Shakespeare is Easier Than You Think

It is a rite of passage for high school students to struggle through Shakespeare’s iconic works in English class. Some teachers and critics of Shakespeare believe that his writings and plays are too complicated for modern students to understand. However, Shakespeare is not too hard; today’s modern audience is simply not cultured enough to understand it.

Critics argue that students cannot understand Shakespeare because the language is too intense. In a panel called “The Green Room” for the website The Stage, six panelists sat down to discuss whether or not Shakespeare is too challenging for people to understand. Regarding some modernized rewrites of Shakespeare’s plays, one of the panelists, a 38 year old actress who has played leading roles at the National, the RSC and the Royal Court, stated, “Why not rewrite? Being too reverent can make it too dusty for people to be bothered to engage with it. But of course if it’s a bad rewrite then that’s a different problem.”

Although the opinions of these critics are valid, they do not reflect the true reason why Shakespeare is so hard for modern audiences to follow. Shakespeare’s unique language has been criticized for being too intense for years; it is not because of modern audiences that his work is difficult to understand. James Shapiro, a writer for The New York Times, writes in his article “Shakespeare in Modern English?” that Shakespeare’s unintelligible language is nothing new; people of Shakespeare’s time barely understood what he was writing. One of Shakespeare’s biggest critics, Ben Jonson, reportedly complained about how Macbeth’s soliloquies were impossible to understand. Shapiro counters, “Jonson failed to see that Macbeth’s dense soliloquies were intentionally difficult; Shakespeare was capturing a feverish mind at work, tracing the turbulent arc of a character’s moral crisis.”

Furthermore, a theatrical experiment took place in 2013 where Shakespeare’s “Much Ado about Nothing” was trimmed down to 90 minutes and performed in its original language. The audience, a group of inmates from Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail complex, was largely unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s work. Although the inmates were free to walk out of the performance, none of them did so. They were deeply engaged, at the edge of their seats, and visibly moved by what they were watching. It is highly doubtful that the inmates understood every word of the play, but they found cues to the character’s personality through Shakespeare’s language and the performance of the actors.

If we as a society will become more interested in literature and in the arts, they will be able to comprehend them better. How can we fix this? How can we better understand Shakespeare’s writing and further appreciate he has done to shape our modern society? The answer is that we need to make more of an effort. Instead of being lazy and going through the motions of Shakespeare’s works, high school students especially need to read more in depth. By doing so, students will find that they understand Shakespeare more than they think.