Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" is one of the greatest Sheakespearean films ever. We watched it on the big screen with two good friends, one an artist, the other an attorney.   Neither had majored in literature, taught high school or college, or taken part in any of the specialized activities that so many Shakespeare-lovers seem to take for granted.

Neither one of these highly intelligent people was able to sit through the film with us. Each had bailed out, separately, by the time the movie was half over.

This was just the most glaring example in my experience of smart, educated people being unable to understand enough of Elizabethan dialogue to understand fully what's going on. And I suspect that many of Shakespeare's original audience had a hard time following his language too. First of all, much of it was poetic and artificial even in 1600. And second, what do you make of a writer with a 35,000 word vocabulary when your own is about 8,000? One reason Shakespeare's works were so successful commercially is that seeing a play was an important diversion - and the Globe did not have many competitors on a given afternoon. We know that those audiences were rowdy too: in other words, only the most artistic and intellectual were giving their undivided attention to the majesty of the speeches.


Oh yeah: I didn't say Shakespeare's language was "gobbledygook," just that without footnotes it's very hard to follow 400 years later.
Ask anyone with a degree in something other than English.

I dare ya.