Shakespeare in modern English

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

As somebody already said, with a lot of the verse you can't just "translate" without effectively dismembering the meaning. It would be like "translating" the lyrics of a mid-era Beatles song as "woah, I'm high as balls and see crazy stuff" - technically true, but kind of useless in practice.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with taking the bones of Shakespeare and making something new with it, changing and adapting their contexts, re-examining their themes, reframe the text under the lens of postmodernism or feminism or absurdism or what have you , but I just don't see the point of repeating everything but simpler. It just sounds boring.

Like, why would you see an ersatz Romeo and Juliet (with the same plot + setting but with all the poetry obliterated) when you can see West Side Story?

If you want some interesting adaptions and recontextualisations I would look up Kyle Kallgren on Youtuber, who is also an obsessive Bardolatrist with an ongoing series reviewing and analysing various Shakespeare adaptions and reinterpretations - Derek Jarmon's Tempest, Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, Akira Kurosawa's Macbeth adaption Throne of Blood etc.