This is asinine. I feel sorry for your students. Any teacher of Shakespeare (or any other historical literature) needs to begin with inculcating in their students the awareness that "then is not now."

In other words, the prevailing cultural values and attitudes shared by Shakespeare and his audience in England four centuries ago were almost as different from our current culture as the world of, say, mandarin China or the ancient Mayans. The fact that he and his peers wrote and spoke a language accessible to modern speakers should not occlude the fact that he was writing within a culture almost completely alien to ours.

The wise teacher therefore should predicate lessons on an anthropological understanding that they are "reading" another culture, not to be judged by the standards of our own, but rather to be studied in and of itself, objectively, so we can see both the vast differences between their world and ours, but also the common human themes that emerge despite these differences. Shakespeare was formed by, and participated in, his own culture, but his poetic talents and insights into human character and motives transcend it.