[Trigger warning: sad things]

We’re going to have to talk about death.

                I’d much rather talk about any number of things. I’ve got a lot to say about the existence of a notwithstaning clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I badly want to spread the word about Tilting Biped’s brilliant production of Macbeth. I spent two weeks in England recently and have plenty to say about Brexit, climate change, road signs and Comic Conventions. I still have to compose my retrospective for Stephen Moffat’s tenure with Doctor Who. . .

                But circumstances bring me to death.

                It’s an appropriate day for it. The air outside is grey, and damp with spittles of rain. It’s colder than it’s been for a while, not the razor cold of January but the sad and sleepy cold of the dying summer. All I can see outside is concrete – there are plenty of trees and grass about it, but it all seems more like cheap green furniture than anything living or vibrant. All I can hear are the cars. . .

                I’ve written on death before – pseudo philosophical musings and laments for passing famous people who’s art once moved me and whose halted output made me grouchy. But Real People? Whom I actually knew? I’ve not actually been touched by death in a long, long time. How naïve I’ve been about it. . .

                To be sure, I’ve not lost an immediate family member, but someone very close to me has. The loss is very real.

                It is astonishing how quickly life can change, how one’s assumptions can fall apart, one’s rituals disrupted. I woke up that morning thinking the world would be no different when I went to bed. I was sitting in a choir rehearsal, serenely mumbling the (mostly wrong) notes of Braham’s Requiem, looking forward to a Barbecue in the evening, and perhaps a little live music the next day. It was a beautiful Saturday. There was no reason to think it would be anything but a relaxing weekend.

               

                At one point, our guest conductor felt the need to share his personal connection to Requiem. He’d lost people recently, including his brother-in-law. “It was expected,” he reassured us. “But there’s never a good time, is there?”  

                Not two minutes later, I received a text. There had been an accident, and someone was being transported to St. Michael’s hospital in Toronto. I had held out hope that perhaps it could be something manageable, even trivial – a sprained ankle say. Pretending not to know that no one gets transported to St. Michaels hospital for a sprained ankle. . . By the time I got to the rendezvous point, not half an hour later, I had gotten the message that someone had died.

                I am not accustomed to death. I do not understand it now any better than I did when I was five. I did not grasp the message at first. Honest to god, idiotic as it was, I seriously thought it meant “in a coma”. Or possibly “dying” -present progressive tense, as in ongoing, possibly reversible. Grammar teacher though I am, it was a full minute before I really understood the tense of the verb.  

                Somebody had died.

                There followed a long, long drive to be with the family. Of course there was no radio, and almost no conversation - what could be said? What had happened was unspeakable, and we were driving to confront the intolerable. It was unbearably claustrophobic. And the day did not get better from there.

                I confess, I did not know the man well; but liked him quite well, and keenly feel the king-sized gap he’s left behind. Unlike my (guest) conductor’s recent loss, this one was not expected, and I marvel at the sheer colossal pointlessness of this abrupt removal of someone who meant so much to so many. . .I chafe as well at the helplessness of seeing people I love in pain, and being able to do nothing.

               

                I can’t even say “this will pass”, because it won’t. Things will never be the same again.

                There’s only one lesson, or cold - comfort I can take from it all: we too shall pass. Any time, any where. So we may as well stand tall when our time comes and enjoy what time we have.  I have a feeling the departed would approve. . .

Our Pal, Harlan Ellison

So. . .

The last kids leave, and I am filled with an overwhelming School’s Out mentality of “let’s get the fuck out of here.” But some counteracting instinct insisted I quickly check my e-mail first. 

Now I’m not going to self righteously try to minimize my social media addiction, but I can fight it when I need to, and a little voice did try to say “forget it! There can’t be anything important! You can check later. You gotta get to Dave’s birthday party and you’re running a bit late already!” And yet, I had to see. Just a few seconds. There was a message from “the Harlan Ellison Book Preservation Project”, which again, a voice prompted me to ignore, but again I felt worth looking at. And this is what I saw:

“I'm sure a lot of you have seen the news.

If not, I apologize for breaking it this way.”

Oh no. A cold feeling crept over me.  My hands trembled over the cursor keys. I looked away. Maybe if I didn't finish reading, maybe it wouldn't be true. Maybe I could rewind the clock, and it wouldn't have to be true, not yet. I could live just a few more minutes in a world where it hadn't happened yet. Maybe if I didn't read the news, it could be something else.

But we all know, it doesn't work that way, does it folks? I read on, and learned for sure what I already knew.

Harlan Ellison – dear ol’ “Unca Harlan” - was gone.

It had to happen. We all go one day. But did it have to be that day? Then again, I would have asked the same whatever day it had been. It happened at last: I was going to have to face a world without Harlan Ellison in it.

Now understand one thing: to hardcore fans of Ellison – his “Flying Blue Monkey Squadron”, whose membership I hope was open – he was not just a writer we admired. For those who really ensconced themselves in his work, it was impossible not to think of him as a close friend or even relative. To us he wasn’t “Ellison”, but “Unca Harlan”, a term of endearment he himself came up with and encouraged. He signed off all his messages as “yer pal, Harlan”.  For make no mistake people: for all his reputation as a grump, to us, his really clingy fans, he could not have been more warm, friendly, kind or supportive.  If he occasionally kicked us in the ass, it was only when we deserved it – Unca Harlan expected only the best from people and frequently brought it out of them. Glance even casually at his autobiographical writings, and marvel at how many of his life’s multitudinous dramatis personae he considered friends. While everyone else remarked on his notorious crabbiness, I noticed  how quick to befriend he seemed to be and how much he valued people. I think he appreciated how deeply he was loved, and was quick to reciprocate. Maybe not to faceless masses of fans, but to anyone who got to know him on a human level.

Let’s go back in time a little bit. . .

I first encountered Ellison on the Prisoners of Gravity Show, circa, oh I dunno, 1991 or in that neighbourhood. Unlike so many of the talking heads they brought on, this guy was feisty, animated, outspoken, direct and to the point. He had no patience for nonsense, and seemed to treat writing like hands-on work. I had to read him. . .

The fiction didn’t disappoint. It was every bit as lively and engaging. One day, on a different Prisoners of Gravity episode, he was asked to give advice to young writers in the crowd. He turned straight to the camera and said “the trick to being a writer is to stay a writer!” The advice was good, it was practical, and he said it straight to you. None of the other guests did that. They were talking heads. Some were boring and some were interesting, but they were talking heads. Harlan leapt out of the screen and spoke to you. That was the magic of Harlan Ellison: he made you feel he was addressing you directly. Personally. So the reader-writer relationship was personal. And so is the loss.

Unca Harlan did in fact address me personally, three times, on his message board. The first was when I inquired whether one of is broadcasts would be available in Ontario. His response (and I have not put it in  all caps) was:

“ONTARIO IS NOT SIBERIA!”, followed by a harangue about hiding crystal radios under one’s bed.

The Second time was as part of a larger discussion in which I praised the Dark Knight for being “low tech”. His response was:

“LOW TECH MY ASS!” followed by something about the impossibility of school buses lining up so perfectly. (And then an apology for misreading one of my sentences).

The third time was just a bit of practical advice for making pitches to people – he advised addressing people formally and then asking if they could be addressed informally.

Brief exchanges all, but each one full of his trademark rhetorical virtuosity and personalized bombast. Mini Ellisonian masterpieces carved out of the ether, just for me. I wish I’d copied and pasted them.

That’s the kind of guy he was – he couldn’t say good morning without entertaining someone.

If I concentrated so far entirely on my personal reaction to the Man rather than His Work, it’s only because that’s all I’m qualified to speak on. Smarter people than me will have plenty to say about his work, his thousands of stories and essays and articles, his genius for words, his blinding imagination, his deep, underappreciated humanity. All I can talk about with any authority is what it all meant to me, and why his loss cuts so deeply. He was the crazy uncle whose stories you couldn't get enough of. We all crowded outside his door, waiting for another one, and he was only too pleased to oblige, churning them out with gusto, a verve all his own. You couldn't separate a man from his art. Who would want to? 

To be sure, he wasn’t a flawless human being; doubtless there will be no shortage of pundits and trolls who will be quick to remind you of his shortcomings. I make no excuses for him, but maintain the good far outweighed the bad, that there isn’t one of us who doesn’t have failings and shortcomings, and if were solely judged on them, there would be nothing to celebrate in all of humanity.

In recent years, I slowed my consumption of Harlan Ellison. Not for lack of material – you can never run out. But for the same reason I slowed my consumption of Bradbury. They both inspired me to work hard and follow my dreams. I feel as if I’ve failed. Ellison taught me too well to allow for any excuses, so reading him forces me to face up to that failure. He also wouldn’t allow for any self-pity, so I won’t refer to it any more. Though, perhaps it’s not too late for dreams. . .

I can hardly fathom a world without Harlan Ellison in it. It’s an altogether duller, stupider place. But how incredibly better the world has been for having had him in it. How much deeper my life has been, for having encountered him. So, while I’m heart-broken that he’s gone, I cannot be but thrilled that he lived. What better thing can one say of anyone?

So long Unca Harlan: you were the best!      

Munkying about, part II

As if I haven’t give the bugger enough space, there are just a couple more things I have to get off my chest.

            During the Munk debate of May 18, 2018, Jordan Peterson identified his evil trinity of the extreme left as diversity, inclusivity, and equality (of outcomes, as opposed to opportunities).

            I have to take issue with these benchmarks one by one.

            1) Diversity. He had the nerve to proclaim this in a great big hall in Toronto, one of the most diverse cities in the world. People from all over the world living side by side in complete peace. On what planet could this be considered a bad thing? But never mind ethnic diversity – diversity of anything, of language, of opinion, of dress, cuisine, art, tends to be an incredibly enriching, positive thing. How could this be considered an extremist or totalitarian situation?

            2) Inclusivity. Are we to take from this that “exclusivity” must be a reasonable state of affairs? We were taught in Kindergarten not to exclude anyone, not to exile little Johnny to the corner because we thought he was weird. We took this lesson into adulthood as we try to build (or at least idealize) a society where everyone is welcome. Sorry Jordan, not giving that up.

            3) Equality. Peterson took pains to differentiate equality of outcomes with equality of opportunity, which he admitted was “laudable”. He didn’t seem to notice that equality of opportunity was exactly what his debating opponents, Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson, were clamouring for. What most movements are clamouring for. How can he call something a “laudable goal”, then denounce anyone trying to achieve it?

            But let’s look at equality of outcomes, which he insists is how equality is defined. My first question is “by whom”? Who made that declaration? I didn’t. Did you?  Let’s grant for a moment that this is how it’s defined, my second questions is: so what?

            Equality of outcomes may be impossible, impractical or dangerous, but I don’t think it’s the mark of extremism. Why not? Because it’s largely an abstraction. It doesn’t refer to any particular policy or program. Are we talking economic outcomes? Physical? Emotional? Sexual? It feels more like a caricature of an idea than an idea anybody seriously pushes for. It is something we can discuss, debate, and abandon drunk and happy afterwards. A person pushing for such a thing may be deluded or mistaken, but not necessarily an extremist.

            To determine if a person is an extremist, you don’t ask whether that person believes in equality of outcomes. You ask by what means they wish to achieve it. There is the acid test. A person pamphletting their neighbourhood trying to win it over to equality of outcomes may be a kook, but hardly a extremist. A person willing to bomb, assassinate, torture and kill, is. A person who would suspend habius corpus. A person who would burn books. These, I think, are much more useful warning signs than Peterson’s unholy triumvirate.    I can hardly believe I’m the first person to suggest them.

            More likely, Peterson has heard them and doesn’t like them. They’re not all-encompassing enough. They alone would not allow him to portray himself as a hard-done by martyr. They would have no cache with internet trolls. The problem is not that the left won’t lay down parameters for tyranny. It’s that it won’t accept his parameters.

            What would adjusting them cost him?

 

A letter to Thanos (because life has just been too serious lately)

Dear Sir,

I wish to discourage you most vigorously from your stated plan to destroy approximately half the living things in the galaxy. I think this is a badly short-sighted plan and bound to cause more harm than good.

Before I begin, I must assure you that I am not entirely unsympathetic to your concerns. Indeed, anyone who has been recently stuck in 401 traffic, or struggled to find a seat on the GO-Train would probably find themselves tempted by your plan. Yet at times like this it is important not to let our emotions get the better of us, and not do anything rash.

 To begin with, it is not your decision who lives and who dies. Every person has an equal right to live, and it is not up to you to decide which is which. You can decide for your fate, but not anyone else’s – if you’re concerned about overcrowding, you may start with yourself.

More importantly, you cannot be sure who you will be eliminating. There will be no guarantee that you would get the right half. You could be getting rid of some of the world’s best people, doctors and scientists and artists, and people who could do great good.

Furthermore, people are needed to run the world and organize the planet. It will fall into chaos if half of everyone just disappears. Schoolboards in Ontario are already having a devil of a time finding qualified French teachers as is. It is already next to impossible to get a human being on the phone when you ring any customer service department, and I am having a great deal of trouble finding a qualified electrician to rewire my home. Following your plan, there will be an even more acute shortage of supermarket cashiers, and I shudder to think what it may do to local garbage collection. Furthermore, there is currently an election going on in Ontario, and my party needs all the votes that it can.

I also suggest that you could not guarantee that your purge would not include my neighbour before he returns my rake, which he has had now since November.

You have probably not considered either, that your plan would place nearly impossible demands on this community’s funeral parlours, and lengthen their waiting lists intolerably.

But ultimately, it shouldn’t matter who is chosen for culling, as every person has a right to live out their lives and waste them in the manner they see fit. It would be an act of unspeakable barbarity and cruelty to simply murder every second man, woman, and child on the planet, especially before they’ve seen the new season of Doctor Who.

In hope that you will reconsider, I remain humbly yours,  

Steve AJ Dylan

Munkying around. . .

So. . .
I tried to sit down and watch the latest Munk debates:

https://www.munkdebates.com/The-Debates/Political-Correctness

I couldn't get farther than half way. It was too. . .hostile. I'm afraid it very much turned into what I was afraid it would: a no holds barred grudge match between four people arguing four different things. With the moderator egging them all on.

Perhaps, things transpired later that would change my take, or throw it out the window completely, but here's what I took from what I saw:

At no point was the supposed subject of the evening actually defined: what did any of them mean by "political correctness"? What was actually being debated?
Of the four speakers, I think Fry was closest to my own temperament and philosophy. But even he refused to explain what it was he was railing against, and how it differed from what the other speakers were discussing. 

But I think Fry, Dyson and Goldberg could have had a civilized discussion if not for:
Jordan Peterson.

So this is what the fuss is all about. This is the cult leader commanding the hearts and minds of millions (no exaggeration). I'd never heard him speak at this length before. 

At first, it's not hard to understand his appeal. He's a captivating speaker, almost hypnotic. He speaks softly, effortlessly and rhythmically, unfolding philosophical points like musical notes. Like a gentle piece of orchestral music, it almost lulls you in. . .until he gets to his point. Then like a sour note in the middle of the symphony, he dumps a cold bucket of water on the whole illusion.
Here's the thing: he says the right and the left are capable of tyranny. True. He says the parameters of right tyranny are fairly well demarcated. True. He says the parameters of left tyranny need to be demarcated. Also True. He says the left refuse to demarcate such parametres. Uhm. . .debatable. He says that Equality, Inclusivity, and Diversity are what demarcate that parameter. . .

Uhm. . .what???

Here the whole edifice comes down. He's set the bar for leftist tyranny so low that anyone of even mildly liberal sentiment is no better than a Pol Pot. In Peterson's worldview, there's apparently no distinction.

Whatever point you thought he was going to make, or wanted him to make, as you were lulled along by the pulse of his words, melts like a snowflake. It's not going to be a universal argument after all, but a strictly partisan one.

"If not diversity, inclusivity, and equality, how do we demarcate the too extreme left?" he asks. And then goes on to insist no one will answer him.

Oh for God's sake Peterson, can you be serious? It's when they refuse to recognize the sanctity of human life! When they're willing to torture and kill for the cause! When they use the end to justify any and all means, including brutality. When they refuse to condemn murder. When the reserve the right to cause harm and inflict pain. Surely these are demarcations any reasonable person can agree to, and surely I can't be the first person to mention them.

The problem is not that the left won't demarcate; it's that they won't accept Peterson's demarcations. And doesn't he just hate that!
Then he loses his professorial demeanour and starts pouting about his "white privilege", a phrase nobody else invoked up 'till then. The whole of Michael Dyson's eloquent denunciations of slavery and police violence went straight over his head: "never mind all that, what about my white privilege?"

As if it was all about him.

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times spoke of "category creep", whereby (I think) categories become too broad and encompass too many people. It's a charge leveled against the left, whereby moderate conservatives are held to be no better than the Grand Marshal of the KKK. Some people fail to make this distinction, fair enough. But isn't it just as bad if not worse on the right, especially in the US, where calling for a health care system is a call for the GUlag? And doesn't it show up in Peterson, who's definition of the "sensible left" doesn't include anyone to his own left?

Peterson claims to be of the centre, but his venom is mainly for the left and his category of "excessive left" includes just about everybody on the left, so his message will be (and has been) most comforting to those on the right. You don't need to be a Bolshevik to refuse to buy it.

Meanwhile, the sleazy moderator egged and prodded everyone on so that the audience could have its bloodbath.
Peterson started smooth and elegant, but soon got shrill and petulant, like a whiny teenager. He may have picked apart the rather timid and nervous Goldberg (she got better), but he was no match for the majestic Michael Eric Dyson, who, frankly, tore him to shreds.

Still though, it was Fry I most related to. Despite his throwing away his decorum too early on (why Fry, when you were doing fine?). Make of that what thou wilst.

Not long ago, I was given a whole set of Piers Anthony’s Space Tyrant books by a well-meaning friend who thought my recently-decimated library could use a boost. (He cannot have read them). Being unacquainted with Piers Anthony as a writer, and ever a sucker for space-opera, I eagerly dove into the first volume, Refugee.  

Ye Gods. . .Where do I begin?

To pilfer a passage from Roger Ebert, I hated this book. Hated, hated, hated it. It is the worst book I have read in quite some time.  Worse than The Residential Tenancies Act. It is depraved. It is despicable. It is, at times, laughably amateurish. For all this, its author is highly successful, and continues to sell books to a devoted fanbase. This to me, is astonishing.

I was actually moved to write an Amazon review for it. Here’s what I put:

“What we have here is a character who: watches his sister raped, watches his mother raped, watches his father disemboweled, and only towards the end remembers that he has a laser pistol in his possession?

This is a book in which the plot largely depends on the idiocy of its characters. Whose staggering ineptitude and incompetence, painstakingly conveyed in three hundred pages of the most clumsy, leaden prose I've ever read, has one screaming at the pages in exasperation.  The only plotting Anthony seems to care about is piling miseries upon his characters, contriving ever worse ways for them to suffer and sadistically depriving them of any agency. It becomes apparent early on there will be no pay-off, no redemption, not even sensible action.

Don't read this expecting fun space-opera: what you get rather is a kind of pulp torture porn, replete with rape, cannibalism, incest, pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia references.”   

I’m not joking – each of those show up. Not all are portrayed as graphically as the near constant rapes, but they are alluded to, in passages so brief and so pointless, yet no less stomach-churningly nasty for it, one wonders why the author bothered with them, unless churning the reader’s stomach was exactly what Anthony wanted. Was it? To heap violence and depravity on the reader until they cry “Uncle”? I shudder to think what Anthony’s horror fiction must be like…

To be clear, the problem here is not that Anthony is sexually explicit, nor that he wants to bring up certain topics (though to no apparent purpose). For serious writers, no topic is out of bounds. But subjects like rape need to be handled with incredible sensitivity. Rape is real, and ruins who-knows how many millions of lives. It is not something to be trifled with. It is not a plot device. It is not motivation for vengeful characters. It is not a short-cut to gravitas, and it is most certainly not a subject of titillation.  It is not to be handled lightly.

Even if I grant Anthony the benefit of the doubt, and assume he wanted to write a serious book about a serious subject (albeit very misleadingly marketed by the publisher), an author who includes lines like “I’m here to keep you from getting raped – unless you want to” rather seems to lack the requisite sensitivity. Any male writer who presumes to speculate on the female reaction to the experience of rape – not just an individual character but the generalized universal experience – is taking upon himsel on an almost impossibly delicate task. Does this sound delicate to you?  The sheer ineptitude of this work keeps it from sounding anything but sleazy.

Which brings us to the laser-pistol. This is not a small detail. When fictional characters consistently, even insistently, fail to follow the most obvious course of action or even attempt the most basic solution to their problems, or when an author has them simply forget the options available to them. . .at some point you can’t suspend your disbelief anymore, you can’t believe in the characters anymore, you can’t give the author any more free passes.

In a bazaar reversal of Chekov’s law, Anthony’s protagonist is provided with a laser pistol, which, despite constant threats to him and his loved ones, it never occurs to him use. It’s not like he forgets about it either. On something like seven different occasions (I lost count) after each successive family member is raped, killed or mutilated, he laments “if only I had my pistol”. By which point the reader can only scream at the page:

“Well why the fuck don’t you???”    

 

Anthony provides no reason. There are any number of narrative devices he could have invoked – the charge was low, the kid was a bad shot, the pirates shot first – but he doesn’t bother. I can’t help thinking he’s just taking the piss; setting up audience expectation in a painfully obvious way, only to violate it. It’s all fine and good to violate audience expectation, except when it makes no fucking sense. It erases empathy for a character who won’t even attempt to defend his family. It’s a massive distraction. And, if it is a piss-take, then it’s not taking this most serious of subjects seriously is it?

How seriously can the author be taking things when he has the protagonist announce the death of thirty people with “there’s good news, and there’s bad news”. Could this line be anything other than a joke?

Or are we to believe that a small community of widows and orphans, having lost thirty of their adults on a dangerous alien planet, would send thirty more out after them? Really? Really???

Or when the protagonists mother goes missing on this alien world: does he really wait to refurbish his spaceship before going to search for her? (he has a skiff by this time – again, it doesn’t occur to this idiot to use the technology at his disposal).

 I could go on and on. Are there really no such things as radios in this world? Why can’t they lock their spaceship doors again? What the hell was the point of that fake but not really fake hijacking at the end? Just about nothing makes sense. Those are just the plot points – I haven’t even started on the prose style yet. I don’t to know how a hoverboard works, I only need to know if the bad guy fell off. . .

Bad plotting, bad prose and impossibly problematic subject matter form a kind of unholy trinity, feeding off and enforcing each other until it all snowballs into an avalanche of “yuck”. It’s not that good writing would have saved the book, but I can’t help thinking that a better writer might not have been quite so ham-fisted with it. The prose certainly makes it all the more cringe-worthy.  The plotting and sheer implausible idiocy of the characters makes it impossible to take anything within it seriously. And this fixation on rape and pedophilia only ever comes across as creepy.

There’s another thing too. Piers Anthony is not a nobody. He is (or was) a very big selling writer. And a significant part of his audience appear to be young people. I remember Piers Anthony’s Xanth books prominently displayed in my Grade 7 library, and eagerly devoured by the 12 and 13 year girls in my class.  So. . .an eager young reader relishes the fantasies of Xanth, spots this title in the bookstore, with an astronaut on the cover and her favourite author’s name in exciting Buck Rogers front. . . you see where I’m going here? There’s no reason writers who’ve written for children can’t cross-over into adult fiction, or vice-versa.   (Roald Dahl comes to mind). But when a book is marketed as space opera, a genre widely believed to be harmless and kid friendly, and there’s no attempt to represent the contents of this book accurately, it does feel like something sinister has gone down. A trojan horse if you will.

Perhaps Anthony can’t help how his books are marketed. But he did write the damn thing. . .

To what extent are we bound to artist intent when we adapt their work? 

I am inclined to think that our freedom here is not unlimited. It is very very broad of course, and we want to avoid slavish imitation, and of course we need to take modern sensibilities into account. But I do not think we can ignore context completely. It behooves us to understand what a work meant to it's own time and place, before we force our own tastes and values upon it. 

Context matters. Realism is all fine and good, but I'm not convinced a graphic gang-rape scene really enriched "the William Tell Overture". I think Rossini's intention here should have been more carefully considered. 

Performers of operas and plays do indeed need to try new things, and do indeed have a difficult task in making old works relevant to modern audiences, but I'm not sure they have tabula rasa. It can only be made so relateable. Let's face it: Opera, and Symphonic music, and ELizabethan drama are not immediately relateable to modern audiences. If they were, they would be filled with pop music, and spoken in modern English. At some point it needs to be acknowledged that these are older forms, created in different times for different audiences. Good art is eternal, but it is also of its time, and we ignore it at our peril. 

I suppose the issue comes up most often in adaptations of Shakespeare. Most productions these days I would wager (though it'd be a dangerous wager to make considering how often they're performed) opt for some kind of anachronistic performance, setting them in recognizably modern, or at least much more recent settings. I'm not sure exactly why - every director and set designer probably has a different idea, but I suspect it has something to do with Shakespeare's perceived universality (that, and the extreme ugliness of Elizabethan fashions). 

This raises all kind of issues. Some interpretations work, and some do not. I enjoyed Baz Lehrman's "Romeo and Juliet" but despised Julie Taymar's "Titus". I felt one respected the subject matter and the other did not.I had no trouble with the introduction of guns into a tale of gang-violence, but saw no point in the addition of arcade machines and disco balls in the latter. It would be absurd to suggest that every future production should be just like the Globe Theatre's strictly historical enactments (an argument applied by some Baroque musicians to their own art), but does that mean we can do absolutely anything we want with the text? Could Romeo and Juliet work in an age of texting? Could Henry V be set in Paschendale, Normandy, or Falujah, or the Star Wars universe? (Let's try it and find out!)

I suppose it depends. Let's look at two plays. "Hamlet" is almost always modernized. "Macbeth" far less so. (And don't be a smart alec and go on about some indie college production you just got back from. . .). I think it's because many people recognize that time and place is important to "Macbeth" in a way that it isn't for "Hamlet". Nobody cares that Hamlet is set in Medieval Denmark; it is generally understood that the core of the play lies elsewhere, in the psychology of the character. So Hamlet can be adapted to just about any setting imaginable and lose none of its power.

Macbeth though. . . I saw one updated Machbeth, (with Patrick Stewart) set in what looked like Soviet Russia. In grim bunkers and military hospitals. It looked like one of the "Hostel" movies. It didn't work. For one thing, the Soviet setting imposes on it a whole set of associations that aren't really supported by the text. I think that matters. 

Akira Kurosawa moved the action to feudal Japan in "Throne of Blood", and it was brilliant. THe Scottish play worked ideally amongst the samurai. So the "place" is clearly not what matters, but the "time" - it was still very much an ancient, historical, mysterious setting. 

Macbeth needs to take place in a world where ghosts exist, and where witch's prophesies are taken seriously. Hamlet saw ghosts as well, but Hamlet spends most of the play pretending to be insane, and is widely suspected to not have been pretending. Hamlet has been performed as a one act monologue by the schizophrenic inmate of a lunatic asylum. It's a modern interpretation, but the text does support this interpretation. Hamlet is so much about psychology and inner struggle that its ghosts can be easily brought into the modern era. But Macbeth's ghosts are actually ghosts, and need an age fit for ghosts. If psychology lay at the heart of Hamlet, superstition is the core of Macbeth, and does not lend itself to more enlightened ages. The Dark Age is the proper home for Macbeth. It could be Scotland's or Japan's, but either way should be in a time where such a tale could be believed, when the social constraints of civilization were that much weaker, and race memories of the caves and trees that much fresher. If it can be set in dark, misty forests, so much the better. You could never set Macbeth in a discotheque. Or, you shouldn't anyway.

When we we adapt a text, we submit ourselves to the will of the text, not the other way around. Hubris will not serve us well.

(Of course, the moment I post all this, no fewer than two major anachronistic Macbeths pop up in London, and I found yet a third in my local library. Well, I never said it never happened. . .)