anarchonomicon.substack.com
A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.
The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.
Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Soundbites and references to Shakespeare have been alive and well and in fact continue to be alive and well.
As for actually understanding everything that he wrote beyond the soundbites that remain comprehensible in The Year of Our Lord 2023, you cannot do that today without studying English as Shakespeare spoke it.
There's certainly a place for historical linguistics in our understanding of literature, but if you mean that the educated, literate reader of English needs to take a full course on Early Modern English to understand Shakespeare in the original, rather than simply referring to the footnotes that accompany any modern edition of his plays at moments of confusion, then I disagree. I will however allow that by my standards very few American English-speakers post-1960 count as being educated.
Moreover, it is entirely possible for individual works in archaic language to be understood even when anything else written in that stage of the language would not, so long as those works are continually read and reread, commented on, and taught by succeeding generations. I don't think it's fair to say that modern Christians reading the King James Bible don't understand its meaning if they don't know how to conjugate for thou or that Chinese people don't understand Tang Dynasty poetry because they are reading the characters using modern pronunciation where they no longer rhyme. The most extreme example of this is Hebrew, which was able to be revived as a spoken language solely because of an unbroken chain of literary transmission in the form of preserved religious texts.
If you're reading Shakespeare with footnotes, then the conversation is totally moot - I could read Chinese if you supply the proper footnotes.
I guarantee you that there are parts of the KJV that people do not understand correctly (see the "censure" example above). "Thou" (which is not a verb and doesn't conjugate) has nothing to do with it. Words simply do not mean what they used to.
That's because people would literally learn Hebrew as a foreign language to understand the Torah. Yiddish speakers didn't just read every other word and fill in the gaps with the footnotes. There are no footnotes. This is exactly the opposite of the approach you are talking about with Shakespeare.
While Shakespeare didn't include footnotes, he also was writing plays, not novels -- moderns will have no problem understand what is going on most of the time watching a competent performance, despite the original language.
I do not believe that moderns will understand that "censure" means something totally different, no matter how competent the actors are.
How relevant is that really to the scene though? And how relevant to the wholeness of the play? Can you still appreciate marvel movies if you don't recognize Stan Lee in his cameos, or know every reference to the comic books?
It totally changes the meaning of the dialogue. It's also just one example. Yes, you can read Shakespeare for the vibes, and even enjoy and appreciate it, but then you should have no illusion that you are actually understanding what he wrote - and in that case, there's no need to worry about future generations not understanding Shakespeare because you also don't understand him.
I'm not even talking about understanding all the allusions and references that Shakespeare wrote into his plays, so your marvel movie point is unrelated. I am strictly talking about understanding the literal meaning of the words he wrote, which is the lowest imaginable bar for any discussion of how we can "still read" Shakespeare.
Understanding what's going on overall when you see a play even if you don't understand all the dialogue is like a child who can barely read who can follow a story thanks to the pictures. For some reason, this opinion only comes out for Shakespeare. Nobody thinks that "I think I understand most of the words" is any kind of literacy in any other situation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link