Oct 10, 2015 3 min read

Zounds!

Just when it seemed like there was enough to fret about in the world – refugees from Africa and the Middle East pouring into Europe, Russia embarking on air strikes in Syria, the House Republican leadership in complete disarray – plenty of folks have had to reach for blood-pressure monitors following the announcement by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that it is enlisting 36 contemporary playwrights to adapt all 39 plays by William Shakespeare, including “missing” plays like “Edward III” and obscurities like “Pericles,” into more modern idiom.

It was almost as if someone suggested that modern painters be let loose in the Louvre to “touch up” paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh. Hey, how about making the smile on the Mona Lisa a little bit less enigmatic?

All right, climate change and American gun laws may certainly have more life-or-death consequences than a dispute about the works of a playwright who hasn’t walked among us for 400 years as of next April 23. And those original plays, as Shakespeare penned them, are not going anywhere.

They will still be performed on stages in every corner of the world, be pored over by high school and college students, dissected by scholars and quoted from by people in all walks of life.

Still, we understand the concerns of those who say you shouldn’t mess with Shakespeare.

This is, after all, the Bard, the greatest playwright in the history of the language, whose works continue to brim with insight into the human psyche and contain profoundly beautiful poetry. “To be or not be? That is the question?” would certainly not be as penetrating if it were rendered as “Should I stay or should I go?”

Supporters of the plan to spruce up Shakespeare for 21st century audiences point to the King James Bible, published in 1611, just five years before Shakespeare died. The translation was carried out with the intention of making Scripture more accessible to everyday people who, in those days, were often illiterate.

Fair enough. But a compelling counter to that argument is that so much of the richness of Shakespeare rests in its literary value, while the King James Bible aims to impart moral and spiritual instruction with greater clarity.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University and the author of several books about Shakespeare, has expressed vehement opposition to the revisions to Shakespeare planned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

He wrote in The New York Times last week, “To understand Shakespeare’s characters, actors have long depended on the hints of meaning and shadings of emphasis that he embedded in his verse. They will search for them in vain in the translation: The music and rhythm of iambic pentameter are gone. Gone, too, are the shifts – which allow actors to register subtle changes in intimacy – between ‘you’ and ‘thee.’ Even classical allusions are scrapped.”

If you visit the burial site of Shakespeare at the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, England, you will find an epitaph on his gravestone that he is said to have written himself: “Good friend for Jesus sake forebeare, to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.”

His bones aren’t the only thing about Shakespeare we should leave alone.