st of the director. Without delving into a debate on whether or not a play should be performed in the style of the time in which it was written, one must acknowledge that a director can very noticeably, or subtly make adjustments to characters and plots which an actor must reflect in their performance. Furthermore, the audience to which the actor is performing must be taken into consideration. Despite the fact that we are not the classless society that we wish to be in the 21st century, there are less class barriers in place than those of 1597. The aristocratic, highly - Christian society of Shakespeare's day differs hugely from our own, and this must be taken into account along with the fact that the modern audience is presumably better educated than their late 16th century counterparts. Finally, the type of stage being used may or may not be an issue for an actor in preparing to portray a character. The Elizabethan stage, such as The Globe would have been in Shakespeare's mind as he wrote, but the huge variety if performance stages today often means certain aspects of a performance must curtailed or expunged upon. Indeed the versatility of many pre - cinema scripts has been demonstrated on the silver screen, none more successfully than the Stratford Bard in recent years.
             Shakespeare's plays are also recognised for the number of plot undertones that can be discerned upon closer examination. Although not a 1990's phenomena, there has been in the recent past an upsurge in the debate over homosexual devices in Shakespearean plays. While some of these claims do have substance to them, with literature as intense and intricate as Shakespeare's, one can read anything that one desires into it to attain one's goal. Sometimes it is necessary simply to take a play as it stands, rather than questioning every element and deconstructing it into such a level of obscurity as to lose the intentions of the auth...