Shakespeare a la Ruse

My host mom and I were watching TV tonight, and some old-looking period film came on. It was really obviously a movie from the seventies, and I thought it must have been an adaptation of the Iliad or something like that. It had the look and feel of Ben Hur – slow as molasses action, sweeping views of an orange-tinted countryside or cityscape, etc. Most remarkably, the language was simple enough that I understood it just fine.
And then, all of a sudden,
Diana (my host mom): Oh! This must be a Shakespeare play.
Annie’s head: Hah! Yeah right.
Annie: Oh, yeah maybe…
** several minutes pass, in which the acting is boring and the language is, too**
Annie: So are you sure this is Shakespeare? It’s just that the language is so simple, I can understand everything, and in English Shakespeare is really complicated.
Diana: Oh, yes, this is Shakespeare.
Annie: But they’re talking in prose, and Shakespeare only wrote poetry.
Diana: He wrote plays, too.
Annie: Right. But the plays were written in verse.
Diana: Well, parts of them were, but some sections were in prose.
Annie’s head: No they weren’t.
Annie: Oh, really? That must be the translation because I’m pretty sure Shakespeare only wrote verse.
Diana: No, it’s not the translation! Here, I’ll show you (opens a translation and begins to read aloud to me. She finds after flipping a few pages a section in verse and takes this as a victory.)
Annie’s head: I’m going to cry.
Annie: Yeah… All I’m saying is that this is really different from English-language Shakespeare. In English, the whole play sounds like that, not just certain sections.
Diana: I believe you! But all the same, *insert about 15 minutes of dialogue about how she learned English in school, school in the Soviet Union generally, one of her favorite childhood films, the plot of said film, the biography of the main actress of said film.*
Annie’s head: Damn if that woman can’t talk!
Diana: Here, I’ll show you a book of poetry. I think we’re having a misunderstanding because sometimes Shakespeare wrote in free-verse. That’s poetry that doesn’t have meter.
Annie’s head: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why haven’t I learned to say iambic pentameter in Russian yet??
Diana: So this is a book of Russian lyrical poets, who wrote in the post-Pushkin decades.
Annie’s head: Shakespeare was writing two centuries before Pushkin was born! And he was not writing in post-Pushkin free verse!
Annie: Yeah, that’s interesting. Look, I’m pretty tired. Goodnight!

By the way, for the interested, the movie turned out to be A Comedy of Errors. This calls to mind a story that sjba told me about a girl he went to high school with – when they were reading Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) in their literature class her parents (of Russian-speaking heritage) forbade her from reading it. That story was kind of silly when I heard it two or three years ago. But I understand now.