Joss Whedon's Shakespeare Misplaced

For years, you suppressed your unease as film directors set Hamlet in modern New York City and Romeo and Juliet in modern American “Verona Beach.” You didn’t want to be called a philistine, did you? The directors who placed Twelfth Night in the nineteenth century and Coriolanus in the twenty-first couldn’t both have been wrong, could they? For some reason, the modernizing treatment seemed to be limited to Shakespeare: you realized that even if a hapless director decided to redo Casablanca, he would never dream of setting it in present-day Baghdad. But if you were like most moviegoers, you didn’t worry about that inconsistency, any more than you worried about the ludicrousness of a Richard III set in “an England of an alternate timeline, which clearly evokes 1930s fascism,” as Roger Ebert put it. Or if you did, you didn’t voice your worries in respectable company.