There's no joy in reading texts in archaic English that need translating as you go, and copious footnotes of explanation.
For that matter, we live as far from England as it's possible to get, far from Shakespeare in time, and fewer and fewer of us are even of English descent.
Other cultures have their own literary heroes and different attitudes to epic questions of right and wrong. Shakespeare wrote when Christianity was an unquestioned belief, which it is no longer, in a time when a plague might wipe out a village, and the New World wasn't yet a supermarket chain.
You read him now in a time of mass media entertainment, when religion takes a back seat in most people's lives, and medical advances make survival much less precarious.
More to the point, we don't read him; not unless we're involved in the theatre, which fewer and fewer people attend.
Valiant and desperate efforts are made to make the bard seem relevant.
Actors may dress in Nazi regalia, or in drag, but that doesn't make the plays contemporary; it only makes them weird. No, Shakespeare is best left to academics and luvvies.
The ordinary people who once flocked to theatres to see his plays can now suck lollies at home while watching Shortland Street, and who knows? They might be studying that at university in a century's time - if anyone can afford a higher education.
As for luvvies, I am stunned at an Auckland judge's decision to discharge a man on a child sex charge without conviction.
The man is described as a comedian. He pleaded guilty to performing an indecent act on his 4-year-old daughter, but Judge Phillipa Cunningham last week said the consequences of a conviction would outweigh his offence and, curiously, that the unnamed man "makes people laugh. Laughter is an incredible medicine and we all need lots of it."
Who's laughing? Not his partner, from whom he is now estranged.
She woke to find he had removed his daughter's nappy and was kissing her, after she climbed into bed with them in the night. His lawyer, Marie Dyhrberg, said the source of the offending was alcohol, an odd claim to make for a substance that can, in fact, do nothing but be ingested.
For his part, the man claimed he mistook his small daughter - nappy and all - for her mother. That's not remotely amusing.
Neither is the impression that it's OK for someone who says they're sorry, has lots of character references (when are they ever bad?) may well be European, and is quite likely middle class, to behave like this - but unspeakable vileness if you're unemployed, brown and inarticulate.
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