Bard and bred in Yorkshire

THERE'S more than one way to pay a compliment, just as there's more than one way to skin a cat. You can try the poetic: "O when mine eyes did see Olivia first methought she purged the air of pestilence". Or, in classic Yorkshire style, you can try the blunt: "When Olivia walked in, a thought 'flamin Nora, war a bit a crumpet'."

William Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, preferred the former. Coal miner's son Malcolm Darby prefers the latter.

The problem with Shakespeare, the 64-year-old retired surveyor and hotelier says, is that nobody understands him.

Not having studied the bard at school in his mining village near Barnsley in the 1940s, that never bothered Malcolm. "I didn't know anything about him then, and when I did get to know about him, I didn't like him," he says. "Like nine out of ten people in this country, I didn't understand it."

Then, a few years ago, he saw a bit of Shakespeare on TV and began to puzzle over the strange language. "I thought, 'what the hell does that mean?'" he says. "I sat down and thought: 'If he was a Yorkshireman, what would he have said?'"

He looked up a few quotations, and started, just for the fun of it, to turn them into broad dialect. The result is Shakespeare Just For A Laugh, a slim, self-published volume which applies a blunt Yorkshireman's ear to the task of making sense of some of Shakespeare's best-known and best-loved quotes.

Some of Malcolm's "translations", it has to be said, work better than others. "Ee by 'eck, by gum sithee, to be or not to flippin' be, that's t'question intit tha knows?" doesn't, to be honest, add much to the Shakespearean original other than a few extraneous words.

Others, however, are hilarious in their plain Yorkshire bluntness. The immortal line "I pray you, let none of your people stir me. I have an exposition of sleep come upon me" from A Midsummer Night's Dream becomes, in Malcolm's broad Yorkshire: "Eyop, Oberon, keep them soddin' elves quiet will tha, a'm tryin' to 'ave a kip 'ere."

And "God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another," from Hamlet, becomes the implacable "Tha nowt burra two-faced lying owd bat."

Some of Malcolm's versions may not quite capture the full beauty of Shakespeare's originals, but at least anyone born in Yorkshire will know what they mean.

Malcolm's not about to apologise. "Shakespeare was writing in the language of the day," he concedes, charitably. "But I have found he has been hijacked by elitists.

"I wonder how many Shakespeare- lovers actually understand what they have seen when they go to a performance or whether they just go because it is the thing to do."

Despite his Shakespearean quotes being featured on national TV, publishers didn't want to know. "So in the end, just before Christmas last year, I thought 'to hell with it. I will do it myself!'" he says. And he did.

Shakespeare Just For A Laugh contains nearly 300 of the bard's most enduring quotes, rendered into plain or comical Yorkshire dialect. But Malcolm's new-found interest in the playwright doesn't stop there. He has also translated for the stage five of Shakespeare's comedies - Twelfth Night, Taming Of The Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It and Romeo And Juliet - and plans to translate the rest.

What he would love more than anything is for a Yorkshire theatre company to stage one of them.

So having spent so long working on Shakespeare's plays, has he come to like the bard any more?

"I like it more now I understand it," he says. "But I have never been to one of his plays and probably never will. Unless it is one of mine!"

Having tackled the plays, you would think his Shakespearean ambitions would have no limits. There is one part of the bard's canon he won't attempt to translate, however: the sonnets.

When asked to explain why, he reveals that the heart of a romantic beats beneath his gruff Yorkshire exterior after all. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate," he recites. There's a distinctly un-Yorkshire catch in his voice. "That's too beautiful to send up, is that."

Score one to Shakespeare.

- Shakespeare Just For a Laugh, price £5.95, is available direct from the author by ringing 01572 737738

Yorkshire translations of Shakespeare -

As You Like It: Thou art in a parlous state

:: Flippin 'eck, tha looks like tha's been dragged thro' 'edge back'erds

Twelfth Night: Love sought is good, but given unsought is better

:: Ee, it's flippin great if tha gets it when tha wants it, bur ah'll tell thee summat, it's better if tha gets it when tha dun't want it, innit?

Hamlet: For to the noble mind, rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind

:: If tha dun't want mi to 'ave it just se so

That he is mad, tis true, tis true, tis pity

:: Ee's flippin barmy, that bloke Hamlet, inti? In fact ees a flippin' barmpot really. Shame though intit?

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain

:: Does tha know Hammo, thas cut me to t'quick sayin' that

King Henry V: It is not a fashion for the maids of France to kiss before they are married

:: I'll tell thi what, tha's no chance er scorin' theer pal so forget it

Macbeth: Fair is foul and foul is fair, hover thro' the fog and filthy air

:: Ah'm sick e this bloody weather

Julius Caesar: Et tu Brute?

:: Not thee anawl Brutus?

Updated: 11:31 Tuesday, May 27, 2003