Does Oregon Shakespeare Festival Violate Civil Rights Law?

[Conrad Spoke]

Three years ago Oregon Shakespeare Festival launched a program to translate Shakespeare into Modern English. The program is called Play On! (which you can easily search for ). They needed 36 translators to work on all of Shakespeare's plays. Their stated goal was to hire more than half writers of color and more than half women. I think this violates state and federal civil rights laws, which insist that people cannot be excluded from work because of race, sex, etc.
I was an experienced Modern English Shakespeare translator long before this program was started. I was excluded because I am a white male? Was this legal or moral?

[Dr. MB]

Methinks you're overthinking this.

[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.

[Conrad Spoke]

Yeah, I know you're not lawyers. This thread is called "Constitution and Law" so I thought maybe this legal quandary would be very interesting to people.
Isn't that why this site exists?

[Since I'm the mad scientist proclaimed by myself]

Correcting for biases that lead to people who aren't white men getting denied jobs in favor of less skilled white men is not discrimination.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Shakespeare already is written in Modern English though. What is the point in updating Shakespeare so the language is flat and uninteresting?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Shakespeare already is written in Modern English though. What is the point in updating Shakespeare so the language is flat and uninteresting?

Yeah, I couldn't care less about the quota business, but this entire project is blatant and brazen cultural  murder.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Shakespeare already is written in Modern English though. What is the point in updating Shakespeare so the language is flat and uninteresting?

Yeah, I couldn't care less about the quota business, but this entire project is blatant and brazen cultural  murder.

Really. What’s the point of watching a 500-year old entertainment piece if it is stripped of everything anachronistic?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Shakespeare already is written in Modern English though. What is the point in updating Shakespeare so the language is flat and uninteresting?

Yeah, I couldn't care less about the quota business, but this entire project is blatant and brazen cultural  murder.

Really. What’s the point of watching a 500-year old entertainment piece if it is stripped of everything anachronistic?

It wasn't anachronistic when written. I suppose you didn't care for the 1995 film version of Richard III? Making a old story relevant to the current era can be good, tho merely updating Shakespeare from Early Modern English to Colloquial English does seem a waste of effort to me as well. However, just because it doesn't go as far as Ran or West Side Story in reimagining Shakespeare doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

[Torie]

The legality turns on how the goal of achieving diversity is implemented. On one end of the scale, there certainly is no legal problem if the effort to achieve the goal is merely actively recruiting applicants that foster diversity. On the other end of the scale is having rigid quotas to get to the right percentages, which is probably illegal.  In-between is where the legal ambiguities arise, and are continually litigated.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Shakespeare already is written in Modern English though. What is the point in updating Shakespeare so the language is flat and uninteresting?

Yeah, I couldn't care less about the quota business, but this entire project is blatant and brazen cultural  murder.

Really. What’s the point of watching a 500-year old entertainment piece if it is stripped of everything anachronistic?

It wasn't anachronistic when written. I suppose you didn't care for the 1995 film version of Richard III? Making a old story relevant to the current era can be good, tho merely updating Shakespeare from Early Modern English to Colloquial English does seem a waste of effort to me as well. However, just because it doesn't go as far as Ran or West Side Story in reimagining Shakespeare doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

I think part of the idea is to update it to the modern idiom as is done with modern translations of Shakespeare into other languages. They don't translate Shakespeare into 400 year old versions of Japanese or Spanish, for instance.

As for the claims that it's "cultural murder," spare me. Nobody is proposing eliminating the original texts.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think part of the idea is to update it to the modern idiom as is done with modern translations of Shakespeare into other languages.

Yes, but why? Shakespeare is perfectly understandable in his own words, and those words, of course, have a huge literary value in themselves. How boring and how arrogant to insist that the text must be 'updated'. Why? What for? To make up for the widespread cultural shortcomings created a deficient education system?

[Slander and/or Libel]

I think part of the idea is to update it to the modern idiom as is done with modern translations of Shakespeare into other languages.

Yes, but why? Shakespeare is perfectly understandable in his own words, and those words, of course, have a huge literary value in themselves. How boring and how arrogant to insist that the text must be 'updated'. Why? What for? To make up for the widespread cultural shortcomings created a deficient education system?

There's plenty that's not actually perfectly understandable to a modern audience in his own words. There are stretches that are impenetrable because of obscure idioms that have faded from usage. The claim that every bit of Shakespeare is as perfectly understandable to a modern audience as it would have been to an audience of his contemporaries is historically illiterate to the way that language changes.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Besides, what lawyer would dare take a case involving Henry VI Part 2 Act IV Scene 2? They might all be killed!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

[Slander and/or Libel]

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.

[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.

[Slander and/or Libel]

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.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Or maybe not if they're reincarnating puns.

[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.