by agingjb » October 12th, 2009, 7:10 am
Shakespeare is usually presented with conventional "modern" spelling, which works well enough. If you look at an original text Shakespeare, then virtually every "different" word is easily seen to be roughly equivalent to its modern form:
"to dye, to sleepe/ No more; and by a sleepe, to say we end/ The Heart-ake, and the thousand Naturall shockes/ That Flesh is heyre too?"
but then we are very familiar with Shakespeare, and in any case he was partly (with Tyndale) responsible for modern English.
In the case of Chaucer the language is perceptibly different. It does make some sense to translate Chaucer - going beyond respelling. Chaucer wrote, of course, before printing.
In the case of Spenser, I suppose that he is right on the border. I can certainly see a case for a "modern spelling" edition for those words that do retain, approximately, their meaning. A personal note: I find the exchange between "v"s and "u"s in my Penguin Faerie Queene much more obvious, and slightly jarring, than any other variation in spelling.
I've always been curious about the extent to which Dante, before Chaucer and long before printing, is, I assume, completely accessible to modern Italians.