Yeah, I agree. (Though I think they change those u’s to v’s, though even that’s not hard to understand.)
If they were going to update or standardize, I’d think priority #1 would be changing wherefore to why in Romeo & Juliet - the most famously misunderstood piece of English I can think of…
Heh, point taken. We had some sample pages from early printed versions. The professor was actually making the same point to us that I’m trying to make to you, about how different modern texts and period versions of Shakespeare are. It’s like watching a subtitled movie. Sometimes people get the false impression that they’re actually understand the original language, but remove the training wheels and they realize that they were getting a lot more help than they thought. If you guys think you could plunk an average reader down in front of a page of Shakespeare or Chaucer with no notes and no previous exposure to it, and he’d understand it, I think you’re wildly optimistic.
Like I said, the difference is only really that the first folio was handwritten, which makes it much harder to read. I’ve also read some copies of the first folio (it’s unlikely you had any pages from the actual first folio - they’re worth millions), and was surprised at how little had changed in terms of punctuation and spelling.
There are some versions of Shakespeare’s plays that have been updated a lot (while still being plays - I’m not talking Charles and Mary Lamb), but they’re not the versions people usually study. My PhD was about different adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays - I’ve read maybe forty different versions of Romeo and Juliet. The standard school editions are barely changed at all from the first folio.
Perhaps your professor was comparing the first folio to some editions that have been changed more, but that would be a disingenuous way of making his point.
But how will we Lit nerds be able to prove that we’re better than everyone else if we don’t have lovely things like this to act as a shibboleth? 
My, what a lovely strawman you’ve built. Too bad it’s early for Halloween, or you could prop him up on the porch with a pumpkin head to scare the neighbor kids. (Hint: no one said anything resembling the situation you’ve presented. Personally, my position was annotation + minimal effort = comprehension.)
Ah. No true Scotsman, huh? I was an English major too, and read Chaucer’s introduction in the original middle English as well, none too hard. And I’ve studied a ton of Shakespeare. I think you’re the one overestimating how difficult they are to decifer.
Well, to be honest the Canterbury Tales in the Norton anthology did have margin glosses and a few footnotes.
So you read Shakespeare a lot, and then you read a bunch of Chaucer? And you understood it? And what’s your point again? That if you study older versions of English long enough you’ll actually come to comprehend them naturally? No shit…
Shakespeare (his made-up vocabulary, his disregard for grammar, etc.) is hard to understand. End of story.
That’s part of the cult that surrounds him, really. This indoctrination that happens where you read him enough that it all starts to make natural sense. It’s this initiation, this hazing after which you start to share in the belief that his word is the greatest ever penned.
Well, that was certainly a bunch of Shakespeare hatred out of nowhere. Somebody having nightmare flashbacks to their high school English classes?
Yeah, wherefore the Bard hate, d00d?
I was obviously responding to all the people who jumped on Sleel trying to claim that Shakespeare is no more difficult to understand than a guy with a lisp. I think this all started with an analogy between Shakespeare and ancient Chinese writing. And I think it makes more sense than ever to say that a Chinese/Japanese person who’s had a few books’ practice would understand it just fine.
And wait, why are you all acting stunned? Did I touch a nerve…
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The comparison was between how well a native speaker of English would read older documents in an earlier form of the language, and how well a native speaker of Japanese would read older documents in an earlier form of that language. People weren’t saying that Shakespeare and Chaucer were as easy to read as a Happy Meal Box–just that they’re easier to read than Japanese texts from their respective time periods. Yes, without any kind of annotation you’re going to be missing a few words in Shakespeare and more in Chaucer, but in older forms of Japanese, the writing system is so different as to be much more obsfucated.
Do you have any background in Japanese or Chinese at all? I’m guessing not.
You give off the impression of being iconoclastic for the sake of being iconoclastic. “It’s regarded as important, therefore I must hate it.”
SFG, nicely said.