| Jay Scott : Daily Whale : archive : 1998 : 19 June 1998 |
Why's Shakespeare so tough to understand? When Falstaff is jabbering you might as well read the footnotes and skip the text. The Avon Laddie's contemporaries aren't half as obscure; compare Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe and you'll see.
That's an easy one: Shakespeare's perplexing because he drew on the full resources of Elizabethan English. He went past the Dick-and-Jane that most writers are content with.
The lesson here? James Joyce has it made for posterity; Finnegans Wake draws on a dozen languages.
copyright 1998, 2003 Jay J.P. Scott
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