Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. The backlash began immediately, with O.S.F. devotees posting their laments on the festival’s Facebook page. “What a revolting development!” “Is there really a need to translate English into Brain Dead American?” “Why not just rewrite Shakespeare in emoticons and text acronyms?” Beneath the opprobrium lay a shared assumption: that Shakespeare’s genius inheres not in his complicated characters or carefully orchestrated scenes or subtle ideas but in the singularity of his words. James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, used a regionally apt analogy to express this opinion: “Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “It’s like the beer I drink. I drink 8.2 per cent I.P.A., and by changing the language in this modernizing way, it’s basically shifting to Bud Light. Bud Light’s acceptable, but it just doesn’t pack the punch and the excitement and the intoxicating quality of that language.”

I don’t disagree with Shapiro, but, as a literary historian who studies the way Shakespeare has been reinvented, I’m struck that so many serious Shakespeareans over the centuries have argued the opposite: that Shakespeare’s genius had to be salvaged from the obscure, indecorous, archaic, quibbling mess of his language. For poets, playwrights, editors, and actors from the seventeenth century through much of the nineteenth, Shakespeare’s language wasn’t intoxicating so much as intoxicated: it needed a sobering intervention. These days, we tend to assume that productions can change anything about Shakespeare (the setting, the period, the characters’ race or gender), as long as the script stays intact—cut or reordered, perhaps, but not rewritten. This is a fairly recent notion. Until the late Victorian era, stage performances usually observed the setting and period implied in the play, but they transformed the language. Shakespeare’s script was the first problem that a production had to remedy.

At the end of the English Civil War, when the restoration of the monarchy reopened the theatres, Shakespeare’s fifty-year-old plays looked, to many, out of date. Playwrights polished up his rusty parts for performance, pruning his unruly plots to fit a French-fuelled demand for dramatic unities, tweaking his politics to suit an age wary of further unrest, recasting his roles to accommodate newly licensed female actors, and rewriting the rough bits that violated neoclassical decorum. John Dryden and William Davenant introduced their adaptation of “The Tempest,” in 1667, as Shakespeare resurrected for the present: “from old Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day / Springs up and buds a new reviving Play.” Restoration playwrights treated Shakespeare much as he had treated his sources: as fertile soil ripe for tilling. John Crown found “Henry VI” full of “old gather’d Herbs”; he added a dressing of “oyly Words” along with “a little vinegar against the Pope” to pique the taste of his Protestant audience. Shakespeare was seen as an untutored poet of nature who was, as John Milton memorably put it, apt to “warble his native wood-notes wild,” and who lacked the art—and knowledge of classical precedent—to shape his fancy. (The prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition stems, in part, from Dryden’s attack on this “common fault” in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.) “There are Lines that are stiff and forc’d, and harsh and unmusical,” the playwright John Dennis complained as he tuned up “Coriolanus.” “There are Lines in some Places which are very obscure, and whole Scenes which ought to be alter’d.” The Irish poet Nahum Tate cast “King Lear” as “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht”; his notorious resetting of those smudged gems modernized the language, cut the Fool, and added a happy ending in which Lear survives to see Cordelia marry Edgar—an anathema to our current judgment, but popular enough to hold the stage for the next hundred and fifty years.

Even the eighteenth-century vogue for printed editions of Shakespeare, which often sought to rescue the plays from the perceived travesties of the playhouse, found his work faulty. Nearly all the editions modernized the plays’ spelling and punctuation; some went further. Striving to refashion Shakespeare as a more genteel poet, Alexander Pope, in the preface to his 1725 edition, acknowledged his subject’s shortcomings: “It must be own’d that with all these great excellencies he has almost as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better so he has perhaps written worse than any other.” Pope’s solution was to flag the excellencies with a comma in the margin—or, if they were particularly “shining” examples, with a star—whereas “excessively bad” passages were “degraded to the bottom of the page.” Although Pope blamed these faults on Shakespeare’s need to please the debased taste of his audience, another poet-editor, Samuel Johnson, thought Shakespeare’s defects could not be excused by the “barbarity of his age.” He disdained the comic characters, whose “jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious”; he deplored the labored tragic writing where “the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity”; he criticized narrative scenes for “a disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution”; and he lamented Shakespeare’s wordplay, sighing that a pun or “quibble was to him the fatal ‘Cleopatra’ for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.” Although Johnson regarded Shakespeare as the greatest modern writer to depict our “general nature,” he preferred Tate’s “King Lear” for the poetic justice of its ending.

As the scholar Michael Dobson has argued, canonization fuelled adaptation: if Shakespeare was the newly minted national poet, his plays had to be improved to be worthy of his stature. (That impulse spurred Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler’s expurgated “Family Shakespeare” edition, which advertised that it removed “from the writings of Shakespeare some defects which diminish their value.”) In 1838, the great actor-manager William Macready restored Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” complete with the Fool and the original body count, but he could not persuade his audiences to accept Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Colley Cibber’s trim Restoration adaptation, with its popular lines like “Off with his head! So much for Buckingham,” was preferred until 1877, and even Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film kept some of Cibber’s alterations. “The Taming of the Shrew,” frequently revived in adaptations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was not performed in Shakespeare’s version until 1887, almost three hundred years after its Elizabethan début.

So what changed? How did Shakespeare’s original texts regain their popularity? German Romantics had something to do with it. They rebelled against French neoclassical restraint and cited Shakespeare’s unruliness as a liberating precedent. British critics in the nineteenth century followed suit, celebrating Shakespeare’s capacious characters and poetic imagination instead of worrying whether his plots fit Aristotelian unities or if his style matched Augustan decorum. Rather than subject Shakespeare to critical standards, Shakespeare became the standard. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge apologized for importing the clunky term “psychological” from the German, but he said that English lacked a word to capture Shakespeare’s “Philosophy of the Human Mind.”)

Then, with the rise of English as an academic discipline in the Victorian era, scholars took over the business of editing Shakespeare, working to establish more historically authentic texts, rather than correcting poetic defects—an editing goal matched by the nineteenth-century taste for spectacular antiquarian stage productions. (John Philip Kemble inaugurated a tradition of playing Macbeth in a Scottish kilt.) Shakespeare’s plays entered the new compulsory public education system in 1870; the national assessment standards required classes to recite Shakespeare passages for an examiner. Shakespeare stocked the cultural arsenal for Britain’s overseas campaign as well, getting a push in the colonies from the British Empire Shakespeare Society, whose motto read, “Using no other weapon but his name.” Even the Oxford English Dictionary helped secure Shakespeare’s status as the source of the imperial tongue; one editor instructed researchers to stop looking for earlier instances once they found a word listed in the concordance to Shakespeare. George Bernard Shaw feared that the Victorian tendency to see Shakespeare as immune from criticism verged on “Bardolatry,” warning that “it is false admiration to worship him as an infallible demi-god.” But Shakespeare was well on his way to becoming secular scripture. In the twentieth century, New Critics enshrined Shakespeare’s plays as complex poetic art, unified through patterns of metaphor, irony, and paradox, and generations of students were compelled to write exegeses of his linguistic richness. If witty intricacies appeared opaque, that was the fault not of the poet but of the audience who failed to grasp his genius.