[nickcarraway]

Shakespeare is a homophobic, sexist, domestic-violence advocate tea partier who needs to be banned immediately.

[Resolute Conservative]

...and it is painful to read him...

[Cicero]

The problem, if it is one, is partly in the plays and partly in us.

No, buddy, it's you.

[Louis Foxwell]

That’s why we love him.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

A real tragedy is waiting to happen with Obama.

[Sparklite]

like marooned islands of fat in a broken mayonnaise.

Thanks, but I prefer bloodlusty Shakespeare.

[dainbramaged]

He could turn a phrase, whoever he was.

[Little Bill]

“The Taming of the Shrew”, is my favorite.’ O’ Kate, sweet Kate.............. Followed by Richard the Second. “O’ what a rogue and peasant slave am I....”

Power Language.

[Borges]

That’s not what this article is saying.

[Chaguito]

A true crock. He begins with Titus Andronicus, by far the most atypical Shakespear play to establish his premise. The Shakespeare tragedies work just fine. I read them regularly to give me perspective on the headlines.

[Billthedrill]

Oh, brother. Jesse, buddy, crack a history book or two before you bleat this stuff. Whatever happened to "context", anyway?

When these plays were written, bear-baiting took the place of the World Cup (and the bears didn't fake injury, either). Elizabeth I had sent Bingham to Ireland to finalize the brutal takeover of that country. the Thirty Years' War was a couple decades away. They still drew and quartered people (Fawkes' co-conspirators, 1606), broke them on the wheel, and subjected them to sarcasm, f'Petessake. And that was just England.

The plays work perfectly well. What doesn't work is applying early 21st-century political correctness to them.

[windsorknot]

Shakespeare is a homophobic, sexist, domestic-violence advocate tea partier

and he's a white guy.

[Timocrat]

The author of this piece obviously hasn't paid attention to the news lately and hasn't read a history of the 20th Century. ISIS beheads anyone not a Sunni, wholesale massacres in Kenya, people being killed by the boatload in the Ukraine to say nothing of the killing on an industrial scale by the various forms of socialism.

Shakespeare only scratched the surface of human depravity.

[Tax-chick]

Your average Shakespeare tragedy - distinguished from the historical plays, with their fields of dead - has a body count comparable to an episode of "Midsomer Murders." Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare popularizer, stars in plots as twisted as Titus Andronicus in the BBC series Wallander. Michael Hurst, "New Zealand's top Shakespearean actor," observed that the themes of his hit tv show, Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, were no different from the themes of Shakespeare, although the dialogue in the tv show was less sophisticated.

Thus, to contend that the modern audience cannot be engaged by Shakespeare is absurd. Even updating of the English text might not be necessary, if the actors will simply speak slowly and clearly, and if the action, stage or film, is directed with an eye toward explicating the text.