"Hey Juliet, are you home? Want to get pizza, watch Netflix, and chill?"
That's how Romeo may have tried to woo Juliet in Shakespeare's famous romantic tragedy if he were making the effort in 2015 (maybe with a few emojis thrown in for good measure.) It may also be what the latest editions of Shakespeare's plays could look like, because the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has recently announced it will translate all of the Bard's works into contemporary, modern English.
That's an exaggeration, of course. Those translations won't be as lackluster as the one above, rest assured. But that doesn't mean that students—or casual readers—should shy away from reading Shakespeare in its original form, says Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn.
"The idea of trying to bring Shakespeare into modern parlance is another small chip away at our own intelligence and the general intelligence and possibilities of humankind," Koehn said.
First of all, it robs the language of its original complexity, said Koehn, and unravels many of Shakespeare's signature turns-of-phrases.
"Here's the rub," Koehn said. "Shakespeare's language is in general very tightly constructed...It's not like you can take one sentence out, find an app that says 'find the modern equivalent of these words,' and insert it back into the play and the whole of the act, the soliloquy, of the play, stays the same."
Besides that, Shakespeare's plays were meant to be performed and to be seen—not just by royals or noblemen or the highest echelons of society, but by the average person. So if you have trouble understanding the original as written on paper, go see it live, Koehn advised.
"Shakespeare was meant to be seen by the popular people of England," Koehn pointed out. "He wrote for the average Londoner. The language was designed to be accessible...It's not just about the words themselves, it's about the entirety of the scene or the character or the moment that's captured."
To hear more from historian Nancy Koehn, tune in to Boston Public Radio above.
