Near the end of her course on classical mythology, Elizabeth Vandiver speculates on why people find Shakespeare hard to read. She says that, contrary to popular opinion, the difficulty is not the language per se. Elizabethan English is not that foreign to modern readers. The difficulty in reading Shakespeare comes from the literary allusions, particularly the allusions to classical mythology.
Her explanation matches my experience. I can easily read the King James version of the Bible, produced during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but I find it hard to slog through Shakespeare. (To be fair, I must say I grew up with far more exposure to the King James Bible than to Shakespeare.)
Vandiver when on to say that the primary source of classical mythology for Shakespeare and his audience was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Studying this one book would make the Bard much more approachable.
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ekzept 08.16.09 at 19:13
I think the Bard is accessible if given time and good teachers. I had a lot of Shakespeare, first in high school. Then, when I cut a deal with my dean on reducing the number of liberal arts courses I had to take in favor of more science and math, he demanded I take two course, such as history and literature. On the history I opted for American, which was two semesters of a fun experience. For the literature I opted for “Honors” Shakespeare, a.k.a., Shakespeare for English majors. That was actually a lot of fun, with a great professor. I have a Pelican complete. I’ve annotated/mutilated it (in fountain pen, no less) with hundreds of notes from the late Rene Fortin. Sure, he emphasized a Christian take on things, less classical. It was at a Dominican college, after all (Providence College, Providence, RI), but surely the Bard had a lot of New Testament to which to refer.
gwern 01.02.10 at 22:52
The allusions may be a small part of the difficulty, but I don’t buy that it’s most or even a large part of it. Look at Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Unless I am far more ignorant of the Bible & ancients than I would’ve credited myself as being, there’s not a single classical allusion (aside from a generic ‘Nymph’ in one version) in that speech, yet it’s still much more difficult to read & understand than the KJV.
Shakespeare uses a now-difficult vocabulary and prefers to express things in a contorted way; nothing to do with Ovid. If he wants to, he can write as clear as anybody even when dealing with classical subjects (consider Mark Antony’s funereal oration).