# Anyone else have a hard time understanding Shakespeare? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 23, 2004, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696 "2004-01-23T01:42:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2004, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/21 "2004-01-24T23:15:01Z")
\ Does anyone know if it’s true that Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is only on VHS? I’ve been looking for it on DVD (needs to be R1) and have no luck whatsoever. It’s not my favorite version (I like the Mel Gibson one) but I was hoping to buy it as a birthday present, and would need it by June. \ ---
**Author:** ![Doomtrain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/0ea827/32.png) [@Doomtrain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doomtrain)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2004, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/22 "2004-01-24T23:55:01Z")
I checked Amazon and the only thing they have is a “Sign up and be notified if it ever gets released.” Spring 2004 is the word on a variety of websites, but I can’t do better than that. ---
**Author:** ![Ilsa\_Lund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/a6a055/32.png) [@Ilsa\_Lund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ilsa_Lund)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/23 "2004-01-25T00:28:50Z")
I don’t have your particular problem. I can understand the content and the actors well enough. I just hate his comedies. The dramas are great, but A Midsummer Nights Dream and The Taming Of The Shrew irritate me to no end. ---
**Author:** ![Flutterby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Flutterby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flutterby)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/24 "2004-01-25T00:53:04Z")
> [@Leechboy](#): > > People often forget how dirty the Bard can get. It wasn’t that I had forgotten how dirty the Bard could get… it was that up until that point I _didn’t know_ how dirty he could get. Remember the first time I heard this I was 15 and at that point my mind wasn’t tuned to such nuances (I was pretty naive and had a bland mind, what I read often I took at face value. Especially with the Bard for some reason.) though I had read Romeo and Juliet numerous times before. If I went back today and read Taming of the Shrew (btw can anyone recommend a good video of this?) I would pick up a lot more then I did the first time I saw it at around age 10. ---
**Author:** ![Doomtrain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/0ea827/32.png) [@Doomtrain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doomtrain)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/25 "2004-01-25T05:16:59Z")
If you want Taming of the Shrew, the one with Liz Taylor is frickin’ hysterical. ---
**Author:** ![TJdude825](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dec6dc/32.png) [@TJdude825](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TJdude825)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/26 "2004-01-25T05:56:19Z")
I’ve had to read some plays and sonnets in school, and I liked the sonnets much more. They’re shorter and, in my opinion, easier to understand. From what I understand, he wrote hundreds of sonnets, so maybe you should start with those. ---
**Author:** ![Art\_Barber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/edb3f5/32.png) [@Art\_Barber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Art_Barber)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 6:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/27 "2004-01-25T06:08:02Z")
I agree with those who have suggested that you focus on _watching_ Shakespeare, as opposed to reading. His plays were meant to be watched, not read (We don’t read screenplays to understand movies, do we?). A larger issue is why you’re bothering. I’m firmly convinced that Shakespeare’s work has been not so much misinterpreted as unnecessarily cannonized. In his day, Shakespeare was a populist; his work was enjoyed by more than just the upper class. How? For one, _people understood him_. The audiences could watch his plays on a lark (not that they did…fun being a rare commodity, they took entertainment seriously), not watch and understand them after endless study. That’s not possible in our modern age. Modern English is so much different…so much so that it’s really a different language. You wouldn’t watch a French movie without subtitles, would you? What I’m driving at here is that Shakespeare has been raised to the level of genius because he’s so incomprehensible _to modern ears_. That’s not a good enough reason. Keep in mind, BTW, that Shakespearre hasn’t always been held in such high regard; he was popular in his day, forgotten, and then rediscovered years later by academics. Art ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 6:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/28 "2004-01-25T06:35:56Z")
Art Barber writes: \> What I’m driving at here is that Shakespeare has been raised to the level of \> genius because he’s so incomprehensible to modern ears. That’s not a good \> enough reason. Keep in mind, BTW, that Shakespearre hasn’t always been \> held in such high regard; he was popular in his day, forgotten, and then \> rediscovered years later by academics. The problem with your theory is that the high point of Shakespeare’s popularity was in the nineteenth century. He was truly worshipped then, and not just by academics. Shakespeare’s plays were popular with all audiences then. So it’s not a matter of his popularity varying only by the incomprehensibility of his language. Shakespeare was popular in the early 17th century when the plays were first performed, but the popularity was mostly among the masses. There weren’t very many scholars then, and they didn’t think much about current plays. They thought mostly of Greek and Roman plays. There was a decline in Shakespeare’s popularity till the 19th century, when he was rediscovered by both the masses and the scholars. By the 20th century, some of the worship had declined. Shakespeare remained reasonably popular for both the masses and the academics. And it’s not his incomprehensibility that’s appreciated. Annotated editions never appeared until the 20th century. Shakespeare’s fans, both among the public and the scholars, are more likely now to understand all the references and the vocabulary than the more enthusiastic fans of the 19th century. ---
**Author:** ![Call\_me\_Frank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/90ced4/32.png) [@Call\_me\_Frank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Call_me_Frank)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/29 "2004-01-25T07:32:51Z")
I too have a less than easy time at understanding Shakespeare. I get the gist of it, but there are parts that just defy the modern rules of syntax, imueo (in my unedumacated opinion). However, I found that after I gained greater proficiency in _German_ Shakespeare was a little more comprehensible. Make of that what you will. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 8:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/30 "2004-01-25T08:33:14Z")
Please see Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version of _Romeo and Juliet_. It has been wonderful at breaking down barriers to understanding Shakespeare! Although the dialogue is edited, the performances leave little to misunderstand. It’s a beautiful production. I believe that Olivia Hussey was only thirteen when she played Juliet. (An adult in an adolescent’s role just doesn’t make sense.) She was grand! Don’t worry too much about understanding every single word or line. It all falls together. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 9:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/31 "2004-01-25T09:09:59Z")
Agree with most everything said here. Movies also tend to cut less important bits and diversions that can confuse people. I understand Shakespeare’s language very well, but I can get totally lost on the cultural allusions and references to Greek and Latin things. Those might have made sense to those who got the education Shakespeare did, it doesn’t make any sense to anybody now. I like a few of the comedies but prefer the dramas as a whole. Some of the comedies just aren’t funny to me, although a few are hysterical. (Problem is that everybody knows which ones those are and they get performed a lot until you’re somewhat immune to it.) Watching many of the dramas, I wish people could clip the comedy stuff out. It was necessary to include that stuff for Shakespeare, but some it gets very jarring in a dramatic play when the IQ level drops 50 points (and that’s only if you get the jokes). Even if you get Shakespeare a lot of the time, sometimes it’s hopeless. We did _Merchant of Venice_ my junior year of high school, and some of the comic stuff was absolutely unintelligible. It seems the guy who played the Clown in that show had a tendency to improvise, and nobody knows what Shakespeare wrote and what he just made up, or if he stuck to the text at all, or generally what the hell he’s talking about. > [@](#): > > And if something sounds like it’s a raunchy pun, it probably is. > [@](#): > > People often forget how dirty the Bard can get. This is true, but in my experience THE worst thing some actors do to Shakespeare is to make every damn line into a dick joke. Sometimes it’s really there, but it can ruin the rhythm of a scene and make the audience lose the thread of the plot. Also, it’s annoying. Unless someone really great is doing it, the actor shorthand for ‘this is a dirty pun’ always involves thrusting your hips (or, better) your sword just so, or grabbing a woman onstage or in the audience, or whispering to another guy character conspicuously. Drives me nuts. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 9:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/32 "2004-01-25T09:11:31Z")
Another voice in the chorus. Watching Shakespeare is much more entertaining than reading him. There’s a pretty good Shakespeare festival semi-near where I live that I’ve been to a few times, and it’s nearly always loads of fun. One year we got tickets to an adaptation of some of the historical plays - they took, I think, 3 of his historical plays that are widely considered to be deathly dull (I forget which ones) and compressed them all into one play. They didn’t rewrite anything - just cut and compressed. I was riveted the whole way through. It was really fascinating. A good performance can make all the difference. ---
**Author:** ![Doomtrain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/0ea827/32.png) [@Doomtrain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doomtrain)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/33 "2004-01-25T17:42:53Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > Another voice in the chorus. No, no, no, that’s Greek drama! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Katisha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bcef8e/32.png) [@Katisha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Katisha)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2004, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696/34 "2004-01-25T20:14:59Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > One year we got tickets to an adaptation of some of the historical plays - they took, I think, 3 of his historical plays that are widely considered to be deathly dull (I forget which ones) and compressed them all into one play. They didn’t rewrite anything - just cut and compressed. I was riveted the whole way through. It was really fascinating. A good performance can make all the difference. If it’s three plays, then it was probably _Henry VI_ – whose reputation for dullness is really quite undeserved. They tend to get ignored because they can be a bit of a tough read (I personally love them, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Shakespearean so that may not count), but as theater they’re absolutely electric, even unabridged. _Especially_ unabridged, honestly. Plus you’ll never watch _Richard III_ the same way again. This post has been brought to you by the Committee to Show the _Henry VI_ Plays Some Love. 😉 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anyone-else-have-a-hard-time-understanding-shakespeare/225696.md?page=1)