[Mikey_1962]

Elizabethan English is difficult, I still remember looking up what a bodkin and petard was in the dictionary.

So I'm ok with some changes so long as it does lose the poetry or start sounding like Ludacris.

[scouse]

So I'm ok with some changes

What a rogue and peasant slave thou dost appear to be...In the words of the Bard, "Speak the speech .....As I pronounced it to thee...:^).

[brothers4thID]

The Bard was a master of the double entendre, so changing even a single word can lose some of the meaning of a sentence or even the play.

[ArrogantBustard]

Hmmm ... so reading The Bard induced you to drag out a dictionary and learn something. Excellent!!! That't part of the reason for teaching English Literature.

Now, you want to spare the next generation the awful strain of thinking? Pathetic. This is indeed the very definition of 'dumbing down'.

[dmz]

Were you damaged by your having to look up those words?

Leave Shakespeare the hell alone.

[CatoRenasci]

It's not that Elizabethan English is difficult, just that it uses constructions we have dropped - the second person familiar (thee, thou, thine) for example - and rythms that are unfamiliar (iambic pentameter in which Shakespeare abounds), as well as having a vocabulary that differs from modern usage in many respects.

When I was a youth and student, in the 1950's and early 1960's, children learned much of this as a matter of course: almost everyone in the English-speaking world (Protestants of all stripes at least) read the Authorized Version (King James) Bible, even if the Revised Standard was also around. The Catholic English Bible used similarly archaic langauge, even if it differed in many ways. Most of us read Shakespeare, beginning in 5th or 6th grade, in the original, though with vocabulary notes. Shakepeare continued through high school at (for us anyway) 2 plays per school year. In my junior high English classes, perhaps because we had very senior teachers who'd started teaching in the '30s, grammar study included at least an introduction to the use of the now archaic second person familiar.