It is surely the assumption of many that the works of Shakespeare received swift translation upon their success. Britain’s closest European neighbours must have heard some rumour of his success and clamoured for a translation into their native tongue. 

Not so. This talk, given by Dr. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen of the University of Leiden, chronicled the history of Dutch efforts to translate and adapt the plays of Shakespeare. The specifics of this history were interesting on their own, but the strength of the talk was in the broader distinction between translation and adaption. 

Contrary to the assumption expressed above, the first Dutch production of any of Shakespeare’s plays was The Mad Wedding by Abraham Sybant, an adaptation of Taming of the Shrew. This was not a translation, at least not by modern standards. Rather it inserted scenes, added characters and borrowed from Dutch folklore. All around, it was a taming of Shakespeare’s content by Sybant in order to bring the adaptation more in line with 17th century neoliberal Dutch values. 

With pleasing scope, Dr. van Dijkhuizen finished with a discussion of a 2015 adaptation of King Lear by Tom Lanoye. Lanoye’s Queen Lear switches the gender of the lead role and sets her as head of a multinational corporation. Lanoye described his own various radical adaptations of the source text as ‘friendly betrayals’ which seems fitting. All of the works in this talk were not written to glean relevancy from Shakespeare. Instead they explore the contemporary political climate through the lens of the original, whether that be the emphasis on wifely duties in The Mad Wedding or the current precarious corporate banking environment in Queen Lear. 

The interesting thing is that when attempts were made, in the 18th century and beyond, to directly translate Shakespeare (with a preservation of both plot and semantics), the resulting text was a faithful work that became unreadable within a few decades. The language quickly became archaic and stultified. It is a curious quirk in the history of Dutch translations of Shakespeare that adaptations, with their attempts to square the plays with the morality of the time, have had a longer shelf-life than those translations that try to capture the piece as purely as possible.