Each year, a new batch of Shakespeare adaptations opens at festivals across the country and, each year, Shakespeare turns fully 180 degrees in his grave. Today, the Shakespeare industry is run by revisionists. For years now, the adaptations which open each Summer’s season have been dominated by a parade of wholly predictable inversions: the past becomes the present, straight characters are turned into gay ones, whites into blacks, men into women. For every play, it seems, there’s somebody with a political ax to grind and the money to do it onstage. Indeed, the trend has gone so far that it sometimes seems as if Shakespeare’s plays continue to be produced solely for the pleasure to be had in systematically flouting a great author’s intentions.
Well and good, some will say. After all, Shakespeare was writing for a sixteenth-century audience with sixteenth-century concerns. Four hundred years have passed and a lot has changed. Who’s to say what sort of play he’d write if......

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Title: To Be Or Not To Be
Approximate Word Count: 2007
Approximate Pages: 9 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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