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?

The four-part series ShakespeaRe-Told transformed Lord Macbeth into Joe Macbeth, a power-hungry chef, and The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherina Minola into a successful but tempestuous politician; it set Much Ado About Nothing in a local television studio and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in ‘Dream Park’, a holiday village not dissimilar to Center Parcs. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly ambitious choice to modernise–after all, how many fairies do you see these days? However, setting the drama in the holiday centre is inspired; by creating an isolated microcosm, which intensifies and speeds up events, the drama is amplified and the improbable events are made to seem plausible. The story remains similar; we still have Oberon and Titania as the King and Queen of the Fairies and their assistant Puck, who takes on the role of narrator, often speaking directly to the camera, and commenting on events. Theseus and Hippolyta become Theo and Polly, the proud parents of Hermia, who is engaged to James Demetrius. A party of family and friends have come to Dream Park to celebrate the engagement. The love quadrangle and sexual tensions between Hermia, James, Zander (Lysander) and Helena remain the same, and Puck’s love potion still plays a vital role in the plot. The players in the forest become employees of Dream Park who are to perform at the engagement party, and some clever irony sees Johnny Vegas cast as Nick Bottom, the aspiring comedian of the entertainers.

At one point in the drama, Helena consoles James (Demetrius) that “words aren’t everything” to which he despondently replies “yes they are”. This epitomises the concerns that I have with such extensive modernising of Shakespeare. Granted, the storylines are entertaining and appeal to a larger audience who see Shakespeare as boring and archaic, but without the poetry of Shakespeare’s verse, is it still Shakespeare? I am a firm advocate of making Shakespeare approachable to all; after all, he is a national hero that everybody should at least have a chance to enjoy, he should not be solely for unwilling schoolchildren and academics. Equally, however, Shakespeare has lasted for 400 years, arguably because of the sheer intensity of his language and his unrivalled insight into character. If this poetry is diluted and substituted for everyday slang and colloquialisms, surely this undermines everything that Shakespeare means to us? The English diarist John Evelyn wrote in 1661 that he saw a performance of Hamlet “but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age”, and yet Shakespeare is still viewed as one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, playwright Britain has ever seen. I have no problem with modern adaptations of Shakespeare; in its own right even the American teenage romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, (loosely) based on The Taming of the Shrew, is entertaining. Not as a replacement to Shakespeare though. In Twelfth Night Viola claims, “I would be loath to cast away / my speech, for besides that it is excellently well / penned, I have taken great pains to con it.” As far as I am concerned, take the poetry out of Shakespeare and you have taken Shakespeare out of the drama.