Modernize the Bard? No way!

Thoughts On Shakespeare
The Globe and Mail

DO you remember "Wipe the Blood off My Toga," the Wayne and Shuster spoof of Julius Caesar ? It was first aired in the 1950s and still looks good in reruns. Not only good but startling: it assumes its prime-time audience had a nodding acquaintance with Shakespeare, and it even throws in jokes about Latin. (Wayne orders a martinus . "You mean martini," says the bartender. "If I want two," snaps Wayne, "I'll ask for them.")

Even today, a theatre show like The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), currently playing in Toronto, can be a tidy hit. Nobody goes to see it as a substitute for the original plays; the joke only works if you know them already. Universal dumbing down may be further off than we had feared.

Or maybe not: not if we believe a recent letter to The Globe and Mail from Brian Mossop, who declared the plays as obscure as Beowulf (which is in Anglo-Saxon, a language almost completely distinct from modern English) and The Canterbury Tales (which isn't and can still be enjoyed with the same application). He deplored "the veneration of Shakespeare as a quasi-religious figure" and called for an "annual international contest inviting poets to submit English translations."

Mossop makes one very valid point: In non-English speaking countries, audiences don't have to grapple with all those hard old words. They see the plays in crisp, wrinkle-free new versions tailored to their own specifications. Language, of course, isn't everything. A great play can work in translation. Britain's second favourite playwright is Chekhov. The English may be getting him wrong, but they have certainly been getting something , and it's unlikely that responses sustained over so long a period could be wholly mistaken.

I remember this whenever I encounter estimates of Shakespeare based entirely on what sentimentalists used to call "the verbal music." I'll go further. Even for an anglophone -- perhaps especially for an anglophone -- Shakespeare translated can be a revelation. Actors, untroubled by memories of how their predecessors have spoken the familiar lines, can find their own way into the characters. Audiences, similarly unencumbered, can do the same. A Japanese Macbeth , an Italian Henry IV and a Romanian Midsummer Night's Dream have all afforded me insights into the plays that British or North American productions would find impossible to equal.

However, I don't understand Japanese, Italian or Romanian, so I'm responding to broad strokes of staging and the odd arresting gesture, backed up by my knowledge of the original text. (I recall at Umabatha: The Zulu Macbeth , which played Toronto recently, picking up the simultaneous translation system to check out the hero's state of mind and finding him wondering if that was an assagai he saw before him, which I must say was pretty much what I'd suspected.) This suggests that audiences can follow and enjoy a play even if they don't literally understand every word of it, and therefore that we should all be able to cope with the odd archaic phrase.

Productions in translation are not better, merely different. Such freedom entails its own limitations. A translation is a lesser play that may cast light on a greater one. A good translation, especially of poetry, is its own animal and imposes its own rhythms. The rhythms of the original -- rhythms of speech, rhythms of action -- are what anchor an English production, or should. When what the actors are saying is at odds with what they are doing, the play no longer makes sense.

The same thing, only worse, would happen if someone tried modernizing the text while keeping it in English. A translator into French, Portuguese or Urdu has to change every one of the words. A modernizer would only change some of them, and the results could be extremely disconcerting: "Friends, Romans, -- all right so far -- compatriots . . ." "Countrymen" could mean people living in a rural area. "Fellow countrymen" would ruin the metre. ". . . please listen to me . . ." The confusion inherent in "lend me your ears" hardly needs emphasizing. Just one pentameter, and already we have a malformed, unactable bastard.

Maybe it's unfair to choose so famous a line, but then Shakespeare is full of them. They're famous because they're memorable. They carry and enrich the meaning; they create the characters and tell the stories; they're why we want to act and watch the plays in the first place. Any modernizer would have to face up to them.

"If it were done when 'tis done," says Macbeth, meaning if only committing the murder would mean that it would be over and completed without repercussions, and you see how long it's taken me to paraphrase a simple pun. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . ." The first line could hardly be clearer, the second involves a reversal of syntax and a couple of words whose meaning has changed, but who would want to tamper with the spitting alliteration or with the doggedly despairing movement of the verse? This, of course, is the fallacy in the poetry-contest suggestion. No French poets, however much they might enjoy recasting Shakespeare in their own tongue, would lay their hands on Racine. No reputable English poet would dream of competing with Shakespeare.

Actually, one has. In 1965, the British National Theatre, two years old and full of missionary zeal, commissioned Robert Graves to revise the more obscure lines in Much Ado About Nothing . Graves accepted with the stipulation that he would only touch passages in prose. The production, by Franco Zeffirelli, had its charms, but it proved no more funny, touching or comprehensible than others have done. The National never hired a rewrite man again.

Shakespeare, by the consent of centuries, used the English language with more imagination, resource and nervous energy than anyone else, ever. If that avowal sounds quasi-religious, I'll live with it. Actually, I think it's Mossop who's being mystical: He seems to think that a prefabricated adaptation will have value -- will even be living entertainment -- because somewhere, at some remove, it had contact with Shakespeare. If the original texts are on the way to oblivion, all the more reason to enjoy them while we still can.