If you are like me, you love literature and always have high hopes for your English classes…then you attend the first class and realize you will be reading text written a million years ago that you can’t possibly relate to even if you wanted. In a frenzy to get the full original text editions of the books online I came across something that I don’t think a lot of college students really know about. You may have heard about “No Fear Shakespeare”, a really useful section on the SparkNotes website that has old books written in today’s terms. What you may not know is they also have published print editions of many classic drama books that have the original text on one side of the page and the modern translation on the other side.
There really isn’t much to worry about when you have a story written in terms that you can truly understand. I would go to say students, including myself, who read these books using today’s terminology will get more out of it than students who stick to trying to understand and interpret the original text themselves. In the age that we live in, if there’s some sort of assistance when it comes to hard classes or understanding the impossible, I say we should take advantage of that. Oh, and get this, on Amazon they are all around $6-$8. That’s super cheap, if you know anything about college books then you would agree. Just go to Amazon or your favorite bookseller and search for “No Fear Shakespeare, then your book or drama’s title”. I hope this little golden nugget of advice helps you out as it has helped me!
Toast Pop 