Plain-English Bard is nothing new

The Times Colonist gave the Oregon Shakespeare Festival thumbs down on Sunday for wanting to hire scriptwriters to re-do the works of the immortal bard to everyday English.

It has been done before. A certain Alan Dur band gained a scholarship as a young man to the Liverpool Institute, a grammar school where entrance was by scholarship, and would have been at the school in the late 1930s or early 1940s. (He might possibly have overlapped some of my own years there, though I have no memory of him.) He went on to university and eventually returned to the school as an English teacher.

Dur band devised the concept of Shakespeare Made Easy and rewrote 12 of the bard’s works into everyday English. These are still in circulation. No doubt his efforts were of great benefit to many scholars.

Paul McCartney was one of his pupils and speaks highly of his influence, and as we all know, McCartney went on to fame and fortune in the music world. McCartney was the prime mover, after the school had been closed down in an overhaul of the British education system, in turning it into the now world-renowned Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts.

I struggled with my Shakespeare at school, but so many phrases from his works continually pop into my head. I should also add that I prefer the older version of the Bible with all its smiting and begatting. Bill Gard Nanaimo