Translating Shakespeare

May 12, 2018

Translating Shakespeare: Match Shakespeare’s English with today’s expressions below:

Look fresh and merrily!

An there be any matter of weight chances, call me up.
Away to heaven respective lenity, and fire-eye’d fury be my conduct now!
Come, sir, leave me your snatches, and yield me a direct answer.
Direct not him whose way himself will choose.
Even as a splitted bark, so sunder we.
Fewness and truth; ’tis thus:
Her wits I fear me are not firm.
His flawed heart, alack, too weak the conflict to support, ‘twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, burst smilingly.
His giving out were of an infinite distance from his true-meant design.
I have a motion much imports your good; whereto if you’ll a willing ear incline, what’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.
I play the torturer by small and small to lengthen out the worst that must be spoken.
I prithee vent thy folly somewhere else.
I would thou hadst been son to some man else.
It is not well done, mark you now, to take the tales out of my mouth ere it is made an end and finished.
It’s monstrous labor when I wash my brain and it grows fouler.
Look fresh and merrily, let not our looks put on our purposes.
Look what envious streaks do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer.
O, I have fed upon this woe already, and now excess of it will make me surfeit.
Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears, that long time have been barren!
Speak’st thou in sober meanings?
Though I am not splenative rash, yet have I in me something dangerous which let thy wisdom fear.
Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh, and sees fast by a butcher with an axe, but will suspect ’twas he that made the slaughter?
You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock’s feather.
Your sense pursues not mine.
Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.