To speak it or not to speak it, that is the question.

One of the greatest complaints modern readers have regarding Shakespeare's work is that it's not approachable, that his word choice and phrasing is too dense to unravel in order to understand. It's as if everyone reading Hamlet or Macbeth collectively gets a migraine trying to figure it out. Pass the Advil.

This sort of collective groan from confused people is what has led various Shakespearean theatrical companies to reconfigure the bard's work into modern vernacular. Gone are the "thee"s and "thou"s and sentences that sound like Yoda on a bender. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival--an 80-year old annual event--is the latest to jump on the modernization bandwagon. As James Shapiro notes in an opinion piece this week in the New York Times:

"However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean."

Or, taking it one step further, we have become so beholden to the rhythm and patterns of 21st century speech, that simply making an effort to interpret a different cadence, a different pulse to the phrasing Shakespeare uses has become too much for readers and playgoers to bother with. It isn't simply a dumbing down. It's apathy. It's mental inertia. It's intellectual lethargy that wants things handed over easily.

Put in more simplistic terms: It's wanting a 12-course French meal, but only willing to pay for a Big Mac.