Translating Shakespeare

‘If This Be Magic’ Review: A Great Feast of LanguagesShakespeare has resonated with audiences in Swedish, Swahili and beyond. But translating the Bard requires some difficult choices.By Henry Hitchings, WSJ (April 22, 2026) Transferring Shakespeare's works into another language is hard work: Samuel Johnson complained, more than 250 years ago, that William Shakespeare’s style was “ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.” Many students and theatergoers since have shared that view. Yet even if we agree with Johnson, it has become customary to celebrate instead the playwright’s linguistic resourcefulness and dazzle: his flair for coining words and twisting old ones into new shapes, his taste for double meanings and calculated ambiguity. The obscurity condemned by Johnson derives in part from Shakespeare’s readiness to draw on vocabulary that would have struck even his contemporaries as bewilderingly nonstandard. Today many of us are as likely to be disorientated by his fondness for…