A couple of weeks ago I was at the Wigtown Book festival where I had been invited to give the first Magnus Magnusson Memorial Lecture. Magnus had been a great supporter of this festival — and no wonder, for it is quite charming — ever since it began when Wigtown was chosen as Scotland’s official book town. That selection was a surprise, partly because this small Galloway town on the Solway Firth is ill-served by public transport. (‘What’s the quickest way to get to Wigtown from Edinburgh by public transport?’ Answer: ‘Fly to Belfast and take the ferry.’). Nevertheless it has been a great success, and the little town seems more prosperous on every visit. This year’s festival attracted, among many others, Neal Ascherson, Louis de Bernières, John Walsh, Maggie Fergusson, R. F. Foster and The Spectator’s own James Delingpole.
The subject of my lecture was ‘Our Changing Language’ and one of the questions put to me was this: ‘Given the development of our language over the centuries, is Shakespearean English still generally comprehensible? Is there a case for rendering the plays into modern English?’
One’s immediate reaction is, ‘Of course not; the suggestion is heretical.’ Moreover, given the fact that Shakespeare still holds the stage, there would appear to be absolutely no need for any modernisation of the text. Yet some have thought otherwise. A. L. Rowse, whose opinion of his own mastery of Tudor and Jacobean history and Shakespeare scholarship was not notably humble, did in fact produce modernised texts of some of the plays, though I doubt if his versions have ever been staged. Certainly the further we get from Shakespeare, the more difficult his language will seem. Half a century ago the Oxford scholar, Neville Coghill, produced a version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in contemporary English.
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