This edition of As You Like It is modernized
(gracious!). Why? Rachel Burke said it best, in her
introduction to the Bandanna Books edition of
The Merchant of Venice:
Why translate Shakespeare into modern Eng lish?
In a word BARDOPHOBIA. Bardophobia can be des -
cribed as that sweaty discomfort one experiences
when seeing the word “thee.” Or “thou.” Or
“eft soons.” Too many students give up on Shake -
speare and buy the Cliffs Notes, which all too
often are read instead of the play…
Why do some critics object to an edited
ver sion of Shakespeare? They object because
many editors watered down the original until it
is nearly unrecognizable, taking out the similes
and metaphors that Aristotle called “the heart
of poetry”… The most infamous example is
the Family Shakespeare, Henrietta and Thomas
Bowdler’s 18th-century ex pur gated edition in
which all the “nastiness” was simply cut out.…
Where Shakespeare wanted his characters to
sound crude, they sound crude. If he wanted
the to speak in iambic pentameter, they speak in
iambic pentameter.
In his plays, intentionally or not, Shakespeare
reorganized the whole conception of theater,
away from the long-held Aristotelean notions of
unities and logical sequence from beginning to
end. He didn’t do this alone—Elizabethan theater
was a product of many hands and minds, as we
are reminded in scrambling to attribute this or that
play to Shakespeare or others. Play by committee,
perhaps?
The gender-crossing in As You Like It is essen -
tial to the structure of the play, extending from Act
Two to Act Five, with deep explorations of what it
means to be a woman or a man.
I try to keep changes in Shakespeare’s lan -
guage to a minimum, just enough to be understood
imme diately without stopping to look up obscure
words, expressions, or references. Even so, some
obscurities may be lost to bulky dictionaries.