The Text is King

I went and saw A Midsummer Night's Dream on Saturday night, and something that really surprised me is how they played around with the text to make it fit the modern setting. Not that it was a bad thing. The way they did it was actually really funny. However, it made me think about the other Shakespeare adaptations (mostly film versions) that I've seen, which all were very faithful to the text beyond moving some things around and taking some things out. This is the first Shakespeare performance or adaptation that I've seen that actually exchanged some of the words for new ones, even though not all of those were in an Elizabethan setting.
This in turn made me wonder why the original Shakespearean text is often viewed as somewhat sacred. In an article that I found via Google on the "dos and don'ts" of Shakespeare adaptations (see here) one of the "don'ts" was to avoid messing with the text. Obviously Shakespeare's use of language was groundbreaking and is still powerful for many modern audiences, but I don't see any harm in changing just a few words here and there to make the text fit a new setting better. It was a bit distracting at times when I was trying to focus on understanding the Shakespearean language, but overall it helped the text work much better in the modern setting.