I suppose I should begin with the title. This article is not about Old English; this article is about Early Modern English. This would be a trivial difference if it were not central to the entire argument. Yes, Old English is incredibly outdated, however it is not in any sense of the word overused. A rather notable prerequisite of overuse being, of course, use. Shakespeare is not written in Old English. Old English closer resembles Icelandic than it does Modern English, for example.
The article’s next point is that there should be a greater focus on contemporary works. This is a fair comment from the interviewed student. Unfortunately the author of the article disregards this point and swerves violently back into aimless rambling.
The article’s third argument is their first argument: Shakespeare is Old English, Old English is bad, therefore Shakespeare Bad. To demonstrate that Old English (not Old English) is difficult to read, the author randomly mentions a company heavily invested in making people not read.
Old English is, admittedly, not easy to recognize as English. This of course is irrelevant as Shakespeare, again, did not write in Old English. I don’t know about everyone else, but reading Shakespeare in high school, going to Shakespeare in the park (a family endeavor, y’know with literal children), and watching the actors act, (they seem to do this on occasion) you do not need to understand each and every word (see: La Traviata).
If you are truly dead set on watching “modern” adaptions of Shakespeare which shed the Early Modern English for Modern English you have a plethora of options: The Lion King, Upstart Crow, The King, West Side Story, and god damn Gnomeo and Juliet. Nobody forces the audience to go to Shakespeare in the park (excepting of course the parents).
Shakespeare’s themes are universal – he’s not coming up with unique or out of the box themes. Updating the language does not change them; they are temporally consistent. What updating the language does is implicitly admit that you do not trust your audience, your peers, or your teachers. Finally, if you cannot empathize with others because they speak slightly differently than you do, then you are broken.