Dickensblog

I don't know if any of you happened to see the recent Romeo and Juliet film, but if you did, my sympathies. It was terrible. And the main reason was that Julian Fellowes rewrote a great deal of the dialogue, and did it in so clunky and tin-eared a fashion that I was cringing all the way through.

BBC News quotes Fellowes as saying, "When people say we should have filmed the original, I don't attack them for that point of view, but to see the original in its absolutely unchanged form, you require a kind of Shakespearian [sic] scholarship and you need to understand the language and analyse it and so on. . . . I can do that because I had a very expensive education, I went to Cambridge. Not everyone did that and there are plenty of perfectly intelligent people out there who have not been trained in Shakespeare's language choices."

The problem with that is, generations of people who have not been trained in Shakespeare's language choices have somehow nevertheless managed to appreciate and enjoy Shakespeare. This was going on long before Julian Fellowes came along, and something tells me it will continue long after he's gone.

Why do I bring this up here? Because it doesn't just apply to Shakespeare; it also illustrates something about Dickens and those who love him. Somehow, people who argue that Dickens's original words can and should be read by many, not just a select few, tend to get a reputation as stuffy elitists. Which doesn't make any sense at all, because in fact, the exact opposite is true. And Fellowes's words show us why. It's those who try to water down those beautiful words, because they think the masses don't have a hope of understanding them, who are truly acting like elitists.

Yes, reading Dickens and Shakespeare takes hard work and patience. I would never argue otherwise. But to try to keep people away from them on those grounds does a great disservice to both the authors and the potential readers.