Why is Shakespeare Difficult to Understand?

Hmm... There's a lot of answers to this one. I think it's because the language itself is incredibly emotive, far more than contemporary English can typically be. Shakespeare looks and feels incredibly clunky when its written down on the page, but it can be some of the most fluid and moving dialogue one can ever hear. You can see the problem with translation in practically every high school English class who read Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet. Stilted, fumbling and arhythmic because what they see on the page doesn't quite connect with what they feel. It's carried quite a lot by that speaker's emotion.

Another hurdle is also likely cultural. I know it's a word that I use almost ad nauseum, but it has a very pertinent impact on how texts are interpreted. More tellingly, you can see the shift in language, not just over the course of centuries, but in mere decades as well. Moreover, the emphasis is usually placed on culturally specific slang. For example, how many middle class, native English-speaking people living forty years ago (circa 1977) would have wondered if senpai noticed them? How many of them would have seen "Dewey Defeats Truman" in the context of what's now known as a meme? Shakespeare, sharing a trait with quite a lot of speculative fiction, has similarly his own cant. "Bodkin" for dagger, "slugabed" for someone who sleeps in, "facinerous" for evil and so forth.

The latter isn't so much a problem exclusive to Shakespeare though. If you read something like Neuromancer by William Gibson, there's a lot of local language that you have to absorb by the context it's in. "Jacking into your deck" means linking your mind to cyberspace through a mind-hardware interface. It takes some getting used to, but it's manageable because the majority of that futurespeak is couched in Modern English. Shakespeare adds another layer of difficulty on top of that by having wordplay and worldbuilding in an earlier version of the dialect. It stops being like trying to read Iain M. Banks and instead becomes like trying to get the play-on-words of Asterix in the original French.

Knowing the purpose of adjectives, nouns and verbs can help quite a bit with deciphering Shakespearean language, I think. Just knowing the structure of Modern English can help with the structure of the plays considerably.

Shakespeare is difficult because he's writing in an idiom that's over 400 years old. Once you get used to that, he's great. I mean, some of the jokes have aged badly but no more or less than some comedy from more recent years. His stories are great and are can constantly surprise new audiences: Henry V has some really great ideas about what it means to be a leader in times of conflict; Much Ado About Nothing is still hilarious; we still argue about whether or not Shylock is a sympathetic character or not; and Julius Caesar is a great political thriller.

That language is the barrier, but it doesn't take much to get over it.

Like opera, its best to read a synopsis of the story first.

Then you can sit back and enjoy with trying to work out and keep pace with the plot.

People always say Shakespeare isn't meant to be read, it's meant to be heard. It's true. Look at BFs Hamlet and within a couple weeks, King Lear. I can't say anything for Lear but Hamlet is one of the best things BF has put out in recent years.

It's been said above, they're meant to be listened to, seen, not particularly read. He was a playwright and a poet, not a novelist (although the concept hardly existed) or an essayist. And even if he had been an essayist the style of the time wouldn't necessarily have given him greater clarity, it might even have decreased it! Since plays needed to be understood by the mass of the groundlings and not just those who could read.

It can be easy to understand basic plot, but one really does have to read quite carefully and perhaps also watch a performance or two. There are double and triple meanings scattered throughout, at times.

He went on a bit lol. He had some good one liners lol