Studying Shakespeare is not like studying the first version of Java. It's like studying an extremely well-written program that happens to be written in the firs

Studying Shakespeare is not like studying the first version of Java. It's like studying an extremely well-written program that happens to be written in the first version of Java. We wouldn't ignore a monumentally important program just because it wasn't in a modern dialect of Java (or in a more modern programming language). We don't study Shakespeare to study that period's English; we study Shakespeare to study literature. And we shouldn't ignore the monumental literary importance just because his work happens to be written in an older version of the language. There will likely come a day when modern English has diverged far enough from Shakespeare's English to make Shakespeare genuinely incomprehensible to modern English speakers, but we are not there yet. Shakespeare is difficult (much less so when seen performed, I should emphasize again), but not incomprehensible like Beowulf or even The Canterbury Tales. And when we can genuinely no longer understand Shakespeare that will be a sad day because there is always something lost when translating, especially when translating poetry or very poetic prose, and especially when the translator is not as skilled a writer as the person they are translating (which is almost an inevitability with translating Shakespeare).