Why is shakespeare so hard to read

So at the time of Shakespeare, wit meant knowledge, and now it has a different meaning. Another interesting case is a sentence in which all the parts have shifted their meaning. Or when people abuse you, keep quiet. It is definitely not advice we would take as rational. It actually means size someone up but keep quiet about it. The English language has gone through so many changes that one wonders whether understanding Shakespeare would be much different in English and Vietnamese.

This is why even native speakers of English have to read Shakespeare with a knowledge of these changes to avoid the feeling of frustration from not being able to get a whole idea of what is going on. The English language has transformed over its history. All features of the language, namely grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling have changed over time. There are so many differences in the language of Shakespeare and modern English.

For example, semantic changes have led to different meanings of words. A word like silly meant blessed, while it means foolish today. Words have adopted new meanings and some features have been eliminated from the English language. It is not because of ignorance or illiteracy. The only reason is that many words have changed their meanings over these centuries.

I could write with no depth whatsoever but someone, someday, of the professor-sort, will be grading their students on their interpretation of my depth, a depth I know today I didnt intend. There will be entire books devoted to scholarly discussions and essays about my work. I find it annoying, actually, that teachers could believe there is more depth than there might actually have been. I have written short stories for classes, and classmates make all sorts of outrageous comments about subtle meaning and whatnot that I know full well I had no part in.

My intended depth had in fact fallen on deaf ears. When youre as poetic and vague as Shakespeare, anyone with an imagination can put their own interpretive spin on anything. Allusions to ancient myths is why one can think Pouchkine difficult to read, esp.

Still Pouchkine and Shakespeare did the same thing and that was language we talk now in Russia and world-wide resp.

Shakespearean language is the beautifulest English I ever come across. Is Shakespeare really harder to read than other old books? Does anyone think Milton or Spenser are easy? And what about spoken Shakespeare? On the other hand, anecdotally that theory would explain why my teen-age daughter likes Shakespeare so much—she likes mythology even more. KJB was written in formal English, or so I understand. Many people have said they find reading Shakespeare a bit daunting, so here are five tips for how to make it simpler and more pleasurable.

If your edition has footnotes, pay no attention to them. They distract you from your reading and de-skill you, so that you begin to check everything even when you actually know what it means. The layout of speeches on the page is like a kind of musical notation or choreography. Long speeches slow things down — and, if all the speeches end at the end of a complete line, that gives proceedings a stately, hierarchical feel — as if the characters are all giving speeches rather than interacting.

Blank verse, the unrhymed ten-beat iambic pentamenter structure of the Shakespearean line, varies across his career. Early plays — the histories and comedies — tend to end each line with a piece of punctuation, so that the shape of the verse is audible. Later plays — the tragedies and the romances — tend towards a more flexible form of blank verse, with the sense of the phrase often running over the line break.