Some people object to any modernization of shakeseare's plays claiming that such productions cheapen the original. what is your opinion?

Answer 1

There are different kinds of "modernization". Some take the plays and put them into a modern setting, but the dialogue and the structure of the play remains the same. This is essentially what was done, for example in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet in 1996.

Others take the plot of the play or some of the plot elements and build different dialogue around it. This is what was done, for example, in the film "10 things I hate about you."

In the first case, where the dialogue and structure is retained, the argument for is that a connection with modern life demonstrates the universality of the themes Shakespeare addresses. When Ian McKellen plays Richard III as a Fascist, the connections between fascism and Richard's style of realpolitik become clear. The argument against is that a script is like a novel--it is fully imagined by the author and nothing in any way deviating from the performance he visualized is acceptable. Shakespeare could not have imagined fascists, so Richard III cannot be played as a fascist. The actors and directors are not collaborators with the playwright--they are slaves to the playwright's (often narrow) vision. It is a kind of Fundamentalist or Wahabist view of Drama and must result in plays becoming tired very quickly, since we cannot watch a Shakespeare performance which is not exactly like the ones put on at the Globe. In order to keep plays fresh after 400 years, actors and directors have to keep bringing out new ways of looking at the text.

But the "modernizations" which replace Shakespeare's dialogue and dramatic structure are another thing altogether. Shakespeare did not write most of his own plots--he borrowed them. What is uniquely Shakespeare about Shakespeare is not the plots but the dialogue, from which the actor can realize a character. Characters in drama are formed by their dialogue; change the dialogue and you change the characters. Thus although the general plot outline of "10 things I hate about you" is similar to that of The Taming of the Shrew, the characters are actually quite different. The Kate character's motivation for her bad-temperedness as given in the dialogue in the film is very different from the motivations for Shakespeare's Kate. They are quite different women.

Sometimes people take a Shakespearean plot and build something new and amazing out of it--Kurowawa's Ran is an example. But Ran is not Shakespeare, it is Kurosawa, just as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is not Arthur Brooke, just because that's where he got the story from.

Do such productions "cheapen" the original? The latter category has nothing to do with the original: Ran and "10 things" have to stand on their own merits, because they are totally new scripts. As for the former group, it really depends how it is done. Most people who are not Dramatic Wahabists will agree that McKellen's Richard III is the greatest Richard ever filmed, and has easily surpassed Olivier's. The modern setting enhances the performance. The opinions on Luhrmann's Romeo are perhaps more divided.

To my mind, Shakespeare is most cheapened when it is performed without thought, following blindly notions of performance because "that's how it is supposed to be done". That is not art; it is mere hackwork.