Well.. it does take some time and study to become familiar with the archaic language and vocabulary.. not as difficult as Chaucer, but still.

In a way, it's good to know the archaic, more formalized language of the olden days because some of the conventions are used for very interesting literary purposes.

Steinbeck and Hemingway use the archaic conventions when translating Spanish in some of their novels. In The Pearl and a few other works, for example, Steinbeck uses the Elizabethan forms of "you" to translate the formal "usted" as thee, thy, and thou.

In Thomas Mann's great novel Doktor Faustus: The Life of the Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told By a Friend, the translator has to figure out a way to render the archaic German used by Mephistopheles into English, so he turns to renaissance English to do that, making it sound biblical and shakespearean, which works extremely well.

For me, life has been so much more interesting because of Shakespeare, who is pretty much universally acknowledged as the greatest writer ever. According to our indomitable formalist friend, L. Swilley: " Shakespeare has been accepted as the greatest author of all time of all nations. He remains famous because there is no one to compare with him in depth of insight into the human condition, or in the ability to express it effectively."

Also, about the new authorship question, Mr. Swilley writes as follows:

QUOTE:
> By Mike Collett-WhiteFri Oct 7,11:11 AM ET
>
> Something is rotten in the state of Shakespeare scholarship....

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Rotten, indeed. Of what possible service to the appreciation of the plays and sonnets is it to know that they might have been written by someone other than Shakespeare? This and other investigations of this kind are "People Magazine" gossip and should be set adrift by the serious scholar. Happy the authors of such works as The Odyssey, The Idiad and Beowulf about whom so little is known, forcing us to examine only what the authors wanted us to see. This silly but wide-spread passion for the ad hominem is part of the larger iceberg of Historical Criticism, which asserts that we should know the who, where and when of the work in order to understand it. It is to be seriously doubted that any mathematical or scientific statement is clarified by an examination of the the person who made them; why should there be a rage for such examination in other disciplines?
UNQUOTE

Sorry to say, I sometimes take a little swim in the less than Parnassean waters of People magazine. So sue me. heheh

Sue