The latest issue of The Economist reviews a book called Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary & Language Companion by David and Ben Crystal, and the review begins thusly: “Although welcome as a magnificent tool, this doorstop compendium prompts an alarming question: has Shakespeare become a foreign language to us?”

I’m wildly vacillating between two extremes. On one hand, sure, modern English-speaking people don’t know enough about their own language to understand a lot of Shakespeare, which is lamentable. On the other, you don’t need to understand every word to understand the meaning. That’s why Shakespeare’s tucked into that little slot that’s marked “Genius”.

On the other other hand (let’s move down to feet, shall we?) I anticipate this new book with glee, word-lover that I am. One of the reasons I relish Shakespeare is because he uses so many different words. His vocabulary is delightfully varied, and if he didn’t have a word for something, he made it up. A goodly portion of our modern lexicon is derived from Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

Without further ado, check the review out. I hate the fact that people feel the need for a glossary to understand what someone is saying, when if they just listened and watched they’d get the gist of it, but even a glossary is preferable to rewriting a perfectly good piece of theatre. That, in my mind, is punishable by death. My back goes up every time someone suggests rewriting a line in a Savoy opera “because modern audiences don’t know the phrase”. Tough. The piece of theatre is a piece of history. Constantly updating it means you will lose the heart of it. Look at what happened to the Bible. Sure, King James brought the Bible to more people who hadn’t had previous access to it, but he rewrote and twisted meanings left, right and centre. (Incidentally, yes, that’s the same King James for whom Macbeth was written. He really had a thing about witches, didn’t he?) Rather than pandering (look! A Shakespearean word!) to the lowest common denominator, why not educate them instead by leaving the challenging reference as is and the LCD rising as a result?

Please note that by updating I don’t mean changing the setting, or performing the work in different costume. I think Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet was brilliant, transmitting the truth of the piece to modern audiences while preserving the language – excellent proof that one doesn’t need to rewrite something to tell a story originally written in Elizabeth I’s reign. Luhrmann’s work made the point (and “o, excellent well” at that) that proved something which more high school English teachers should know by now: Shakespeare is meant to be watched, at the very least heard aloud, and not read. Updating, for me, means changing words, phrases, into what a modern interpeter thinks would be equivalent. It resembles translation in that a translator cannot translate word for word; s/he must search out equivalent idiom and translate meaning. I find it ludicrous that people think Shakespeare (let alone William Schwenk Gilbert) requires translation. Older texts such as works in Middle English? Well, we’re now getting to the point where our language has shifted so much over the last millennium that yes, an extensive glossary or a side-by-side translation is required for the lay reader when approaching works dating from 1240 CE like King Horn. Chaucer (d. 1400 CE) is iffy; but again, if read aloud, his works such as the mainstay Canterbury Tales make much more sense. Shakespeare is a mere four hundred years old. Language has not shifted so far in four centuries that a translation is required.

Is Shakespeare truly becoming more obscure, though?

It is sometimes assumed that it is only a question of time before Shakespeare becomes inaccessible. But does time come into it? As early as 1679, John Dryden was complaining that �the tongue is so much refined since Shakespeare’s time that many of his words are scarce intelligible, and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure.� Shakespeare’s 17th- and 18th-century adaptors blithely clarified him. In 1664, when William Davenant adapted �Macbeth�, the hero was made to say that his bloody hands would �add a tincture to/The sea.� Not until 1744 when Garrick, in part, restored the original, was Shakespeare’s �multitudinous seas incarnadine� heard again on stage. In fact, time may have helped. Modernism has made us more patient with obscurity. We rate suggestion more than clarity. When, for example, the horrified Claudio in �Measure for Measure� imagines himself dead and lying �in cold obstruction�, we relish the strange blockish mouthful before turning to the notes. -from The Economist review Fardels By Any Other Name

Indeed. Our society has this queer dual drive to honour the past (“it must be good, because it is old”, also known as nostalgia), and to remake everything in a contemporaneous fashion, bringing things up to speed to be as cutting-edge as possible. We outgrow and outstrip our own accomplishments of a mere decade ago; it’s little wonder that much of modern society considers four-hundred-year-old theatre no longer accessible. It requires time, and patience, and the willingness to luxuriate in language, something that many people have forgotten how to do in this microwave- and Internet-dominated world.

What has also killed Shakespeare in the twentieth-century is bad, bad theatre. Dreadful interpretations. Actors still being trained to strike a pose and declaim, as opposed to speaking the emotion implicit in the script. Poorly done theatre in an age where TV and movies distribute a permanent product to billions of people in almost no time at all has had an adverse affect on how historical theatre is perceived. A fleeting, brilliant piece of live theatre has more power and depth to it, yet because it is fleeting less people are exposed to it, changed by it. Twentieth and twenty-first century media has made possible the sharing of exquisitely crafted art, but it has also made possible the sharing of so much crap. Unfortunately, there’s more of the latter, overwhelming the art by sheer numbers.

Is there hope? You bet. So long as the world doesn’t decide to go the way of Ray Bradbury’s dystopic utopia in Fahrenheit 451 and destroy literature because each author says something different, thereby dividing the people who cannot rest peacefully is they do not all share the same unchallenged opinion. Personally, I’m hoping for a renaissance in the arts sometime soon. Then again, I’m one of those who thinks holding a tangible, bound book in my hands is infinitely preferable to scrolling through an e-book. Someday, I’ll probably become outdated too, and need to be brought up to speed – contemporised, for the lack of a better term. Until then, however, I’ll honour original works in their original forms as best I can.