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It's a good story. Even though it was written centuries ago, it is still relevant to cultures today as we still have violence and ambition.

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Its worth studying the language because the rhythm and imagery are so good. What examples could you include?

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The language is really hard to understand. Modern language versions like the one set in a restaurant keep the good story but change the language so that everyone can understand it

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Even though you could adapt it and set it in a modern culture, it still focuses on white male culture.  Why can't we have more texts about women, non-white people (including indigenous people) and issues that matter to us instead of stories about violent men?   There is basically only one woman in the play, unless you count the witches, and she is a monster.

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Hip-Hop & Shakespeare? Akala at TEDxAldeburgh

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Akala demonstrates and explores the connections between Shakespeare and Hip-Hop, and the wider cultural debate around language and it's power. MOBO award-winning hip hop artist 'Akala' is a label owner and social entrepreneur who fuses rap/rock/electro-punk with fierce lyrical storytelling (think Wu-Tang Clan and Aphex Twin meets Rage Against The Machine).

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 I disagreed because the version has some bad violent and some abusive moved in the old version. 

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 I disagreed because the version has some bad violent and some abusive moved in the old version. 

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You could use this in your presentation

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"But Elodie, they didn't have texting in Shakespeare's day," I can hear you saying. But I'll tell you right now: you cannot read this article with an attitude like that. You simply can't. For the purposes of this slideshow, Macbeth had an iPhone 6s, Lady Macbeth had her read receipts on, and Macduff knew what emojis were.

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This slideshow is a perfect storm of Shakespeare and memes-basically, it's everything you've ever wanted. (But the on the off-chance that you also want a line-by-line modern translation of Macbeth, we've got that too. WE'RE HERE FOR YOU, FAM.)

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This slideshow is a perfect storm of Shakespeare and memes-basically, it's everything you've ever wanted. (But the on the off-chance that you also want a line-by-line modern translation of Macbeth, we've got that too. WE'RE HERE FOR YOU, FAM.)

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This is why he is awesome.

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It turns out Shakespeare essentially invented the entire English language; before him, we probably just communicated in grunts and frustrated hand signals. The Bard invented hundreds of phrases that are now used every day; here are a few of our personal faves.

1. All that glitters is not gold - From The Merchant of Venice. Oddly, the next line is, " Often have you heard that told," even though it was the first time the expression was used, ever!

2. All's well that ends well - From the play by the same title. All's well that ends well-unless you're Bertram and you're married off against your will.

3. Bated breath -The Merchant of Venice. As in, "I'm waiting with bated breath for the Black Panther movie, which will surely be the best film of this, or any, century."

5. Brave new world - The Tempest. His titles have become expressions and his expressions have become titles.

6. Break the ice - The Taming of the Shrew. In fact, here Shakespeare didn't just mean a way to get the convo flowing. In the play, Tranio is also saying that Katherine is a bit of an ice queen.

9. Fancy-free - Midsummer Night's Dream. The footloose wasn't added until much later.

10. Forever and a day - As You Like It. It makes no sense, but I like it!

11. For goodness' sake - Henry VIII. Such a flexible phrase: you can substitute in "goodness" for all types of words.

13. In a pickle - The Tempest. I didn't even know they had pickles back then. Well, good for them.

14. In my heart of hearts & In my mind's eye - Hamlet. William Shakespeare, a man who never read an anatomy book.

15. Kill with kindness - Taming of the Shrew. William Shakespeare, a man who also doesn't know how kindness works.

17. Laugh yourself into stitches - Twelfth Night. Which became "in stitches laughing." I thought brevity was the soul of wit, Billy?

18. Love is blind - Merchant of Venice. Another classic. "Love is blind and lovers cannot see!" Ah, the romance of mutual dependence.

19. Into thin air - The Tempest. Disappearing into air was already a thing, Shakespeare just brings the skinny.

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20 Super-Common Phrases That Shakespeare Pretty Much Invented

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It turns out Shakespeare essentially invented the entire English language; before him, we probably just communicated in grunts and frustrated hand signals. The Bard invented hundreds of phrases that are now used every day; here are a few of our personal faves. 1. All that glitters is not gold - From The Merchant of Venice.

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What could a 400-year-old play possibly have in common with the woman who invented music? Well, if you think about it, "Be bloody, bold, and resolute" is basically the overarching theme of Lemonade, so...

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QUIZ: Is This a Macbeth Quote or a Beyoncé Lyric?

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What could a 400-year-old play possibly have in common with the woman who invented music? Well, if you think about it, "Be bloody, bold, and resolute" is basically the overarching theme of Lemonade, so...

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Macbeth is a great leveler | James Erskine | TEDxYangon

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Shakespeare Plays Summed Up in Pie Charts

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Have you ever read a Shakespeare play? Look, I love...

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David Tennant on why Shakespeare is still relevant

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David Tennant on why Shakespeare is still relevant

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David Tennant Explains Why Shakespeare Still Matters

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Read the last paragraph for some good quotations on the relevance of Macbeth

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Michael Billington on Macbeth: profile of greatest theatrical poem ever written

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The destructive nature of unchecked power-lust and political ambition in Shakespeare's play speaks to us urgently still today

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Read the last paragraph for some good w

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As a theatre critic it's important to not decide on a work before you see it. But while "don't judge a book by its cover" remains a virtuous aim, theatre critics have not only the cover to judge, but also years of theatregoing to frame our opinions as we take our seats.

And so here's my admission: I don't like Macbeth. And yet just like Banquo's ghost the play continues to reappear, finding its way back into my life.

I saw it again this week, for the eighth time in seven years, at the State Theatre Company of South Australia. Macbeth visits Australia a lot: the STCSA production comes quick on the heels of Melbourne Theatre Company's production in June. Australian film-maker Justin Kurzel's version hit cinema screens in 2015; Brisbane saw it in 2015 care of Opera Queensland, and again in 2014 thanks to Queensland Theatre Company - the same year it was also staged by Sydney Theatre Company. And this is all to say nothing of the productions by smaller companies, by students and on the fringe.

According to AusStage, a database of Australian theatre, Macbeth is the most performed Shakespearian play in Australia, beating Romeo and Juliet by some measure.

All of this is to say: if I'm going to spend my time working as a theatre critic, I am going to have to spend a lot of it with Macbeth.

My problem, of course, rests largely with a series of unfortunate productions and their shared composition of fake stage blood, dissonance electronic scores, industrial designs, dirty T-shirts. But it's also about Shakespeare's text itself: his unrelenting exploration of masculinity with women shoved off to the side (I've yet to see a production convincingly argue that Lady Macbeth is indeed an interesting role for women), and the irrelevance of a story about royal lineage and power from a country on the other side of the world.

My first Macbeth in 2010, from the Sydney Theatre Company and independent Adelaide outfit The Border Project, started things so well. Playing off the reportedly cursed nature of the play, the production, Vs Macbeth, irreverently played with the script, adding in a litany of errors to the work. Everything that went wrong in the rehearsal room - supposedly - made its way to the stage, and some added homage to the curse besides.

Sets caught on fire, the fake dagger was swapped for a real one, the wheels on rolling sets weren't locked and actors went careening across the stage. Instead of blood we had yellow paint balls; instead of darkness there was laughter. It was less about Macbeth and more about making Macbeth; less about Shakespeare and more about the notion of young artists playing with theatre and performance itself.

Since then, it's been downhill in Dunsinane. There was Macbeth set in a jail where the witches gathered around a toilet; the Macbeth where I excitedly thought "out damned spot!" would be told via contemporary dance, before I realised we'd just been victim to an incongruous sound cue; the production where the stage blood just made it look like everyone had their period.
Macbeth review - a Shakespearean noir-thriller soaked with operatic verve
My one other bright moment was a musical version performed by teenagers - turns out there is little in Shakespeare that can't be improved by making it shorter and adding children dancing like their lives depend on it.

The play itself is too bleak, too unrelenting. While Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have the potential to be compelling antiheroes, too often I've seen actors drown under the weight of their characters. There is no one to root for, but there is little to root against, and the play just gets subsumed in a not particularly interesting form of misery. The latest production, unfortunately, has done little to change my mind.

It reminded me, too, that there is little in the way of a narrative arc - just a steadily growing pile of bodies. Perhaps this is useful: in the absence of any dramatic differentiation, you can measure how much longer you have to sit there quite neatly by counting how many people are left to be killed.

And yet however much I scorn Macbeth, I'll keep going back.

The reason we are theatre critics is not because we think all performance is great, but because we believe in the steadfast capacity for theatre to be transcendental. Even when seeing hundreds of shows a year, it would be folly to think these experiences might come around more than a handful of times in a lifetime - but every show could be the next one. And if it is, we want everyone to know.

Am I ever going to have that experience with Macbeth? I doubt it. But despite my cynicism about criticism, the act of being a critic is forever an act of hope. Outside the theatre I can dislike Macbeth as much as I like, but as soon as I step inside a theatre as a critic I have to believe that thi s will be the one. No matter how many times Shakespeare seems intent on proving me wrong.

* Macbeth runs at the State Theatre Company of South Australia in Adelaide until 16 September
Topics

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The curse of Macbeth: why I keep going back to see a play that I don't like | Jane Howard

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As a theatre critic it's important to not decide on a work before you see it. But while "don't judge a book by its cover" remains a virtuous aim, theatre critics have not only the cover to judge, but also years of theatregoing to frame our opinions as we take our seats.

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It's not that Shakespeare needs to burn out - but it's time for him to fade away. Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Dead white men rule the roost at South African and British universities. They preside over open spaces and lecture halls. They clog up reading lists and dominate the syllabus, particularly in subjects like philosophy and English literature.

In eight years of university teaching in the United Kingdom and South Africa, I have had to cover works by Malory, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Eliot, Sophocles, Ovid, Homer, Beckett, Joyce, Hopkins, Heaney, Anouilh and ... more Shakespeare. In all that time, I've been required to teach literary texts by just three women, also dead and white: Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen.

Outside of the courses I have designed myself, only one person of colour - Naguib Mahfouz - has featured in my required teaching. Academics can suggest additional texts and offer optional modules but not all students will delve deeper in their own time or explore authors not included on the required reading list.

In South Africa and the UK, students who want diverse, transformative education are growing increasingly restive. Their first target was not an author or theorist, but an entirely different sort of dead white man.

Toppling Rhodes from his plinth

For 81 years, a statue honouring British mining magnate, politician and committed colonialist Cecil John Rhodes occupied a perch on the University of Cape Town's (UCT) campus. But on March 9 this year the statue's silent contemplation was interrupted when 30-year-old student Chumani Maxwele threw a bucket of human faeces over the statue and sparked a movement, #RhodesMustFall.

Rhodes openly derided black people and foreshadowed the formal introduction of apartheid as far back as 1894, when he told the Parliament of Cape Town:

I hold that the natives should be apart from white men, and not mixed up with them ... We fail utterly when we put natives on an equality with ourselves.

UCT students, staff and alumni argued that a man like Rhodes did not deserve a monument at one of Africa's top universities. The statue, they insisted, was a physical reminder of just how little the institution had changed from the days when it only served white students.

Their complaints struck a national chord. One month after Maxwele's pungent protest, Cecil John Rhodes was evicted from UCT.

Mark Hutchings/Reuters

Students in the UK are also questioning the lack of diversity in higher education. They are asking: "why isn't my professor black?" and "why is my curriculum white?". These are not new questions. Calls for transformation are as much a hallmark of higher education as it is a resistance to change.

But in the era of social media, student activists are armed with more efficient and powerful tools than ever before. The message to universities, carried on platforms like YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter, is clear: engage with these issues - or get left behind.

After the fall

The Rhodes monument seems an apt metaphor for the looming presence of certain authors, texts and narratives in the humanities and social sciences. The problem is that they are not as easily dislodged as statues. If we want to build on what movements like #RhodesMustFall have achieved and really decolonise universities, it's time for dead white men to stop controlling things.

Altering the curriculum is a necessary part of this change. That doesn't mean Shakespeare should pack his bags and leave universities once and for all. It simply requires a different way of teaching - and here's how it can be done.

1. Academics and their students must engage with English being a language born of and sustained by migration and cross-cultural contact both in Britain and overseas. This narrative must be a central part of the curriculum, from the very beginning of the literary studies degree.

2. We must acknowledge the power structures that have allowed some people to contribute to the canon while keeping others out. These structures have also preserved certain texts while ignoring others. We must also explain the role universities have played in this selection process.

3. It's time to eradicate the notion that writing by women, people of colour and other socially and culturally excluded groups is only interesting to a limited number of people. Being familiar with these voices is essential to the kinds of skills cultivated by and assessed in a literary studies degree. It is not an optional extra.

4. Teachers must be retaught. We tend to reproduce the narratives we absorbed as students, so an ongoing process of research and sharing is crucial if we are to teach differently. The Sheffield SEED project is tackling this issue well.

5. "Race" and "gender" do not just mean blackness and womanhood. There must be space in the core undergraduate curriculum for analyses of whiteness and masculinity, too. Rachel van Duyvenbode's White Like Me: Reading Whiteness in American Literature MA module at the University of Sheffield is a useful template that can be adapted at undergraduate level.

6. Students must have opportunities to produce original research and pursue their own concerns and interests from the outset of their literary studies degree. The University of Sheffield again leads the pack here through its Radical Theory module. This asks students to actively engage in "re-interpret[ing] the university as a site for philosophical speculation and theory-based intervention" through independent projects and peer-to-peer learning.

7. Creative writing can give students - and teachers - a chance to imagine the voices that are ignored in our existing curricula. A possible starting point might be the responses of the Africans who, in 1607, witnessed the first recorded performance of Hamlet: on a ship off the coast of Sierra Leone.

A long-term investment

It will take more than a month-long campaign sparked by a bucket of waste to transform higher education in South Africa and the UK. In the short term, at least, there will be no empty plinths. Changing the curriculum is just one of many things that needs to be done - but it's an important start.

By allowing different voices to step up to the lecture podium, we can begin to push dead white men like William Shakespeare out of the limelight and ultimately produce a curriculum that better reflects the diversity of English literature and culture both past and present.

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It's time to take the curriculum back from dead white men

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Dead white men rule the roost at South African and British universities. They preside over open spaces and lecture halls. They clog up reading lists and dominate the syllabus, particularly in subjects like philosophy and English literature.

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I will read a novel and write you any essay from it mail me facistbiz at gmail 

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I will read a novel and write you any essay from it mail me facistbiz at gmail 

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English and Drama Teacher at Mount St Bernard College