I remember as a kid seeing an representation of Shakespeare's Twelfth's night in French as a kid and the meaning was changed so that the jokes would work in French. Likewise, it was made to rhyme in French. I do believe that even in older works, it makes more sense to translate in a creative way. After all, those works were written to convey comedy or poetry and if a translation fails to convey that, then the translation failed.

Likewise, when Baudelaire translated Edgar Poe, the translation literal as it would have been a failure to convey the poetry of the text.