Does Oregon Shakespeare Festival Violate Civil Rights Law?

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Atlas is not a civil rights attorney and we are not qualified to give you legal advice. If you believe you have been illegally discriminated against, you should contact such a professional instead of posting a topic on here.

[Associate Justice PiT]

There's plenty that's not actually perfectly understandable to a modern audience in his own words.

So long as that modern audience is sufficiently well-educated in one of the most important bodies of work in the English language (should this not be a major part of formal education? Else what is it even for?) there should be no problem. Therefore, if there is a problem then it is clearly with an education system that has apparently produced a nation of halfwits, rather than with one of the highlights of human achievement.

Yes, all we need is to be sufficiently well educated in the idiomatic usages of our language four centuries ago in a different country.

     This sort of comment proves Al's point. Shakespeare is a cultural touchstone of the Anglophonic world that has inspired countless writers after him, and that goes all the way down to his poetic turns of phrase. A work of literature inevitably loses something in translation, so we shouldn't be translating something if we don't need to. The Iliad needs to be translated, since most of us can't read even a word of Ancient Greek. Shakespeare is similar enough to modern English that you can read the original text of his plays with a little training.

[Associate Justice PiT]

There's plenty that's not actually perfectly understandable to a modern audience in his own words.

So long as that modern audience is sufficiently well-educated in one of the most important bodies of work in the English language (should this not be a major part of formal education? Else what is it even for?) there should be no problem. Therefore, if there is a problem then it is clearly with an education system that has apparently produced a nation of halfwits, rather than with one of the highlights of human achievement.

Yes, all we need is to be sufficiently well educated in the idiomatic usages of our language four centuries ago in a different country.

     This sort of comment proves Al's point. Shakespeare is a cultural touchstone of the Anglophonic world that has inspired countless writers after him, and that goes all the way down to his poetic turns of phrase. A work of literature inevitably loses something in translation, so we shouldn't be translating something if we don't need to. The Iliad needs to be translated, since most of us can't read even a word of Ancient Greek. Shakespeare is similar enough to modern English that you can read the original text of his plays with a little training.

Sure, you can literally read them. But there are bits that are impenetrable without significantly more than some minor training. Idioms that have gone by the wayside, oridioms ghat haven’t, but have shifted in meaning; shades of meaning in words we otherwise know that indicate something different to us than Shakespeare was trying to convey at the time. There are even bits that don’t work without some attempt at reconstructing what pronunciation sounded like in Shakespeare’s time (seriously, there are puns that emerge from this type of reconstruction).

Nobody is saying we should destroy the original works. This would be a supplementary effort.

     Should we also narrate all the themes and subtext that the average viewer would not grasp, such as how the procession of kings in Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1 juxtaposed the villainous Macbeth against the lineage of the current King James? After all, that stuff is impenetrable without more than minor training.