The play was translated over several years by Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader of the "Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project", with feedback and editorial assistance from Mark Shoulson, d'Armond Speers, and Will Martin.

The impetus for the project came from a line from the motion picture Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in which Chancellor Gorkon states, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."

Spock, recognising the quotation, responds, "Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1", to which Gorkon replies with his statement about the "original" Klingon text of Shakespeare.

"[3] The idea had also already been used by Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Pnin, the eponymous hero of which prefers the Russian translation he grew up reading to the inferior English edition: “whenever you were reduced to look up something in the English version, you never found this or that beautiful, noble, sonorous line that you remembered all your life from Kroneberg’s text in Vengerov’s splendid edition.

[4] The introduction also claims that the notion that Shakespeare was a human poet living in the late 16th century was invented after the United Federation of Planets instigated a large propaganda campaign in order to rally the human population against Klingons, "hoping by this falsification of history to discredit the achievements of Klingon culture".