Why is the language of shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet so challenging to understand?

Answer 1

1. It's poetry. In Romeo and Juliet particularly Shakespeare uses poetic forms like the Sonnet and rhymes his lines. He writes most of his dialogue in blank verse. Using verse means that he sometimes reorganizes the words of his sentence, so that "What light breaks through yonder window?" becomes "What light through yonder window breaks?"

Being poetry also means that the lines are crammed full of poetic devices like similes, metaphors, personifications, oxymorons, etc. etc. It takes a little more work to understand these things, but it's worth it.

The poetry is the most significant reason why people find Shakespeare challenging.

2. Sentence length. Our minds are tuned to simple sentences of seven words or less, or to sentence fragments of about that length. Most of what Shakespeare puts into his characters' mouths is about that long, but every once in a while you will get something like "O, speak again, bright angel, for thou art as glorious to this night, being o'er my head, as is a winged messenger of heaven unto the white-upturned wondering eyes of mortals that fall back to gaze on him when he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds and sails upon the bosom of the air." Whew! It takes some thinking to figure out a thought which is that long.

3. Uncommon words. The average person uses 10,000 words and can understand as many more again. Shakespeare uses 37,000 words in his plays. A lot of them he made up himself. His audience must have been guessing a lot of the time as to what his words meant. The word he picks is usually the perfect word, but can send you scrambling to a dictionary sometimes.

4. Changes in the language. People tend to focus on this, the least significant challenge to reading Shakespeare. Learning the second person pronouns thou, thee and thy and their verb forms, and the half-dozen contractions which have fallen out of use takes ten minutes to learn and covers most of the difficulties that come from this area.

Answer 2

The language in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet can be challenging to understand due to its use of old Elizabethan English, unfamiliar vocabulary, and complex sentence structures. Additionally, some words and phrases have evolved or changed meaning over time, making them harder to interpret for modern readers.