ABSTRACT
This is how Hamlet opens; not in so many words, it is true, but in so many interactions or exchanges between professional soldiers who are frightened and excited and behave, on the whole, rather unprofessionally. The paraphrase of their conversation may reduce to modern banality the sharp impact of Shakespeare’s dramatic language, but it has one advantage. The commonplace phrasing, unsanctified by time and literary reputation, presents a direct reading of motives, a reading here freely supported by the interpolation of explanatory directions. This means, of course, that the paraphrase is not simply a translation of the scene into modern colloquial English, but also an interpretation, or more precisely a close sequence of interpretations, from sentence to sentence, emphasis to emphasis, inflection to inflection. The paraphrase simply does what any producer of a play has to do. It reflects decisions about context and motive, which lead to decisions about language, about underlying meanings, about the stylistic cohesion of the scene. But any reader of a drama is a producer of the drama, for an audience of one. To read is to construct mentally an image of performance, and the mental image is reflected in paraphrase.
