Et tu, dude? Why do directors take Shakespeare so far from his contexts?

Members of the theatergoing jury: I come before you today to speak in favor of men in tights.

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It is the fashion in these meddling times — now perhaps more than ever — to put the doublets in mothballs and tie up Shakespeare in the threads of ponderous context. Only cursory consideration seems to be given in Washington or Baltimore, London or New York to whether it makes sense to dress Petruchio in chaps or Macbeth’s witches in the aprons of abattoir workers. To transport Lear to the heath of “Waiting For Godot” or Shylock to a tenement on the Lower East Side. To decide that Messina is not on Sicily but a stone’s throw from Havana, or that the Rome of “Julius Caesar” was actually meant to be the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein.

Yes, somehow, a consensus has been reached that William Shakespeare was not a playwright but a time-travel agent, one whose points of geographic and temporal reference were meant as mere suggestions. A milestone of sorts was achieved this season at Washington’s Tony Award-winning Shakespeare Theatre Company, where all three of its Shakespeare productions — “Much Ado About Nothing,” “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” and current “The Merry Wives of Windsor” — have been set, with wildly varying degrees of success, in the century between 1915 and now.

The city’s other influential outlet for Shakespeare, the Folger Theatre, has proved just as seducible by directors lugging in their conceptual baggage. A rootin’, tootin’ “The Taming of the Shrew,” set in the Old West, just finished a run in its Capitol Hill playhouse, where one would have been forgiven for wondering why angry Kate didn’t use her trusty gun, or how Padua wound up being a suburb of Tombstone. The scouting for unique environments in which to speak in iambic pentameter goes on apace in other major cities: Witness the arch and overpraised new “As You Like It” in New York’s Central Park, set in the wilderness of mid-19th-century America, with banjo-picking exiles from the court — in this case, a fort like those eternally under attack in vintage cowboy-and-Indian flicks.

The fussing with the cosmetics of Shakespeare has become so routine that it is a shock to more devoted patrons of the Bard when any of his plays are performed these days in both the time and place the author intended them. Has a belief taken hold that only by placing Shakespeare’s characters in elaborate disguise can a contemporary theatergoer view them as relevant? The compulsive tinkering yields distressing side effects. Distracted audiences can not only lose touch with the pleasure of listening to Shakespeare’s language but also may become less able to distinguish clearly the worthier attempts at innovation.

The application, for instance, of anachronism to enlarge a theme can be a very useful tool, one that director Rebecca Bayla Taichman employed to fine effect in her abstracted updating of “The Taming of the Shrew” at Shakespeare Theatre in 2007. The difference here was in a director, challenging “Shrew’s” antiquated view of women, who carefully chose a dim sum of modern references that helped us see where attitudes have (or haven’t) evolved since Shakespeare’s time. In the cases of Shakespeare’s broader comedies, where the expectation expands for some degree of absurdity, the demand for rigorous logic recedes. This is partly why director Michael Kahn’s psychedelic Beatles-inspired “Love’s Labor’s Lost” in 2006 proved so easy to digest — and like.