Shakespeare in Any Other Era

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Malviolio...*

Okay, so I know it's "Michelangelo" in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but I adapted it to introduce this post about possibly-incongruous adaptations. Sorry, T.S. Eliot.

The other day I overheard a conversation two ladies were having about Shakespeare. One of the ladies had upcoming plans to see a live performance, but she was already complaining about it.

“When I went to see Much Ado About Nothing they dressed in all modern clothes. I hate that!”

What surprised me about her tone was that it implied she thought it was some new thing, for Shakespearean plays to have a “modernized” setting. She continued,

“It’s just weird, they’re going around in regular clothes, but speaking the same words.”

True, I've encountered similar adaptations and found them confusing. But is it really a travesty to perform Shakespeare—or really, any “ancient” play—as if it were a contemporary setting? Does every adaptation need to be "Shakespeare: Men in Tights"?

Tacitus is Driving Me Crazy

I know that I should be easy on Tacitus for the following reasons:

1. His Histories were written early in the "life" of recorded history. There weren't that many set precedents, such as corroborating hearsay or relating unbiased facts or providing citations of reliable sources.
2. He was Roman, and pretty much anything written in Rome is tinged with propaganda.

But NO, I am NOT going to be easy on Tacitus! Why? Because of this extremely sloppy passage that records the "history" of the Jews:

Should You Read Just Any Old Thing?

As I slowly look through my e-books that have been in “review limbo,” I realize why I haven’t reviewed these books before: they’re dry. Not to say they’re not worth reading or reviewing, but they are rather dense and therefore somewhat hard to comment on coherently. These books are ancient literature, philosophy, or simply novels I read that didn’t resonate as powerfully as other books I was reading at the same time.

Yet while many of these books take a bit more digging to get to the heart of their topics, when you get to that heart you realize how relatable and relevant many of these writers were/are. I’m often surprised by reading (translated) Roman works, because they sound so “contemporary” and the issues they deal with are issues that we still deal with today.

Take the debate regarding the role of books and literacy. Classic literature, in particular, has been criticized for being inaccessible, too long, and generally outmoded. Why force people to read antiquated novels when they could read contemporary fiction so much faster? To answer the question of whether it's enough to read "just any old thing," let's turn to a specific old thing: The Letters of Pliny the Younger. Glancing over the quotations I’d highlighted in this book, I noticed a pattern that had to do with the quality of literature.