The recent BBC adaptations of Shakespeare have got me thinking. Modernising classic literature is not a new concept–Virgil, Chaucer, Dante and countless others have had their work updated, whilst Joyce used the story of Odysseus’ decade-long travails in The Odyssey to shape Leopold Bloom’s single day in Ulysses. Shakespeare himself has been set in the ghettos of New York, nineteenth-century Japan, American high schools and 1920s Britain. But to what extent does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when you change the words, the character names and the setting and even alter the plot?