About Lyly and Dickens and Fielding

I’m not that familiar with the work of the Elizabethan writer John Lyly so I’m not going to judge whether those behind a new production of his play Galatea are justified in calling it “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly trans.” I’m rather more interested in their thinking once they’d incorporated British Sign Language into the mix: 

Once they had made translations for deaf actors, they extended the idea. “Why not translate the text to fit better in the mouth of someone using spoken English, too?” Frankland asks. And so Lyly’s text stretched to fit the new hosts of its words.

Which sounds good, until you realise that what they’re really doing is erasing Lyly’s own text because it’s too old and difficult and they don’t expect the audience or even the actors to understand it. 

See also the just-concluded BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, with its utterly baffling amendments to the plot (no Dolge Orlick; no trip to Cairo; Miss Havisham doesn’t die in the fire, but does shoot Compeyson; Estella doesn’t marry Drummle; Pip ends up marrying Biddy). And while we’re at it, pray for the soul of ITV’s incoming Tom Jones, the star of which thought  at first it was a biography of the Welsh singer and only managed to read the first 10 pages of the novel, complaining, “It’s so beautiful but so dense.”