Play Reviews: King Lear, Twelfth Night, the Comedy of Errors, the Tempest, a Midsummer Night's Dream, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, the Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Hamlet

2010 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Lynne Hapgood ◽  
Peter J. Smith ◽  
Kath Bradley ◽  
Peter J. Smith ◽  
Yolana Wassersug ◽  
...  
Tempo ◽  
1969 ◽  
pp. 6-12
Author(s):  
Stephen Walsh

Although Shakespeare has in the past been freely plundered for musical settings of every kind—from song to opera—it still seems a fair generalisation to say that his best work does not lend itself to this kind of treatment. Perhaps the most successful of all Shakespeare operas in English is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which follows closely the text of one of the less substantial comedies. Of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, no satisfactory opera has apparently been made (though Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict contains charming music), and for much the same reason—namely Shakespeare's unrivalled genius for linguistic imagery—the great tragedies have resisted direct musical setting, Boito's Otello and Piave's Macbeth being, of course, free derivatives, not translations. Only in our own century has it become normal to set Shakespeare's tragedies in the original text, translated or otherwise.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (25) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Michael Skupin

This paper discusses the circumstances of Shakespeare’s arrival in Indonesia via the translations of Trisno Sumardjo, published in the early 1950’s. Biographical material about the translator will be presented, and there will be a discussion of the characteristics the Indonesian language and of Indonesian verse which would determine the expectations of his readers, such as rhyme, meter and style, that would influence his renderings of the poetic passages in the Bard’s plays. These are illustrated in a sampling of passages from As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice. The Dutch translation of L. A. J. Burgersdijk was an indirect influence on the translations, and not always for the good. The paper concludes with a lengthy discussion of the extremely difficult problems that Sumardjo encountered in his translation of King Lear. This Lear was not published during the translator’s lifetime, Sumardjo’s prestige notwithstanding because he was not satisfied with the solutions he proposed.


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