How did the commoners during shakespearean times understand his work?

Answer 1

It is a known fact that regular folk by the thousand bought tickets to go to playhouses in Shakespeare's day. They understood and enjoyed the plays--not only Shakespeare's but those by the dozens of others who were writing at the time. How, asks the modern student faced with a heavy and uncompromising book loaded with blank verse, could these uneducated working class schmos have understood what was going on?

Their first theory is that Shakespeare wrote in a different language from the one we speak now. But in fact he wrote in English which is essentially the same as the language we speak now. Apart from one or two weird words (some of which Shakespeare made up so his own audience wouldn't have known them either) most of his vocabulary is exactly the same as in modern English. So that won't wash.

Were the Elizabethans smarter on the average than people now?

No. There are three reasons why Shakespeare's plays would be easy for the groundlings to understand.

First, they did not try to read them. Scripts are not meant to be read; they are meant to be performed. Take anyone to see a Shakespeare play and they know what is going on, even when some of the language escapes them.

Second, you get used to blank verse if you hear a lot of it. It becomes easier to understand with practice. The Elizabethan audiences regularly heard actors talking this way and they got used to it.

Third, Elizabethans had a much longer attention span than people do now. They could maintain a focus on what people were saying even if they were using long and complex sentences.

Finally, we have to allow that the groundlings may not have understood the plays as well as we think. Hamlet (who is a theatrical snob, but whatever) says that the groundlings are "incapable of anything except inexplicable dumbshows and noise."