There is little debate about the greatness of Shakespeare. The main thing upon which Shakespeare’s greatness lies is not his creative stories, many of his tales were simply adapted from myth or legend, his greatness comes from his ability to use his words to have a remarkably strong impact upon the reader. Without the delicate balance of character development and believable dialogue, the plays would not rise above those of the average playwright. Many people have adapted Shakespeare into modern settings, or updated the dialogue to make it more accessible to the world at large, but you don’t have to delve so deeply to see that while setting change many times, the words of his best plays are largely left alone, baring some few exceptions. Hamlet, by far Shakespeare's most compelling work, has gotten the hollywood treatment quite a few times: Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, and Ethan Hawke each took a turn in movie roles, each set in different time periods, however, all adaptations used the words as written. Why is this? The movie “10 Things I Hate About You”, although subject to different standards being a comedy, was able to effectively update setting, time period, and dialogue of The Taming Of The Shrew to suit its purpose. “O”, adapted from Othello, is able to do the same thing. But Hamlet remains untouched. This can be attributed to not only the notoriety of the characters’ words, but also the fear that when you modernize the script you lose some of the play’s magic.
In the modern interpretations of some of Shakespeare’s other works the stories are clear. The characters are all very throughly explained and very little must be changed about the situation to make them acceptably updated. In “O”, because of the age of the characters, the only necessity being to keep the story organized, and the lack of any lines absolutely irremovable from the play, they could take a large amount of license and get away with it. The level of changes can be best represented by...