One of the lines I disagreed with from the otherwise excellent column:
> Schools and universities ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite.
Of course, a great number of Shakespeare's works were riffs on old plots that had been done many times before, and up to a few thousand years earlier.
His genius was not the plots but in what he 'said more than the plot in question'. One could easily make a distinction between analysis of a work and reinterpretation of a work, but I still think it is foolhardy to claim that analysis and critical thinking can not create its own value, and even more foolhardy to imply that that value is in competition with the value of the original work.
Anyway, I think the better modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare tend to focus on the themes that Shakespeare added to the classic plots, than they worry about the plot specifics.
Its funny. I think if you took away the context of it being an old Shakespeare play, most people would find The Taming of the Shrew (which 10 Things I Hate About You is very loosely based on) fairly abhorrent.
That's common with a lot of Shakespeare. A lot of his plotlines and humour are marginal at best. If Shakespeare was alive and writing these plays today, he would be pilloried.
The Merchant of Venice is blatantly anti-Semetic. The Comedy of Errors has a whole scene that's just fat shaming for no good reason. There's plenty of other examples of things that would be problematic if written in a modern context. Obviously it wasn't problematic several hundred years ago, and we shouldn't judge Shakespeare by modern standards.
