Reading Shakespeare (or Huck Finn, Beowulf, or really anything in odd/antiquarian English)

One thing I was great at as a teacher was teaching Shakespeare. Don’t get me wrong - it wasn’t like a teacher movie where all my students started off illiterate, pregnant, gang-bangers, or drug addicts and went on to be superfans and act in plays (I really loathe teacher movies, by the way), but I could, better than most, get across to students that they could understand what was happening in Shakespeare’s plays. If they didn’t like it, that was fine. Honestly, I don’t like Hamlet all that much. But the kids could understand it and make that choice.

                         

The problem with reading Shakespeare (who I’m calling Willy from here on out) is that people get confused, then frustrated, then tune out. It’s not just Willy – it’s Beowulf, or Jim, the slave in Huck Finn, or people talking in British movies. Or watching Spartacus on Starz. It’s all the same thing. 

Yes, I just compared Spartacus to Shakespeare.

If you’ve read Titus Andronicus you understand how Willy would be totally okay with that. I was actually more emotional during the series finale of Spartacus.

There’s a really simple trick to understanding Ye Olde Style English. It boils down to this question, which students are never asked:

Who cares if you understand every word?

For Willy specifically, it just doesn’t matter. His audience at the time was mostly literate, often drunk during the plays, and were used to seeing things like dogs fighting bears in arenas, because that was actual English entertainment when Willy was alive. You think they were analyzing Lady Macbeth’s characters or spending time dissecting the rhyme schemes? I guarantee you 99% of them weren’t. These people needed entertainment. 

On The Realz

Plays were just the historic versions of movies, and like movies, some are good, some are bad, some are epics, some are dramas, some make you laugh, some make you cry. Willy wrote plays to entertain and sell tickets. Half of them were romantic comedies that would star Hugh Grant and Meg Ryan today. They virtually all had the same story and everyone knew who was going to end up together before the first scene was done. The other half were epic historical action stories. They’d look like Braveheart or star Bruce Willis and The Rock. Most of Willy’s plays weren’t actually that deep. They were deeply and superbly written, and several were masterpieces, but that was Willy’s deal, not the audience’s. The audience just knew they were watching a well-written action story or a funny comedy.  

Seriously, the above quote is about a rich, whiny teenage guy trying to get laid. Really. It’s not that deep and kids in high school will totally understand the content. But somehow society decided to make people think these plays are deep and high-brow. And it’s a shame, because Willy wasn’t high-brow. Most of his audience certainly wasn’t.

Yes, antiquated language can be difficult. So here’s how you get past the language barrier: You don’t bother to try to understand every word or sentence. You speed read. You get through the scene or chapter or page. At the end of it you won’t have understood every word, but you will understand what happened. If you know those 2 guys are fighting over a girl, or that a guy wants to kill and replace a king, or that the duke is dick, then you know what you need to know. Spending an hour reading a page looking for every detail doesn’t make any sense unless you’re getting a Masters in English Literature, or trying to become an alcoholic.

Masters in English Literature and Alcoholic? 
Same Thing.

The thing about most stories or plays or whatever is that it’s the plot and characters that are fun, not the sentence structure. It really doesn’t make sense to focus all of your energy on the least fun part.

Oh, and less fun.

I promise you Willy would agree with 100% of what I’m saying. He’d be appalled to see the way we teach his plays in classrooms, with reading and long discussions and analysis instead of just watching them, enjoying them, and talking about them. He’d say they’re plays, not books, and they’re supposed to be watched and enjoyed, not labored over.

He’d rather watch this, too.

So remember, if you’re reading something in Ye Olde Style English, you DON’T have to understand every word. Don’t stop to look things up. Don’t sweat it when you get lost. JUST FINISH THE STORY. At the end you’ll know what happened and whether or not you liked it. If you did, you can read it closer and more completely later. If you hated it, who cares? – At least you didn’t waste too much of your time.

Then go watch a movie version.