Is it blasphemous to alter Shakespeare's words to cater to modern audiences? This is the question The New Republic asks.
From the piece...
There are indeed archaisms in Shakespeare's lexicon (we no longer say "mine own part"), but most of the difficulty we face in comprehending his dialogue has less to do with the passage of time than with the fact that these plays are not exercises in conversational English but dense, complex, and profoundly non-naturalistic dramatic poems.
Imagery, allusion, metaphor, and ambiguity are the poet's stock-in-trade, so it shouldn't surprise us to find that Shakespeare often seems to say more than one thing at a time. Our challenge today is not that we don't receive meaning from his words, but that we receive several meanings, some of them intentionally contradictory.
Ambiguity is at the very root of Shakespeare's poetic power--and one of the reasons for his enduring appeal is that you can't absorb all he has to offer at a single sitting.
Pictured above: Optimus Prime as Hamlet.
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