Why are shakespeares' plays hard for modern readers to understand?

Answer 1

The main reason Shakespeare's plays are difficult for modern readers to understand is that they are mostly written in poetry and quite dense and difficult poetry at that. Shakespeare also often writes in long and complicated sentences which are tricky to unravel. Although a lot of people focus on unusual words in Shakespeare's vocabulary, these are not the most significant reasons why his plays are hard to understand.

For example, Macbeth says "But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we'd jump the life to come." Every word is a perfectly ordinary modern word which Shakespeare uses with its modern meaning. There isn't even the odd syntax he sometimes uses to improve the rhythm of his lines. And yet this is a difficult line to understand. Why does Shakespeare have Macbeth compare time to a river, and the present to a bank or shoal? Why jump the future?