was actually absent from the film set, trying to raise money to finish the film, when that scene was shot!

There was also a controversial version of the play with Sir Laurence Olivier as Othello - controversial because Olivier was a white man "blacking up", and he copied the speech mannerisms and walk of Afro-Caribbeans, which was criticised as racist.

The inter-racial love affair at the heart of the play has always been a source of controversy and unease. I have a feeling that Paul Robeson also once played the Moor, which would not have gone down well in McCarthyite America.

There are some fine lines in the play. I have always liked Othello's put-down to the frightened old senators with their shiny, unused swords (he himself is an old soldier who "has done the state some service"). When they run around in panic, wondering what the tumult is all about, Othello sneers:

"Put up your bright swords, or the dew will rust them!"

Harry

[Amoxcalli]

I'm not a native speaker of English either, Dutch being my first language. I did find Shakespeare a very rewarding read though, especially the plays Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice.

One thing I've found vital while reading Shakespeare, though, is taking the time to let it sink in. Read a scene, then try to play it back in your head, so that you've got a good idea of what's going on.

In my opinion, and I realise a lot of people will disagree with me here, the real beauty of Shakespeare's plays is their depth, rather than his style, anyway.

[Galatea92]

I don't want to make this post any longer, so I'm just going to ask you what you think about Shakespeare and Othello in particular?
Do you think that Shakespeare's language can be understood? and how??
Thank you!

I want to second both of Harry's points:

1. Shakespeare is difficult to read even for native English speakers - it's only after long immersion that we can feel comfortable with the vocabulary and the rhetorical style;

2. You need to watch the plays. They'll never really come alive until you've seen them acted out.

As to Othello, I have to admit it's one Shakespeare play I've neither read nor seen, so I don't have an opinion. Yet.

[Eric]

Because Shakespeare's plays are so difficult, even for native-speakers of English (400 years on, as Harry suggests), I've always thought you'd get most out of the play if you first a) read it though, notes and all, then b) go to watch it, then c) read it through again, once you've seen how it works on stage.

Obviously, the reason his plays have survived some four hundred years is because of their depth of knowledge about human foibles and behaviour, things that are universal. So to get to that core you have to actually understand what is being said.

But you should not imagine you are going to soak up an understanding of Shakespeare by osmosis, if you don't understand the old and difficult expressions he used. That's why I think you must read the text with notes first.

Most editions of Shakespeare plays I've seen - and I mean in the original English - sometimes have up to a hundred pages of introduction and notes to help the reader. If you haven't got the patience to read the notes, you might as well move on to another playwright who writes in modern, easier, English. But if you've got to do "Othello" for an exam, you will just have to read the play very closely.

[kidvisions]

Thank you,
I think it would be more interesting if I watched a theatrical performance don't you think?
Do you know any good version?

[Bottle Rocket]

Remember that Shakespeare was born in 1564, so his English is difficult for native speakers of English, let alone foreign learners.

No kidding ... I've been speaking and reading English for all of my 57 years, and Elizabethan England was my field as an undergraduate, and I still have to stop and parse out the meaning of some phrase or syntax every few minutes. But as Harry says, that era was astoundingly rich in language, borrowing freely from Celtic and Latin and Norman French, not to mention classical Greek, Norse, and stuff that Shakespeare just made up. Bear in mind that for most people it was necessarily a spoken experience because they couldn't read, and that it's poetry, designed from the very beginning as much for rhyme and meter and gesture as for sense on the folio page. That's why WS is called the Bard of Avon, not the Author of Avon. And in much the same way, he borrows (or just steals) other stories, like The Tempest, which uses contemporary rumors and reports of the discovery of Bermuda to create the exotic, magical world of his play.

Teaching Shakespeare in schools is a perennial problem - how to make his plays interesting and comprehensible to teenagers?

The most obvious comment to make is that the plays are meant to be acted and seen, not read in the study, and if you see a good stage production or film of a Shakespeare play, that will make it come alive for you, even if you don't understand every word.

Well, I've never taught drama or Shakespeare, but I'll hazard a guess that just about every Shakespeare play is on film somewhere, and very likely in several versions. Back-to-back showings of, say, the Olivier Henry V and the Branagh version of fifty years later gives students not just two bites at the same apple but also illustrates how the director, sets, acting, stage business all all work together. The Branagh takes the same words but puts them at the service of a fairly muddy, realistic forlorn-hope-turned-triumph, whereas from the very first shot the Olivier version is deliberately showcasing the theatricality of the whole thing almost after the fashion of a nicely illustrated fable. Or show them the transformation of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet into the Leonard Bernstein musical West Side Story

Re Othello specifically, there is a famous film of the play made by Orson Welles in black and white. As usual with Welles, he was busy with more than one project at a time, and was always short of money. There is a very atmospheric scene in a bathhouse with two of the characters wrestling, clad only in towels, which was hailed as imaginative and ground-breaking by the critics. In a TV interview years later, Welles revealed that the towels were because he had no money for proper costumes, and was actually absent from the film set, trying to raise money to finish the film, when that scene was shot!

There was also a controversial version of the play with Sir Laurence Olivier as Othello - controversial because Olivier was a white man "blacking up", and he copied the speech mannerisms and walk of Afro-Caribbeans, which was criticised as racist.

The inter-racial love affair at the heart of the play has always been a source of controversy and unease. I have a feeling that Paul Robeson also once played the Moor, which would not have gone down well in McCarthyite America.

Quite correct

For some reason I always think of Robeson as having been farther away in time than he really was; I was already done with school by the time he died in 1976 and while I had some notion of him as a serious singer, Harlem Renaissance public figure, and a radical guy, until I read the Wiki piece I've attached I had no idea his life was quite as dramatic as it was.

There are some fine lines in the play. I have always liked Othello's put-down to the frightened old senators with their shiny, unused swords (he himself is an old soldier who "has done the state some service"). When they run around in panic, wondering what the tumult is all about, Othello sneers:

"Put up your bright swords, or the dew will rust them!"

Or to drag out the old wheeze -- the philistine theatergoer who remarks after seeing a performance of Hamlet, "So what is the big deal about this Shakespeare guy? All he does is stick in one cliche after another!"


BRocket

[Galatea92]

Thank you,
I think it would be more interesting if I watched a theatrical performance don't you think?
Do you know any good version?

My experience of Shakespeare is coloured by the BBC productions in the late 70s/early 80s. You can get the whole set of plays as a boxed set of DVDs. I don't know how they hold up now, but I loved them at the time. See this Wikipedia page for details:

BBC Television Shakespeare

[Manuel76]

The inter-racial love affair at the heart of the play has always been a source of controversy and unease. I have a feeling that Paul Robeson also once played the Moor, which would not have gone down well in McCarthyite America.

Paul Robeson played the Moor many many times with great success. Firstly in UK in the 30's and I read somewhere his Desdemona, Peggy Ashcroft fell in love with him on and off stage. That was a scandal.

Among Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, Othello is far from being my favorite. I never saw it on stage, and perhaps for me other tragedies like King Lear, Hamlet or Antony and Cleopatra or Macbeth, when read at home, are more interesting and poetic.

Perhaps it's too that Othello's characters seem to me to be the most directly related with the action itself and shaped and developed always in relation with the action.

[Raphael Lambach]

I hope it helps you:
Othello by William Shakespeare

I've found it when I was searching for Shakespeare's analysis. This webpage is wonderful, 'cause you can find interpretations of his plays and sonnets.

[kidvisions]

Thank you very much!

[Raphael Lambach]

Thank you very much!

You're welcome

[Alkibiades]

Hello, Kidvisions. The short answer to your question is that Shakespeare can be readily understood. But you see that it's not quite the same
as understanding JK Rowling, is it? Who ever imagined it would be? But try to consider why Shakespeare is still being read by so many people
and enjoyed by theatre and cinema audiences around the world. Must be something there, huh? You made a bold choice to begin, but maybe
not the right one. Though reading Shakespeare is wonderful, students often benefit when their first exposure is film. I'd suggest two movies by
Kenneth Branagh: Henry the Fifth and Much Ado About Nothing. These are Entrances to Shakespeare that may be more than revolving doors.
Good luck.