The Best of Amateur Shakespeare

No Fear Shakespeare, the SparkNotes spinoff that I have trouble labeling as either a healthy or unhealthy way of approaching Shakespeare, has hosted a little contest called Show Us Your Shakespeare. People send videos of themselves reciting Shakespeare.

I wrote a post decrying people’s habit of reciting monologues and snippets of Shakespeare; my reasoning followed that because snippets aren’t presented in the context of the play, people don’t understand or appreciate their full meaning, which helps to cement the popular notion that Shakespeare is dry and boring. While that may be true, I should probably just lighten up and embrace Shakespearean recitations as fun for those who do know the plays.

That said, have a look at some of the entries to the Show Us Your Shakespeare contest.

My favorite entry is a college-age girl reciting a Juliet monologue. What’s interesting is that she also recorded herself reciting the same monologue in modern English, which is No Fear Shakespeare’s shtick. It’s rare to find a competent actor performing modernized Shakespeare, so this is a great opportunity to compare and contrast. Amazing how Will’s writing seems to possess a tenth of the depth it once held, isn’t it? While some ideas and talking points are much easier to understand, which is No Fear Shakespeare’s goal, all of the beauty and emotion conveyed by the nuance’s of Will’s language is gone, leaving a recitation that feels extremely academic in nature.

I’m currently rehearsing for a production of Anton Checkhov’s The Seagull by 11:11 Theatre Company in Boston. Checkhov wrote the play in Russian, and it has since been translated into English countless times. We’re using the free translation from Project Gutenberg. As I learn my lines, I often wish that we were going to be performing the play in its original Russian. I can tell that the very matter-of-fact presentation of thoughts and ideas, while translated word-for-word, have been stripped of the kernels of emotion and meaning that won Checkhov acclaim in the first place. It is left to the director and us actors to squeeze as much truth out of these castrated pages as possible.

Similarly, No Fear Shakespeare’s translations of Will’s original words may be technically correct, but, just as foriegn languages can never be translated exactly into English, the translated Shakespeare text will never be able to contain all its original subtexts. I was, however, impressed with how well the girl who submitted the Juliet entries was able to bring truth to the modernized lines. She reminded me that, perhaps, for a frustrated middle-school student, reading No Fear Shakespeare has the same value as performing an English translation of The Seagull; in other words, it has some real value. Just don’t think it’s a perfect translation. It’s just a translation; there is only one truly perfect representation of Shakespeare’s thoughts, and that’s written in archaic English.