If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the impression that she's read all basically all the translations (apparently Tolkien makes it sound just like Lord of the Rings), so it's interesting to see where she's taking it.
If you read interviews Headley has given, you get the impression that she's read all basically all the translations (apparently Tolkien makes it sound just like Lord of the Rings), so it's interesting to see where she's taking it.
And that sort of thing repeats on a line-by-line basis through most of Shakespeare. I tend to think one gets better at reading it relatively quickly, even as a high school student, but there is a reason why the best way to read it is with one page of the historical text and one with extensive notes.
This skips a long discussion on "Should we teach Shakespeare?", "To what degree should we allocate resources to decoding Shakespeare given competing demands for resources to establish baseline proficiency in modern written English?", and "Is a production of Shakespeare in historically representative English a service to the broader community or is it a service to the class which already knows the story and therefore does not need the actors words, which they mostly will not understand, to impart it?"
When I tutored Shakespeare to kids, I always prepped the vocab for each scene, got extra copies ready, and made the parents act out bits. All out-loud. It really helps.
But while an updated Shakespeare might be good thing if well done, to me it would be a new thing, and not Shakespeare.
(I'm not being sarcastic, I think it is a genuinely interesting question.)
But in general the strength of Shakespeare is the language and poetry, so it will be difficult to modernize without losing what makes him great in the first place.
Here are some resources from Historic England on the subject:
https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/ani...