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Conclusion

Cassius’ remarks in the scene of Julius Caesar’s assassination are not without prophetic insight. Shakespeare transformed a great number of sources that enriched his works, and his plays have been translated into a wide range of languages and genres. It is useful to think of translation as a love affair involving two equal partners, because it allows us an unimpaired view of the event, and eschews such hierarchical constructs as a superior original and a necessarily lesser derivative. The production and reception of translated works–either literal translation of words into another language (e.g., the Hebrew Bible to the Geneva Bible) or the transformation of meanings into a new form of expression (stage play to film noir) – imply double perspectives and have a significance that goes beyond the simple transfer of semantic meanings. A translator is an interpreter of the literary text and its cultural contexts, and a reader of the translation is no less a mediator between many possible worlds and meanings. Contradictory to the purists’ anxiety that the proliferation of Shakespeare in translation, whether in modern English or foreign languages, will spell the demise of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, the rise of a global industry of translation speaks to the power of Shakespeare’s words–not bound within the limit of one language and historical period but open to a wide spectrum of interpretive possibilities, a common feature shared by great works of art.

In Shakespeare studies, the term problem plays normally refers to three plays that William Shakespeare wrote between the late 1590s and the first years of the seventeenth century: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, although some critics would extend the term to other plays, most commonly The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice. The term was coined by critic F.S. Boas in Shakespeare and his Predecessors (1896), who lists the first three plays and adds that «Hamlet, with its tragic close, is the connecting-link between the problem-plays and the tragedies in the stricter sense. The term can refer to the subject matter of the play, or to a classification «problem» with the plays themselves.
The term derives from a type of drama that was popular at the time of Boas' writing. It was most associated with the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. In these problem plays the situation faced by the protagonist is put forward by the author as a representative instance of a contemporary social problem. For Boas this modern form of drama provided a useful model with which to study works by Shakespeare that had previously seemed to be uneasily situated between the comic and the tragic; nominally two of the three plays identified by Boas are comedies, the third, Troilus and Cressida, is found amongst the tragedies in the First Folio, although it is not listed in the Catalogue. For Boas, Shakespeare's «problem plays» set out to explore specific moral dilemmas and social problems through their central characters.
Boas writes, throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome, even when, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, the complications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth act. In Troilus and Cressidaand Hamlet no such partial settlement of difficulties takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best we may. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them together as Shakespeare's problem-plays.
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII «was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony». On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.
Genres have a role to play in translation as well. The tragedies and some comedies are more frequently translated, staged, and filmed around the world, because of their capacity to be more easily detached from their native cultural settings and the self-reinforcing cycle of familiarity. In India, for example, Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice have been translated more than fifty times and The Comedy of Errors has over thirty versions in different languages in India, but the only history plays to have been translated into Hindi are Henry V and Richard II, and only one version each. While Shakespeare’s global reputation may seem to be driven by translations of his tragedies, comedies, and the sonnets because of the sheer number of performances and translations since the seventeenth century, the history plays have their own histories of global reception beginning with a 1591 Polish performance of Philip Waimer’s stage version ofEdward III in Gdansk. Laurence Olivier’s wartime film version of Henry V in 1944 is far from the only or the earliest translations–interlingual, intralingual, or intersemiotic–of the history plays, though each instance of translation focuses on different articulations of national histories.
The universal features of translation is viewed as a language activity which is different from original text productions and translation itself presents features explicitation, simplification, normalization and leveling out different from those of original language as well.