For many years, the general public has had a misconception about the nature of Shakespeare. His collective works are generally thought of as a pastime of the upper class and intellectual elite, on par with opera.

As many know, the truth is that Shakespeare’s plays were actually a mundane form of entertainment in their time, on par with going to the movies or seeing a musical today. His productions often tackled humorous or tragic concepts that everyone could relate to—love, daily life, sex, rivalries, and conflict—presenting them in a way that was engaging and at times absurd to the general populace.

But the funny accents and fancier words of Shakespeare eventually started to seem incomprehensible to modern audiences. The timeless plays gradually fell out of favor as people became accustomed to the casual pulp-noir tone of radio plays and the action-packed police procedurals that followed with the advent of television. Just as community theater itself supplanted wise elders at the campfire entertaining their families with nighttime storytelling, this was just another step in a long lineage of narrative tradition.