Death by Footnotes

To decry the dearth of interest in Shakespeare by the younger generations is to overlook the obvious cause of this decline: The Bard is creaking with age and is sinking into incomprehensibility.

His language is glorious, yes, but in a terribly archaic way that has approached the point of being another language. Any text of his works to be even remotely understood requires so many footnotes and interpretations that they fill up nearly half of each page with tiny print explanations. A young reader seeing this naturally is turned off. Anything really fun doesn’t require this much effort.

And they’re right. Imagine watching a movie that was interrupted every few seconds with a commentator telling you what was going on or being said but that without the interruptions wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. That would be a real crowd pleaser, wouldn’t it?

It is time—no, it’s way past time—that we admitted the English of the 16th Century and the social and political framework of that time are so far removed from our own that we must stop with the footnotes and start with the translations, just as we do with Beowulf and with Canterbury Tales.

Let’s rework Shakespeare’s writing to retain the flavor if not the letter of the master’s stories. We do it with the Bible, so why not him?

Oh no, say the scholars and purists, Shakespeare must be read only in the original. Well, if that is the final opinion, then Shakespeare won’t be read at all--except by those tiresome people who treat him as the voice of a cult.

De Vere never really thought the language would change as much as it has. He speaks in the sonnets of conferring immortality to his precious Henry by force of his unexcelled ability with language, language which he felt to be immutable, since he himself was setting the gold standard for that language.

But the forces of the Western Culture were more potent and dynamic than he could ever imagine. The aristocracy that he assumed was eternal is non-existent in most of the English-speaking world, and even in England itself the faintest shadow of what he knew. This aspect alone in his works makes the need paramount to re-do the works—we cannot expect people to read works whose entire social structure might as well be from another planet.

Distillation is necessary. Condense these stories so that their brilliance is visible—and don’t be afraid to say that they are indeed Shakespeare. The New Shakespeare. Improved. Unshackled from its remote past. And we could have a committee, not unlike that charged with the King James translation of the Bible, be assigned to perform this awesome task.

I personally am not sanguine about the future of our Bard. Trends are moving away from seeing him as the “be all and end all” of writers/thinkers. One can already see that educated people are no longer in possession of a command and/or awe of his achievement and his supremacy. Already his works are being relegated to a higher and higher shelf in the library of works one must have at his command to be considered literate and educated, farther and farther away from the culture he so enriched.

He’s lasted longer than anyone else as a master in the voice in which he actually wrote, but now even HE is in need of a facelift. And it must be a facelift so complete that one need not have footnotes destroying the enjoyment of his works. We can’t change society and the direction it is taking, but we can keep Shakespeare alive for our culture by deciding that modification is better than the purity that leads to nullification.

I realize that this is heresy. I am one of those who enjoy reading Shakespeare without being encumbered by footnotes. And, even though I am fairly knowledgeable and adept at reading the old works, I’m sure there are references and allusions and meanings that I just don’t get. But I refuse to be wonkish about my love of the Bard and descend into that arcane world that argues over the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin.

Get thee gone, vile footnotes! Shakespeare will be reworked without you.