What the heck does “palter” mean? It’s from Macbeth and means “to deal evasively or use trickery.” Who knew? Obsolete words like that have long tripped up audience members and bedeviled scholars, directors, dramaturgs and actors who want to attract people to Shakespeare, not drive them away.

Dave Hitz, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Festival benefactor, was interested in finding ways to help people love Shakespeare, as he does. “I have been seeing Shakespeare’s plays since I was a kid,” says Hitz. “I thought it would be fascinating, fun and educational to see Shakespeare translated into 21st-century English so that I could have an experience more like his original audience, hearing it in my own language, without the 400 years of distance that we now have from his words. It is hard work to understand Shakespeare, especially at ‘full speed’ like you get with a live play.”

In 2011, Hitz and his brother, Ken Hitz, met with Artistic Director Bill Rauch, then-OSF Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy Dr. Lue Morgan Douthit and other staff members to discuss the idea of translating Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary modern English. OSF negotiated a four-year, $200,000 grant with the Hitz Foundation for five commissions that included both adaptations and what they called “literal translations.” Douthit started by commissioning a writer to translate one play and reached out to her longtime friend, the British writer, producer and director Kenneth Cavander. They were leery about bringing the wrath of Shakespeare scholars down on their heads for daring to tamper with the Bard’s language, so they trod carefully. They looked at three plays: Much Ado about Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well and Timon of Athens. Cavander translated short passages from each. After a reading at OSF of those passages, Rauch recommended Timon.

Cavander thinks Timon was chosen partly because it’s “relatively unknown, seldom performed, and almost certainly of dual authorship (Thomas Middleton and William Shakespeare), and so less likely to draw criticism from the audience of scholars, Shakespeare lovers and the theatre community in general. It also had a relevance to current events at the time (e.g., Occupy Wall Street) and is suffused with street-smart language and situations.”

Cavander discussed the project with Geoffrey Sherman, the artistic director of Alabama Shakespeare Festival, who agreed to produce the translated Timon. The Equity production was mounted in April 2014 to an enthusiastic reception. (Alabama Shakespeare will offer a second Shakespeare translation, The Tempest, April 20–May 14, 2017.)

On the plane ride back home, flushed with the good response to Timon, Douthit decided to go big: She asked Dave Hitz for funds to commission translations of the rest of Shakespeare’s plays at the same time. He agreed to fund what is now called Play on!, to commission a total of 36 playwrights to translate the 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare into contemporary modern English by December 2018. The Hitz Foundation put up a total of $3.7 million for the project, which covered the salaries of Douthit (who stepped down from her duties as the head of OSF’s literary department so she could focus full-time on Play on!), and assistant director Taylor Bailey, as well as hiring translators and dramaturgs and funding workshops and readings.

Play on! aims to increase understanding and connection to Shakespeare’s plays as well as engage and inspire audiences ranging from theatre professionals and scholars to teachers, students and local theatre enthusiasts. Douthit says she has two goals: “To learn more about the plays, and to recreate the immediacy of the experience that audiences had in Shakespeare’s time. There has been tremendous scholarship over the past 400 years devoted to understanding the plays. I don’t know if the playwrights will figure out what those passages mean, but I do believe that they will give us a sense for how the plays work.”

Douthit set high standards for the translations:

• Do no harm: Plenty of the language doesn’t need translating; some does.
• Go line by line: No editing, no fixing, no personal politics, no regionalisms.
• Keep the time period when the play was written: very late 16th and very early 17th century.
• Keep Shakespeare’s heightened language. That was the most important one, she says. “It still has to have rhyme, meter, rhetoric, image, metaphor, character, action and theme. Shakespeare’s astonishingly compressed language must be respected.”

The public speaks

Word of this new project filtered out into the theatre and academic worlds. Some people misunderstood the project’s intent, fearing it would result in travesties filled with contemporary slang and dumbed-down language that would replace OSF’s traditional-language plays. Not true, says Douthit. At some point, OSF will probably produce at least one of these translations, perhaps in the same season as the traditional version. And OSF’s Canon in a Decade project is committed to producing Shakespeare’s 37-play canon in the original language over 10 years.

The biggest reaction was around the use of the word “translation.” “I knew it would be a provocative concept,” says Douthit, “but it’s an important idea to Dave Hitz. Everyone takes the word at the first definition: exchanging word for word. But I define translation to mean ‘carry over.’ I’m not interested in 100 percent clarity; I am interested in ‘translating’ the experience of a group of people gathered together for the purpose of experiencing the same play at the same time.”

Douthit says the reaction was more negative on social media than in the mainstream press, which was mixed. Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro wrote a dismissive op-ed piece in The New York Times, linguist John McWhorter covered it more favorably in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and scholar Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s New Yorker article put the project into historical context. And others wondered, if you can translate the Bible, why not Shakespeare?

Play on! reflects three of OSF’s four core values, says Rauch: excellence, inclusion and stewardship. “In the work of the writers and dramaturgs we’ve commissioned, we are striving for artistic excellence, especially with the commitment to applying the same formal pressure on the translated language as the original,” he says. “We are striving for inclusion, not only in the gender and racial diversity of the artists involved, but in the entire project’s purpose to provide more access to Shakespeare’s work to the widest possible range of readers and listeners. Finally, we are being effective stewards of our namesake playwright by inviting artists and audiences to have a deeper relationship with the nuance and specificity embedded in each text, which is sometimes lost or buried as language shifts in meaning over time. I am so proud of how our core values are reflected in this ambitious project.”

Hitz says he was always committed to high art as well: “A good translation should still be rich, complex, and ambiguous, just as we would expect of a translation of Chekhov or Molière. A ‘dumbed-down’ translation is a bad translation.” He says he was impressed by the fact that Shakespeare is one of the most-translated authors in the world and that his plays are very popular in translation, perhaps even more popular than in English-speaking countries.

Play on! has quickly taken off. Since it was announced in 2015, the plays have been read and workshopped with the help of more than 300 actors at 19 theatre companies and educational institutions in 14 cities around the country. “We are almost halfway through the time period of the original grant and we are expecting to double the development activities by the end of fiscal 2017,” Douthit says. “We also are making plans to extend these development efforts internationally.”

Choosing participants

From the start, Douthit wanted a diverse group—at least 51 percent women and 51 percent writers of color—who would include the nation’s leading translators, playwrights and other writers at all stages of their careers, and those who teach, perform or direct. Douthit made lists of people she wanted to work with and reached out to colleagues for ideas.

“They had to be game,” she says. And they had to have time in their schedules to take on this big project over the next three years. But they didn’t have to be experts on Shakespeare. “I want them to look at the plays from a dramatic-action perspective,” she adds. “That’s where we will learn new things.”

Matching translators with plays ended up being an organic process that took just three weeks and went smoothly, with no conflicts over plays. Translators were free to choose their own dramaturgs (some had two) or to be assigned one. Most of the teams lived in different locations and had to be creative about how they worked together. Many sent scenes and changes back and forth electronically and communicated by Skype.

Migdalia Cruz chose Macbeth. “I felt it was the one closest to my own thematic sensibilities,” she says. “I feel a kinship to the themes of this play: mourning, ambition, blood, supernatural intervention, murder, ghosts—and a strong female lead, not so common in Shakespeare’s tragedies.”

Aditi Brennan Kapil picked Measure for Measure at the urging of her dramaturg, Liz Engelman. “She said she felt like it had something juicy and relevant for us to work with in a way that felt more compelling than some of the other options.”

Engelman says Measure always fascinated her. “I love its problems. I love how everyone is right and everyone is wrong, how you root for Isabella even as you want to slap her, how you can’t figure out exactly how you feel about the Duke (is he an awful leader? does he have a point?), how the world is a seedy, gritty one even though there’s a nun-to-be striving to be pure.”

Engelman and fellow dramaturg Andrew Carlson first put together two readings of the original play, in Minneapolis and Austin. “This is a project about the delivery and receiving of words and meaning,” says Engelman, “so how do they sound to Aditi? We wanted to make sure we were on the same page about meaning and interpretation based on what we heard, not what we had ever thought previously.”

Romeo and Juliet writer Hansol Jung and dramaturg Aaron Malkin also put together a reading of the full Shakespeare text. “From that reading,” Malkin says, “we had a number of discussions about the themes and devices of the play: the way Shakespeare understood how lovers talk to each other in the day is different from how they talk to each other at night, the use of lower-class characters to break the tension of the tragedy, the consequences of negligent authority figures and so on.”

Challenges in changing the language

“There isn’t a single Shakespeare play that doesn’t present insuperable obstacles to an audience’s full understanding of what they’re seeing and hearing; Timon is no different,” Cavander says. “Sure, there are lines, or whole speeches, that are totally intelligible without changing a word. But the style, linguistic conventions and Shakespeare’s love affair with language, coupled with the enormous changes in the meanings and nuances of even the simplest words in English in the last 400 years—all this means that every line involves a separate judgment call about how much a contemporary audience can understand without serious, but respectful, rethinking of the original text.” One of Cavander’s judgment calls was to not try to mimic the Elizabethan iambic line. “I kept a looser line division that hopefully gave the actors clues for emphasis and rhythm. I did keep the rhyming couplets with which Shakespeare often closes a scene, as far as possible.”

In working on Othello, dramaturg Ayanna Thompson says she supplied translator Mfoniso Udofia with a lot of contextual information about Othello: “The history of its staging, the history of performing blackness and the history of actors of color performing the role. I also sent her tons of scholarly articles on Othello, and she joked that it was like receiving a brain dump.”

Thompson said her biggest challenge has been to find replacements for “Moor,” a term that in early modern English had different meanings. “Sometimes ‘Moor’ is used as an adjective of place and/or religion, but other times ‘Moor’ is used in a derogatory fashion (not unlike the n-word). So the hardest part for us has been to tease out the exact differences between the uses in Shakespeare’s Othello, and then to come up with 21st-century equivalents.”  

For Marcus Gardley, who translated King Lear, “The most immediate realization that I had was that certain lines don’t mean what I assumed they meant. When I read them line by line using the Shakespeare Concordance, I realized that a lot of the productions that I saw truly missed the boat. Words have changed their meaning over time; that changes everything.” 

In working on Macbeth, Cruz says, “As I unraveled the language and did my research about everything from bawdy terms to Elizabethan proverbs to Scottish royal history, I found I could change small things that clarified the plot and the more obscure language. I paid strict attention to the meter, rhythm and alliterative passages. It still feels awkward to think about ‘changing Shakespeare,’ but I was determined to only change things that helped to clarify the journey of the characters. It is still Shakespeare, and the audience does still need to listen to his (and my) poetic language and make sense of it in both vocabulary and emotional sense.”

Some changes were small, like “palter” (which became “deal false”), others more intricate, she says, “where if I changed a word, then I needed to change the following rhyme so I could keep the rhyme or rhythm. It was definitely a rompecabeza, as we say in Spanish—‘a head-breaker’ or major puzzle.”

Dramaturg Martine Kei Green-Rogers worked on one of Shakespeare’s least-performed plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen. “Considering the academic debate about who wrote what in the play—Fletcher vs Shakespeare—and attempting to figure out the best way to honor those two voices in this script, asked for a considerable amount of nuance.” She and playwright Tim Slover, who both teach theatre at the University of Utah, chose the play because they thought the story would work well with students. Translating the play opened up a campus-wide conversation about Shakespeare, access and language.  (The University of Utah will present The Two Noble Kinsmen April 7–16, 2017.)

Understanding things differently

Through the process of translating the sometimes very familiar plays, the playwrights and dramaturgs were sometimes amazed at what they learned. Malkin says, “When we heard Hansol’s translation for the first time, I was struck by how funny the first half of Romeo and Juliet is. Despite being forewarned in the prologue, until Mercutio is killed, the play moves along with great humor, which unconsciously sets up the expectation that Romeo and Juliet will make it through unscathed.”

Kapil was familiar with Measure but admits she had “residual baggage” around what she thought it was about: “A hypocritical lecherous villain, a virtuous woman who is abused by every man in the play, a morally weak brother. What I think I had in my head was an oversimplified version of the play heavily influenced by the performance traditions of the melodramatic era, which is a version neither true to the original Elizabethan-era play nor useful for communicating the play to present-day audiences. And since the assignment is translation, the first job became to encounter the play with none of those muddying distractions and assumptions, on its own terms, albeit as a present-day theatre artist.”

Once Kapil was able to clear her head and come at it clean, new things jumped out at her: “All of these characters are having an extremely complex experience; they’re experiencing deep moral struggles,” she says. “And I feel like the organizing principle of the play is: What is good leadership? What is moral leadership? What happens when you legislate morality? How do you account for human nature in that conversation? Every single element of the play organizes beautifully around exploring these ideas without offering up any simple answers, because there aren’t any. The play is amazingly relevant, centuries later.”

Some playwrights had an unexpected emotional reaction to their plays. “I cry now when Lady Macduff dies,” says Cruz. “I did not used to cry when this part came along. I understood what was happening before, but now I can actually feel her pain. I say that with respect and humility. I have internalized this play so that it feels personal to me. I just hope I have treated the text with respect and I hope this translation is my honoring Shakespeare’s original intent.”

To hear what several scenes sound like before and after translation, listen to:

https://soundcloud.com/playonosf/sets/demos

Macbeth

Measure for Measure

Timon of Athens