Dumbing down Shakespeare

[Marcellus]

Personally I think that it would be more beneficial to students to see the play they are studying being performed than it would for them to study a 'modern version'. I always found Shakespeare to be much more understandable when performed than when read. After all, they are plays, not books.

[Beirut]

Personally I think that it would be more beneficial to students to see the play they are studying being performed than it would for them to study a 'modern version'. I always found Shakespeare to be much more understandable when performed than when read. After all, they are plays, not books.

There be the truth spoken.

[Flavius Clemens]

Takes me back to my schooldays - I never did Shakespeare as a subject (English Language was compulsory to age 16, but English Lit was an option you could choose from 14) but we did A Midsummer Night's Dream as the school play one year. We did use the technique of translating into modern English in some rehearsals to help us concentrate on the emotion and comedy, but the performance was all the straight original text. The review in the local paper carried a quote they overheard from one of the audience "I always thought Shakespear was meant to be boring, but the way they did it, it wasn't."
Read the poetry sitting at a desk, but treat the plays as plays!

[IrishArmenian]

Yes, MacBeth would be exceptionally funny.
Upon seeing Banquo's ghost:
MacBeth: I thought I killed you. Why won't you die?
The royal party enters MacBeth's castle as guests:
Duncan: Fair and noble hostess, we are you guests tonight.
Lady Macbeth: Your servants, ever.
Translation-
Duncan: You better have drinks, and half-good looking women, or I am going to crack some skulls!
Lady MacBeth: Don't get violent, you drunk dimwitt!
In my class, we actually performed A Midsummer Night's Dream and MacBeth in English and Armenian. I was Nick Bottom in the former, and Malcolm and a murderer in the former. I think I did trashy, but people tell me I did well. We modernized the first one by setting it in the late 50's. MacBeth, though, was no holds barred, incredibly vicious, or how it was meant to be preformed.