Spark Notes publishes, in print and on the web, Shakespeare texts in a series called No Fear Shakespeare. Each volume presents Shakespeare’s text and, on facing pages, a line-by-line translation into modern English prose. The modernizations—like translations into more obviously foreign languages—can reveal a lot about the original.

This is the closing couplet of the first scene of Twelfth Night, or What You Will:

Away before me to sweet beds of flowers,
Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.

And this is that couplet without fear:

Take me to the garden.
I need a beautiful place to sit and think about love.

This next pair of lines is from the speech that concludes Macbeth 3.2:

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

The fear-free version:

The gentle creatures of the day are falling asleep,
while night’s predators are waking up to look for their prey.