Why do we still do Elizabethan plays?

If a play still gets performed 400 years after it was written, it is because it is one of the few plays that works, still speaks to something inherent in the human condition, even after hundreds of years. They still get done because they are still good - in fact Shakespeare is considered the finest writer in the English language.

I don't think anyone other than school kids go to see a Shakepeare play for the "educational" value - we go to them because they are among the best that humans can aspire to on the stage.

Because people from all over the world come to Britain to visit the theatre and Shakespeare is a mega-bucks playwright who is never out of date. Benedict Cumberbatch will do Hamlet next year, John Simm played Hamlet in Sheffield's Crucible Theatre recently. How many of these performances have you seen or will see? Judi Dench has been performing in theatre, including Elizabethan plays for 50+ years, bless her. If you're an actress you will want to do these plays. if not , you can always hope for a soap role. But seriously listen to the dialogue in your favourite soap and then ask yourself, "Do I really have to memorise this garbage?"

Shakespeare's plays will never grow stale, because they deal with universal human emotions and behaviors: love, jealousy, resentment, confusion, greed. They do so in extremely effective and eloquent ways.

That's also true of the work of some other writers, Johnson and Marlowe, for example. We find it both instructive and entertaining to see how our ancestors in a particular time and place -- one remarkably rich and fruitful in terms of the development of literature -- viewed these emotions and behaviors, how they understood and examined the human comedy and tragedy, and we admire their spectacular deployment of the early modern English language -- as English was becoming the language we know today.

Because they are entertaining in the best sense of that word. Your question suggests that you don't like these plays, but the fact that people spend millions of dollars a year on theater and movie tickets to see them every year suggests that not everybody agrees with you.

Because you don't stop doing theater because it's old.

Here's something good to listen to on the topic:

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/why-should-we-study-eliza...