What is Hamlet?: A Look at How Translations Affect the Text

Furthering my exploration and study into the subject of Hamlet, and especially German versions and how the play has been performed in Germany, I find myself coming back to this one defining question:

When does an adaptation or translation of a play become a different play?

Are there essential elements of a play that define it, which would, if changed render a different piece of work?  How much of the plot and characters can be modified or adapted and still retain the essence of the original work?

Let's look at Hamlet specifically.  What about the play Hamlet makes it Hamlet?  I mentioned before that I found a German version of the Hamlet story from 1710, called "Der Bestrafte Brudermord", which has enough similarities to Shakespeare's play that some scholars believe it is a translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, but with enough differences that others believe it may be the Ur-Hamlet, or original Hamlet text that Shakespeare based his play on.  

The Joy of Live Theatre

This post is a combination of a couple of posts I wrote for my personal blog last September and October, as well as the opportunity I had this weekend to see New Play Project's newest show, WWJD, by Anna Lewis.


I love live theatre.  I really do. For the last three years I have been acting as Technical Director for New Play Project.  This has given me opportunity to read a lot of plays, hundreds probably.  Some of them I have really enjoyed, and others I haven’t enjoyed so much.  There have only been a very few that I downright disliked.  But the interesting thing is that often when these plays were performed and I watched them, I found myself interested and enjoying the play.  What is the difference, what causes this?

I have thought about this quite a bit, especially as I have had theatre classes at school where I have been required to read certain plays and as I have thought about how to teach theatre to high school students as I prepare to become a teacher.   I have found that I have a difficult time just reading plays sometimes.  I am not a very imaginative person, I don’t picture things very well in my mind and so just reading the words on a page it becomes hard for me to really see what is happening in the play.  Plays were written to be performed and they are written in a specific way to facilitate that, but that makes it hard to just read a play.  I think this is partly why students have such a hard time reading Shakespeare. Aside from the language, Shakespeare’s plays were not meant to be read.  In Shakespeare’s day people did not go to ‘see’ a play, they went to ‘hear’ a play.  The focus was on the words coming out of the actor’s mouth, as they are spoken. 

I also firmly believe in the communal nature of theatre.  Theatre is definitely an act of multiple people coming together.  With a novel it can just be a union of the author and the reader: two people.  But with theatre, you have the playwright, the director, the actors, the tech people, the audience.  So many people come together to put on a play, they work together and their multiple ideas developed the play.  We have different people’s interpretation of the text, discussing it with each other, compromising and coming together to produce a theatrical piece. But when reading a play you are left to yourself and your own interpretation. 

In Memory of Elizabeth Taylor, and her Shakespeare Connection

As I'm sure you've all heard by now, the legendary Elizabeth Taylor died this week at 79 years.  One of the very first Shakespeare films I saw and fell in love with was the 1967 version of Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor playing Katherine opposite Richard Burton's Petruchio.  It was so well done, and I think they both played their parts so well.

I wanted to embed a short clip from that film, Kate's speech at the end, but embedding of that clip is disabled on YouTube, probably due to rights or something.  So, follow this link to go watch it over on YouTube.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQudMqwqpQ

Fratricide Revenged : The German Hamlet

As I have mentioned before, I have found a German play called "Der Bestrafte Brudermord" or Fratricide Revenged, as it is commonly translated into English.  This German play is a version of Hamlet, but it appears to be based less on the Shakespearean play and more on the original source text that Shakespeare also used for his play.  The earliest version of this play we have dates from 1710, but this play still gets performed in Germany, there was a production in Bochum at the Ruhr Universität in 2007.

Here are my thoughts as I read the play, which is surprisingly shorter than I had thought it would be.  The .pdf of the play that I found is only 23 pages, the scenes are very short, often only half a page, but the plot and the characters are similar to those we are familiar with with Hamlet.

Iambic Pentameter in German Shakespeare

In class as I was talking with Prof. Burton he mentioned looking at the use of iambic pentameter in German translations of Shakespeare.  I said that in the German translations they did not use prose much, that German did not lend itself well to iambic pentameter because in German the first syllable is stressed.  I must admit that I was wrong.  Partly.  German is stressed more on the first syllable, but that doesn't mean that German does not use iambic pentameter.  Especially Goethe and Schiller, after falling in love with Shakespeare, used iambic pentameter in their poetry.  

In the German translations that I have read, though, there is little prose.  They have chosen to translate the meaning of the English text, but with little concern for the poetry, for the meter.  So, I went looking for iambic pentameter in German translations of Shakespeare.  I chose a scene that I was very familiar with in English that is well-known for its use of iambic pentameter: the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2.  Then I went looking for German translations of Romeo und Julia, looking for iambic pentameter.   I had to look through three different translations before I found one, by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, that used iambic pentameter.  

Here is the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in German.  I have bolded the accented syllable to show the iambic pentameter, and I have written the number of feet at the end of each line.  A + indicates that there is an extra syllable.

Sources and Links, and another step forward

Following the suggestion that Prof. Burton gave in class today, and modeling after Bryan's blog, I set up two pages:  one for the sources that I cite in my blog and one for other links and interesting websites I have found.  Hopefully this will help keep things a little more organized and a little more scholarly as I can show what I'm studying and where I'm finding my sources.  As my German professor keeps telling us "citing shows how smart you are, how many other sources you have read, how many other people are talking about the same subjects."

In looking through all of my old posts (I can't believe I've written 44 in two and a half months!), I was also reminded of several ideas that I had found and thought about, but forgotten.  In particular, one where I mention a German play called Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished (or Revenged) Fratricide).  I would like to do more research into this, as it is an interesting subject.  I found an English translation online, with an introduction that talked about how this play seems to be based more off of a Thomas Kyd play than Shakespeare's Hamlet.  Others believe it may be the German translation of the original Hamlet story that both Kyd and Shakespeare based their plays on.

As I have been doing posts about Shakespeare and Germany and trying to find a thesis, I am torn between two ideas that keep recurring.

1. Shakespeare and the Nazis -- I want to continue my research into how Shakespeare was treated and performed under the Nazis, maybe comparing the plays produced in Nazi Germany with plays produced in England or America in the same time period.  What does the choice of plays say about Germany and German culture?

2. Germany and Hamlet -- Especially with this reintroduction to Der Bestrafte Brudermord (which I did find a copy of in German!) I would like to study Germany's history with the play and seek to understand why it is so popular in Germany more than elsewhere and more than other plays.  What is it about German history or culture that keeps this people interested in Hamlet?  And, going off of something Prof. Burton said in class today, are German productions of Hamlet more 'real', more 'authentic' than an English or American production, do Germans innately understand something about Hamlet that we do not?

Theatre in Nazi Germany

I was looking in the library the other day and I came across a shelf that had books all about theatre in Germany.  So, I pulled a few off of the shelf and started flipping through them, using the index to find all references to Shakespeare and specific Shakespearean plays.  Here is what I learned from two of those books:

From the book Theatre Under the Nazis, by John London (2000):
There was a section where they he summarized the number of legal productions of Shakespeare by play during the Nazi era.  The results are fascinating.  Now keep in mind these are productions across all of Germany, not individual performances.   Shakespeare was apparently extremely popular.


Twelfth Night -135
Taming of the Shrew - 101
Hamlet - 94
Midsummer Night's Dream - 76
Much Ado About Nothing - 57
Comedy of Errors - 48
As You Like It - 47