No Fear Shakespeare Hamlet – Hamlet translated into plain English
No Fear Shakespeare – Hamlet. How I LOVE this book. Love love love love. If you are new to Shakespeare and a bit daunted by where to start your reading, get THIS book. Because its simplicity and the execution of its concept are just wonderful. Left page: Hamlet as written by Shakespeare. Right page: Hamlet translated into plain English that anyone can understand.
By offering this straightforward side by side comparison of the original and a much more accessible text, the book does exactly what it sets out to do: It takes the Fear out of Shakespeare. Granted my former Uni professors would probably throw such a book at me, but I have studied a few of Shakespeare’s play and still find many parts of his work baffling or hard to understand. He makes tons of references or uses puns or wordplay that would have been easily understood by an Elizabethan audience. But many concepts and meanings have been lost or altered over the years, as language and the cultural context have changed and evolved. This book allows you to relish the Shakespearean language, while giving you the option to quickly look something up, if a certain phrase or word trips you up. Or you can just read the play in plain English first to get a feel for it and to fully grasp the plot. The book also gives context when certain references could be a bit hard to understand for contemporary audiences.
An clever little paperback, which I will probably sneak into the Barbican ‘just in case’. Required reading for any Hamlet novices.
No Fear Shakespeare – Hamlet is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US. Somebody who’s a lot clever than me has also found this online version.
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