Why are Shakespeare's plays considered difficult to modern students to understand?

Answer 1

Your question could be either "Why do people think Shakespeare's plays are difficult?" or "What are the real reasons people find Shakespeare's plays difficult to understand?" These are quite different questions, because people are often wrong about why they have problems. In particular, they imagine that the plays are written in a different language. This is not true, as anyone will find out if they try to read a translation of the plays into a language they do not know. Assuming that you are not a Polish speaker, try reading a passage from Shakespeare in Polish translation and then look at Shakespeare's words. You will instantly recognize Shakespeare as writing in English; most if not all of the words will be familiar to you. Again, the problem is not the use of unfamiliar words, although Shakespeare does use words which he just made up and more often uses the secondary meanings of words. But actually we humans are well equipped to acquire new vocabulary when reading or listening to a different dialect of our own languages. Americans can understand people from England and even from Scotland without a lot of difficulty if they are willing to try (as they did when the Harry Potter books became popular in the US).

The real reasons for difficulty in understanding Shakespeare's plays are as follows:

1. They are plays, which is to say, they are instructions to actors as to what to say in the performance of the play. They are best understood when they are watched, not when they are read. If you want to know what a movie is all about, do you read the screenplay, or do you watch the movie? Of course you watch it. The ability to read and understand playscripts requires an understanding of dramatic convention and a good imagination, and it is not easy, especially the first time. Unfortunately Shakespeare's plays are usually the first plays students read.
2. Shakespeare wrote using verse. Many of his characters speak in it. What this means is that there is a rhythm to their speech and sometimes Shakespeare bends the syntax to fit the rhythm. So, instead of having Richard III say "buried in the deep bosom of the ocean" he has him say "in the deep bosom of the ocean buried," moving the verb to the end of the sentence. Formerly, this was a common custom among people writing lyrics to songs, to make them fit the rhythm of the melody. More recently, however, lyricists do not try to match their lyrics to the melody; they alter the melody to match the lyric. As a result, English speakers these days have very rigid expectations of syntax and easily get confused when it is altered.
3. Shakespeare often writes long and complex sentences. He is not alone in this, of course, and never reaches the kind of sentences we find in 19th century French writers like Proust and Hugo. But many people nowadays expect sentences to be short and simple. They have never studied the grammar of sentences with multiple clauses. They are not practised in unravelling complex sentences and easily get lost.
4. Shakespeare uses a lot of poetic and rhetorical devices. They are what make his words sing. But song lyrics and narrative prose these days hardly use these devices at all apart from a few simple and chichéd similes, and people rarely read or study poetry like they used to do. As a result many students are unprepared for the poetic richness of the dialogue.

Thus, the reasons why people might have trouble understanding Romeo's line "What light from yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." is not the words (your word processor will recognize all of them), but the fact that for rhythmic reasons he doesn't say "What light breaks from yonder window?" and moves the verb to the end, and the metaphor of Juliet as the sun to say that she is dazzlingly beautiful.

Answer 2

1. Shakespeare uses a huge vocabulary, far larger than anyone else including the audiences who saw his plays for the first time in the 16th and 17th centuries. There are inevitably going to be lots of words the reader does not know.

2. Some of the words and phrases he uses are slang or otherwise outdated. Sometimes the words have secondary slang meanings that might go over the reader's head.

3. Shakespeare's sentences are sometimes long, very long, and require a lot of concentration to follow through to the end.

4. Shakespeare wrote a lot of his dialogue in poetry. To many people the idea of people talking in poetry is just weird, but it has the advantage of making what people say much more beautiful, powerful and compelling. Some of the side effects are that the lines are in verse, which gives them a characteristic rhythm (easier to memorize), sometimes results in verbs at the end of a sentence being placed, and involves a lot of similes, metaphors, personifications and all that other poetry stuff. You might find "What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" harder to understand than "Hey, isn't that Juliet in that window?" but it is much more beautiful.

5. Shakespeare wrote plays. He meant them to be watched, not read. Unless you are practised in reading scripts, it is very very hard to imagine how the play will look when it is being acted just by reading it. This is, I think, the fact which, more than anything else, makes Shakespeare's plays difficult for people. Often they are the first plays students have read, and they have no clue how to understand what is happening.

Answer 3

I am assuming that by "hars" you mean "hard" but even so I am finding your question hard to read. When you talk about reading Shakespeare, you might mean reading him as a person to find out what he was thinking, or more likely you mean reading things he wrote. And you say "was" so you mean some time in the past. So you are saying at some time in the past someone had trouble reading something that Shakespeare wrote, and you want to know why. My guess is that it depends on the person doing the reading. Maybe that person was totally illiterate, which would explain why he or she had trouble reading.

Answer 4

1. He wrote plays. Plays are hard to read because there is no narrator to give background or context or what is going on in the characters' minds. All you have is the words they say and brief descriptions of what they do. They are not meant to be read, but rather to be a guide to actors who will perform them for you.

2. He wrote in poetry. He made most of his characters speak in a consistent ten-syllable pattern. Often what they say rhymes. In order to do this he sometimes does funny things to word order and word pronunciation.

3. He used a huge vocabulary. Shakespeare used more words than ordinary people used then or use now. He made up words. His works use four times as many words as the contemporary King James Bible. People who watched his plays then or watch or read them now are bound to run across unfamiliar words.

4. He uses metaphors, similes and personifications all the time. If you are not used to dealing with this kind of language it will seem weird and incomprehensible to you.

5. He expresses complicated ideas in long sentences. Many of his sentences would not fit into a tweet. It's hard work working out complex ideas and following how they develop over a long sentence. Many people these days struggle with sentences of more than four or five words.

Basically, learning new words and more vibrant ways of expressing yourself including rhymes and rhythm and figurative speech as well as learning how to comprehend complex thoughts will do you good, and it is worth your while to learn these skills to understand Shakespeare better, because it will help you to understand everything better.

As for the difficulty of reading plays, there is a simple solution: watch them instead.

Answer 5

People find it hard to read Shakespeare's plays for two main reasons:

1. All plays are hard to read. There is no context to the dialogue given. Playwrights of Shakespeare's generation did not even give more than the most basic stage directions, and did not clutter up their scripts with descriptions of the characters (which is pointless because they will inevitably look just like whatever actor happens to be playing them). Plays are intended to be watched, not read, so if you read them you have to imagine that you are watching a performance. It is clearly much easier to watch a performance than to create it from your imagination.

2. Shakespeare's dialogue is poetic. Some people call it "heightened". It is full of unusual vocabulary (it was unusual in Shakespeare's time too), metaphors, similes and other figures of speech, and long and complicated sentences. People can and do write like this nowadays, and it is always difficult to read. But that is the price to be paid for powerful writing. Shakespeare could have written "Isn't that Juliet in that window?" but he wrote "But soft; what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East and Juliet is the sun." They are both in ordinary English but one is dull and the other is amazing poetry.

Answer 6

Shakespeare's writing is hard to understand, primarily, because it is poetry. Shakespeare uses metaphors, similes and personification, as well as allusions to Classical Literature to get his point across. Sometimes he uses long and complicated sentences. He also uses a much larger vocabulary than most people have (or had in his day, for that matter) so some of his words are bound to be unfamiliar.

Let's take an example from the beginning of The Merchant of Venice:

Salerio: Your mind is tossing on the ocean,

There where your argosies with portly sail,

Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,

Or as it were the pageants of the sea,

Do overpeer the petty traffickers

That curtsy to them, do them reverence,

As they fly by them with their woven wings.

What Salerio means is "You're worried about your ships." But look how he says it: instead of five words he uses fifty-two. There is a personification ("your mind is tossing") a simile ("like signiors") a metaphor ("woven wings"=sails), an unusual word ("argosies") and a word he just made up for the occasion ("overpeer") and the extended metaphor of Antonio's pompous and burgherlike ships being curtsied to by lesser and faster ships. And all this is in the stately and powerful rhythm of iambic pentameter. The language is rich and conveys a wonderful image, but it is not easy to understand. You have to work at it.

Answer 7

They are difficult to understand for a number of reasons:

1. They were never intended to be read in the first place. They are plays and were meant to be watched and listened to. Modern theatre-goers have a much easier time following them than modern readers for this reason.
2. Reading scripts takes practise. A play script is a set of instructions for actors and directors, telling them how to put on this play. Shakespeare's instructions are not very detailed, as he expected the plays to be put on by his friends who he talked to daily. Handing someone a play script and expecting them to know what it will look like is like handing someone the score for a symphony and expecting them to know what it will sound like. It takes training.
3. The language is poetic. It uses unusual words and is full of rhetorical and figurative devices. A lot of attention has been paid to rhythm and the quality of the sounds in the words. Unless you have some experience with poetry, you will be confused. People used to study poetry in school and study why it was poetry, and what poets were trying to do. Some knowledge along these lines would make Shakespeare's plays easier to understand.
4. People expect them to be difficult to understand. They have been told this by parents, teachers, other students and the media. And of course it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They expect it to be difficult and so their minds reject the plain and obvious meaning. Young children--I'm talking six and seven year olds--can follow along what is going on in a scene of Shakespeare (provided they can understand the context--their lack of knowledge of sexual jealousy will mean that they won't get what is happening in Othello) without too much difficulty. They will often enjoy it--because nobody has told them they cannot enjoy it, that it is some kind of incomprehensible mental torture. Show little kids the bit in A Midsummer Night's Dream where Bottom gets turned into a donkey and they love it.

The dialect is actually not all that difficult to understand. It is not that far from most dialects of English today. If people from Scotland can figure out what black American rap singers are saying, anyone who speaks English (including the rap singers) can figure out Shakespeare. There are, of course, those people who are so parochial that they reject anything outside their own little lives, and reject anyone's use of language which differs from their own. It is very sad.

Answer 8

Because it is not written in the same literature that we use today.