I do not think the difficulty with understanding Shakespeare is that they are "written in a language we no longer speak" but rather that they are written for a

I do not think the difficulty with understanding Shakespeare is that they are "written in a language we no longer speak" but rather that they are written for a culture much different than our own. Shakespeare is loaded with wordplay, sly and overt references, callouts, contemporary jokes and in-jokes. How do you "translate" that? He references a Western cultural history that we don't spend a lot of time learning anymore. As someone around a half-century old, I've noticed that most of my younger co-workers no longer "get" many references to bits of classic myth and history that were near-universal when I was growing up. Imagine trying to "translate" all the cultural baggage of a very dense modern action-drama-comedy. It's not a matter of language, it's a matter of cultural familiarity. Sure, you can re-write Shakespeare for a different time and place, but you're not "translating" it, you're re-writing it, and producing a substantially transformed work by doing so.