Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
—Macbeth, II.iii.61
Last September, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (osf) announced an ambitious project called “Play On! 36 Playwrights Translate Shakespeare.” Predictably, the news that one of America’s leading repertory companies planned to “translate” Shakespeare’s English into a contemporary idiom set off a firestorm, and battle lines were quickly drawn between those who lauded the effort to make Shakespeare more accessible to more people, and those dismayed by the prospect of dumbing him down, and by the project’s implicit assumption that Shakespeare’s language could now be considered a foreign tongue.
A pair of Columbia professors, John McWhorter and James Shapiro, most prominently voiced the competing views, though several scholars—including Ralph Alan Cohen and Daniel Pollock-Pelzner—also responded thoughtfully to the osf project. McWhorter has long insisted that Shakespeare’s plays are appreciable only by an elite few among contemporary audiences. In his piece for The Wall Street Journal, he imagines how “Shakespeare would be depressed to sit and watch us understanding one-tenth of King Lear and going to his plays often as a kind of duty,” urging rather that we sacrifice some of his details and verbal richness for the sake of better understanding what Shakespeare meant. For Shapiro, this would present an impossible bargain, since “the only thing Shakespearean about his plays is the language.” In his piece for The New York Times, Shapiro points out that the burden for making sense of Shakespeare’s
