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No Fear Shakespeare: a frightening thing
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No Fear Shakespeare's edition of 'Hamlet'
When it comes to single editions of Shakespeare, there is an embarrassment of riches. Want simple annotations? The Folger and Barnes & Noble editions have you covered. Looking for scholarly essays? The Arden is especially loquacious. Prefer to see what the play looked like in the Folio? Applause has your back. And there are, of course, many, many more, including SparkNotes’ No Fear Shakespeare, which prints the plays side-by-side with translations that put the Bard’s language into (as the website states) “the kind of English people actually speak today.”
Students across the land no doubt cheered the arrival of these volumes when they hit the shelves in 2003, and why not? They take the work out of Shakespeare and allow students to grasp what is happening without all of that pesky back-and-forth that comes with having to look up words or phrases. Suddenly, Shakespeare is accessible! Now students can really understand what he’s all about!
Or can they? In an ideal world, these translations would provide guidelines for students, a basis on which they can build upon and then really get into Shakespeare’s original text. But let’s be honest…it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you give students (save the particularly dedicated) a translated option, they won’t ever bother with the actual text. There’s no reason for them to do so. The modern English versions are close enough and cover the entire play, making it easy for them to fake their way through Lit the next morning.
Therein lies the rub, for if you take away Shakespeare’s language, what’s the point in teaching him at all? Almost all of his stories were ripped off from earlier sources, so it’s not the plots that have kept these plays alive over the past 400 years. It is, in fact, the language. To get rid of it is to, in essence, get rid of Shakespeare. The Folger publications, for example, still provide the guidance of scene summaries, but leave the student to deal with the language him or herself. Paraphrasing Shakespeare is incredibly important, and more or less necessary to fully grasp what he is saying, but you’ll only get things out of it if you do it yourself.
Furthermore, the No Fear Shakespeares are also somewhat dangerous in that Shakespeare already has this stigma of being incomprehensible. While this is true to a certain extent, and many of his meanings have become obscured through time, this idea of Shakespeare being an entirely different language gets blown out of proportion. By “translating” the already-in-English text, SparkNotes is basically saying, “it’s true, Shakespeare doesn’t speak English, you’ll never get through it on your own” and that’s a terrible attitude to take and to encourage in students. It reinforces a wall between students and the language as opposed to help breaking it down.
It’s not just students that are tempted by these volumes. There is definitely an appeal to teachers as well, especially teachers up against high levels of apathy. If your only goal is to get kids a general idea of the plays so that they can write about them on a standardized test and/or be generally better informed about literature, they work pretty well for that. That’s not disparaging—teachers have an incredibly hard job, and sometimes are faced with having to impart huge amounts of knowledge to students who just don’t care or who are coming to the table at a disadvantage in terms of previous exposure or life circumstances. Therefore the idea of “you gotta do what you gotta do” can be a valid one. But still, it would be nice to believe that if Shakespeare is on a syllabus, it’s to actually learn something about Shakespeare and the plays. And if that’s true, you have to actually use the plays. That doesn’t mean dryly slogging through the text. These are plays. They were meant to be performed, and there are more than enough movie versions out there to overcome the difficulties presented by attempting to see live performances. Or, better yet, have the kids read aloud and act the shows.
Surely this is better alternative to skipping over some of the greatest poetry ever written.
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