19 June 1998 - Shakespeare

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.