To What Extent Is Shakespeare Relevant Today

I believe Shakespeare may be relevant today, but hardly worth reading to some extent. Sure, we can relate to many of his characters, as they are the age of his audience for educational purposes. For example, we are able to connect ourselves to Romeo and Juliet’s young love and the ability to personally relate to characters allows us to explore his ideas at a more personal level. However, the ideas and language is very outdated and confusing, including his blatant sexism in many of his plays. We only seem to read his plays because they are labeled as “classics” and because everyone had read them generations before us.
Shakespeare is very much present in modern day literature. Many modern movies and books are based off his work. For example, Disney’s “The Lion King” is based off Hamlet. However, having not read Hamlet, or known “The Lion King” was based off Hamlet, didn’t make the movie’s storyline any worse or any better. Because of this, Hamlet isn’t exactly worth reading solely because Shakespeare is relevant today; you don’t need to read Hamlet to understand the gist of “The Lion King”. …show more content…
Though I can relate to the characters age-wise, some of his ideas and beliefs are quite different to today’s, mostly regarding the role of a female. This alienates his texts and could potentially lower the number of his modern audience if they do not agree. Continuing on outdated behavior, many of the words, phrases and even insults hardly make sense. “I bite my thumb at thee” is definitely not a modern insult. We are able to learn about the time period through their dialogue, however we don’t speak this way now. Furthermore, we will only be continuing the usage of slang in the future, which means our dialects will be even further from the way they spoke then. Future readers will have even more difficulty translating his