Sparknotes.com has put out a series of “No Fear Shakespeare” which, according to its website promises to put “Shakespeare's language side-by-side with a facing-page translation into modern English—the kind of English people actually speak today.”
I know this is not the worst atrocity in the world, but when it comes to the English language, and the teaching thereof, it may well be.
Consider these (of many examples). First, a portion of the famous lines of Richard II when he realizes that his monarchy is lost and he tells his followers that he is but a man like them (Act 3, Scene 2). The original, as read by Richard Burton:
x xYouTube Video… within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Compare to the “no fear” version:
There is always death around kings, and there’s no way to escape it. Death laughs at the king’s reign and mocks his great ceremonies, allowing him to live a little while and play the monarch. Death fills him with pride as if the king’s body were immortal, and at the end death comes and with little effort kills the body. Then goodbye, king!
Come on! What a wretched blot upon the Bard of Avon. All the poetry is stripped from the “no fear” version, such as the analogy to the king’s body being thought to be made out “impregnable brass”, but Death with a pin prick bores through it and “farewell king”.
Even the “translation” is bad. For example “farewell” in the original, and in modern life, often carries an implication of a permanent departure, a sense which is less strong in good bye, and it is the permanent departure (i.e. death) which is the intended original meaning.
Perhaps worse is the No Fear version drops the “kill with looks” language, which is of course readily understandable, and which of course survives as expression, slightly modified (“if looks could kill”) in our time.
Another example, from Henry V, Act 2, Scene 3: The original was so well played by the great Paul Scofield in Kevin Branagh’s 1989 production:
x xYouTube VideoThink we King Harry strong, And, princes, look you strongly arm to meet him. The kindred of him hath been fleshed upon us, And he is bred out of that bloody strain That haunted us in our familiar paths. Witness our too-much-memorable shame When Cressy battle fatally was struck And all our princes captived by the hand Of that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales …
And here’s what the No Fear version would have Paul Scofield saying:
I think King Harry is strong, so the rest of you princes make sure to arm yourselves to meet him with strength. His ancestors got their first taste of blood in battle with us, and he is born of that warlike strain that haunted us on our home ground. Reflect on the battle of Crécy, where, to our everlasting shame, all our princes were taken prisoner by the Prince of Wales, he whom they called Edward the Black Prince.Ugh. Missing so many things, such as the repetition of “strong” and “strongly” in the first two lines, which reinforces what the King is saying. Also No Fear dispenses with the rhyming structure of the original, striking the the half-rhymes of “strain” and “shame” and of “us”, “paths” and “Wales”, and the full rhymes of “kindred” and “dread.”
Really — is it so hard to learn Shakespeare that we have to strip out the good stuff and give people only a (really) dumbed down duckspeak version? Doubleplusungood, comrade!