Social and cultural aspects of translation quotations from William Shakespeare

3.2 Shakespeare in performance

Many of the translators of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are major figures in the world of letters in and beyond their own cultures: August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Paul Celan in Germany, Boris Pasternak in Russia, Tsubouchi Shфyф in Japan, Liang Shiqiu in Taiwan, Julius K. Nyere in Tanzania, Aimй Cйsaire in Martinique, Rabindranath Tagore in India, Voltaire in France, Elyas Abu Shabakeh in Syria, Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, Charles and Mary Lamb in England, and countless others. Some cultures have canonical, received versions for readers and actors, such as Zhu Shenghao's Chinese translation of The Complete Works, but the audience in other cultures, notably France, cannot claim to have any set of standard translations (Morse 2006, 79). There are numerous stage and film directors, painters, composers, choreographers, and artists, who engage and transform Shakespeare, as discussed in other chapters in this volume. The proliferation of Shakespeare in translation, especially in non-European languages, makes nonsense the notion of a homogenized, authenticated Shakespeare in British English.

Translation is far from a one-way street from the English text to a foreign one. Rewritings of Shakespeare sometimes refer to and borrow from one another, resembling the process of cross-pollination. Examples include Chee Kong Cheah's Chicken Rice War, a Singapore film that parodies Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and Wu Hsing-kuo's reading of Macbeth in his The Kingdom of Desire, a Beijing opera play, that alludes to Akira Kurosawa's film Throne of Blood. These borrowings have enriched our understanding of Shakespeare and world cultures. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare was not always translated directly from English into foreign languages. Because of historical or political reasons, double or triple filtering was not uncommon. When composing the choral symphonyRomeo et Juliette, Hector Berlioz worked from Pierre Le Tourneur's French translation of David Garrick's English adaptation of Shakespeare's play. French neoclassical versions were the foundation for early Russian translations of Shakespeare, while the first Shakespearean performance in colonial Korea was a Japanese version of Hamlet in 1909. Teodoro de la Calle's 1802 Spanish translation of Othello was based on Ducis's French version. As a result, Shakespeare in translation has been used as the proving ground of translation theory, and it is the core of the Shakespeare industry.

Genres have a role to play in translation as well. The tragedies and some comedies are more frequently translated, staged, and filmed around the world, because of their capacity to be more easily detached from their native cultural settings and the self-reinforcing cycle of familiarity. In India, for example, Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice have been translated more than fifty times and The Comedy of Errors has over thirty versions in different languages in India, but the only history plays to have been translated into Hindi are Henry V and Richard II, and only one version each. While Shakespeare's global reputation may seem to be driven by translations of his tragedies, comedies, and the sonnets because of the sheer number of performances and translations since the seventeenth century, the history plays have their own histories of global reception beginning with a 1591 Polish performance of Philip Waimer's stage version ofEdward III in Gdansk. Laurence Olivier's wartime film version of Henry V in 1944 is far from the only or the earliest translations-interlingual, intralingual, or intersemiotic-of the history plays, though each instance of translation focuses on different articulations of national histories.

British performances, understandably, are more frequently geared toward constructing a coherent national identity in relation to Britain's friends and foes on the European continent (Hoenselaars, 2004, 9-34). Non-anglophone translations of history plays, on the other hand, often use the plays to interrogate the notion of national history. One of the better-known examples in the West is Richard III: An Arab Tragedy by Sulayman Al-Bassam of Kuwait, a production that has toured widely around the world. Plays such as Henry V that polarizes the English and the French have a contentious reception in France and Europe, serving as a forum for artistic experiment and political debates. Still farther ashore, plays from both the first and second tetralogies, excluding King John, found new homes in nationalist projects of modernization and school performances in Japan, Taiwan, China, and elsewhere. While the Asian translators and adaptors' interest did not always lie in medieval English history (or Shakespeare's imagination thereof), such as the feud between the Houses of York and Lancaster, they drew parallels to inspire analogous reflections on local histories. Kinoshita Junji's translations of Henry VI and Richard III echoes The Tale of the Heike, a thirteenth-century Japanese literary masterpiece chronicling the clashes between the Heike and the Genji clans. Henry IV appeared in prose as a serialised story in The Short Story Magazine in early twentieth-century Shanghai. It was soon published as a volume and prominently advertised. Its appeal was due in no small part to the Chinese discourse of modernity and unified national identity in a time of national crisis as the country was threatened by Japanese and European colonial powers. The Chinese intellectuals of the time looked outward for other nations' experiences. More recently, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 were adapted into a play for the Taiwanese glove puppet theatre in 2002, a hybrid genre blending elements of Chinese opera, marionette theatre, and street theatre.

By the twenty-first century, all of Shakespeare's plays, followed by the Sonnets, have had long histories of translation. 2009 witnessed the publication of a 748-page critical anthology with a title that parallels and talks back to the 69-page quarto of 1609: William Shakespeare's Sonnets for the First Time Globally Reprinted: A Quartercentenary Anthology with a DVD, containing samples of the sonnets translated, performed, or parodied in more than 70 languages and dialects. Since Shakespeare's sonnets in translation have been discussed extensively in the anthology, this chapter will focus on the plays. The spread of Shakespeare's work has accelerated due to the rapid localisation of globally circulating ideas and with the globalisation of local forms of expression, fuelled first by trade and slavery, and now by the digital and Internet culture. A new age of Shakespeare in translation is upon us.

Thousands (perhaps even millions) of performances of William Shakespeare's plays have occurred since the end of the 16th century. While Shakespeare was alive, many of his greatest plays were performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men butKing's Men acting companies at the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres. [1] [2] Among the actors of these original performances were Richard Burbage (who played the title role in the first performances of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and King Lear), [3] Richard Cowley, and William Kempe.

Shakespeare's plays continued to be staged after his death until the Interregnum (1642-1660), when most public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. After the English Restoration, Shakespeare's plays were performed in playhouses, with elaborate scenery, and staged with music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. During this time the texts were «reformed» and «improved» for the stage, an undertaking which has seemed shockingly disrespectful to posterity.

Victorian productions of Shakespeare often sought pictorial effects in «authentic» historical costumes and sets. The staging of the reported sea fights and barge scene in Antony and Cleopatra was one spectacular example. [4] Such elaborate scenery for the frequently changing locations in Shakespeare's plays often led to a loss of pace. Towards the end of the 19th century, William Poel led a reaction against this heavy style. In a series of «Elizabethan» productions on a thrust stage, he paid fresh attention to the structure of the drama. In the early 20th century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with few cuts, [5] while Edward Gordon Craig and others called for abstract staging. Both approaches have influenced the variety of Shakespearean production styles seen today. [6]

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592-3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, «Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest…and you scarce shall have a room». When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.

After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends «in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.»

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII «was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony». On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.

3.3 Shakespeare's influence

Prior to and during Shakespeare's time, the grammar and rules of English were not standardized. But once Shakespeare's plays became popular in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, they helped contribute to the standardization of the English language, with many Shakespearean words and phrases becoming embedded in the English language, particularly through projects such as Samuel Johnson 's A Dictionary of the English Language which quoted Shakespeare more than any other writer. He expanded the scope of English literature by introducing new words and phrases, experimenting with blank verse, and also introducing new poetic and grammatical structures.

Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as «feeble variations on Shakespearean themes.»

Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artistHenry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English. Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.

Expressions such as «with bated breath» (Merchant of Venice) and «a foregone conclusion» (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as «the most excellent» in both comedy and tragedy. And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the «Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage», though he had remarked elsewhere that «Shakespeare wanted art».Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, «I admire him, but I love Shakespeare». For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation. By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet. In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegeltranslated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation. «That King Shakespeare,» the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, «does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible». The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as «bardolatry». He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brechtdevised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T.S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's «primitiveness» in fact made him truly modern. Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for «post-modern» studies of Shakespeare. By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and queer studies.

Conclusion

Cassius' remarks in the scene of Julius Caesar's assassination are not without prophetic insight. Shakespeare transformed a great number of sources that enriched his works, and his plays have been translated into a wide range of languages and genres. It is useful to think of translation as a love affair involving two equal partners, because it allows us an unimpaired view of the event, and eschews such hierarchical constructs as a superior original and a necessarily lesser derivative. The production and reception of translated works-either literal translation of words into another language (e.g., the Hebrew Bible to the Geneva Bible) or the transformation of meanings into a new form of expression (stage play to film noir) - imply double perspectives and have a significance that goes beyond the simple transfer of semantic meanings. A translator is an interpreter of the literary text and its cultural contexts, and a reader of the translation is no less a mediator between many possible worlds and meanings. Contradictory to the purists' anxiety that the proliferation of Shakespeare in translation, whether in modern English or foreign languages, will spell the demise of Shakespeare's oeuvre, the rise of a global industry of translation speaks to the power of Shakespeare's words-not bound within the limit of one language and historical period but open to a wide spectrum of interpretive possibilities, a common feature shared by great works of art.

In Shakespeare studies, the term problem plays normally refers to three plays that William Shakespeare wrote between the late 1590s and the first years of the seventeenth century: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, although some critics would extend the term to other plays, most commonly The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice. The term was coined by critic F.S. Boas in Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896), who lists the first three plays and adds that «Hamlet, with its tragic close, is the connecting-link between the problem-plays and the tragedies in the stricter sense. The term can refer to the subject matter of the play, or to a classification «problem» with the plays themselves.

The term derives from a type of drama that was popular at the time of Boas' writing. It was most associated with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. In these problem plays the situation faced by the protagonist is put forward by the author as a representative instance of a contemporary social problem. For Boas this modern form of drama provided a useful model with which to study works by Shakespeare that had previously seemed to be uneasily situated between the comic and the tragic; nominally two of the three plays identified by Boas are comedies, the third, Troilus and Cressida, is found amongst the tragedies in the First Folio, although it is not listed in the Catalogue. For Boas, Shakespeare's «problem plays» set out to explore specific moral dilemmas and social problems through their central characters.

Boas writes, throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome, even when, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, the complications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth act. In Troilus and Cressidaand Hamlet no such partial settlement of difficulties takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best we may. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them together as Shakespeare's problem-plays.

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII «was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony». On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.

Genres have a role to play in translation as well. The tragedies and some comedies are more frequently translated, staged, and filmed around the world, because of their capacity to be more easily detached from their native cultural settings and the self-reinforcing cycle of familiarity. In India, for example, Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice have been translated more than fifty times and The Comedy of Errors has over thirty versions in different languages in India, but the only history plays to have been translated into Hindi are Henry V and Richard II, and only one version each. While Shakespeare's global reputation may seem to be driven by translations of his tragedies, comedies, and the sonnets because of the sheer number of performances and translations since the seventeenth century, the history plays have their own histories of global reception beginning with a 1591 Polish performance of Philip Waimer's stage version ofEdward III in Gdansk. Laurence Olivier's wartime film version of Henry V in 1944 is far from the only or the earliest translations-interlingual, intralingual, or intersemiotic-of the history plays, though each instance of translation focuses on different articulations of national histories.

The universal features of translation is viewed as a language activity which is different from original text productions and translation itself presents features explicitation, simplification, normalization and leveling out different from those of original language as well.

References

shakespeare actor sonnet translation

1. Arrowsmith, William Robson. Shakespeare's Editors and Commentators. London: J. Russell Smith, 1865.

2. Cappon, Edward. Victor Hugo: A Memoir and a Study. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1885.

3. Dryden, John. The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden. Edmond Malone, editor. London: Baldwin, 1800.

4. Duntzer, J.H.J., Life of Goethe. Thomas Lyster, translator. New York: Macmillan, 1884.

5. Glick, Claris. «William Poel: His Theories and Influence.» Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964).

6. Hill, Erroll. Shakespeare in Sable. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

7. Houseman, John. Run-through: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

8. Jackson, Russell. «Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1994-5.» Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995).

9. Nettleton, George Henry. English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1642-1780. London: Macmillan, 1914.

10. Pfister, Manfred. «Shakespeare and the European Canon.» Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture. Balz Engler and Ledina Lambert, eds. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004.

11. Sprague, A.C. Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1954.

12. Tieck, Ludwig. Alt-englischen drama. Berlin, 1811.

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