Haha! and a Shakespearean play is better understood by French in France than the English in England because its is there properly translated into language they can understand.
> [...] all little indicators of social difference quickly become incomprehensible. If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny. In 50 years time they probably won't understand it at all and the object I'm looking at now carries just such a social meaning, self-evident to an Elizabethan, hard for us to read today. It's an English woollen cap of the 16th century, a sort of flat chocolatey brown beret, and it was found about 150 years ago at Moorfields in London. It was probably worn by a young man.
[...]
> Our hat unlocks a whole language of social difference and a whole structure of social control, both expressed through clothes and sometimes enforced by law. A Parliamentary statute of 1571 stipulated that every male over the age of six had to wear a woollen cap like this one on Sundays and holidays. The law was a shrewd device for supporting the English wool industry, but it was also designed to reinforce social divisions by making them visible.
Yes, the language itself you should be able to get used to after a while, but the historical context needs to actually be studied.
No Fear Shakespeare is really great, though. Not comprehensive, but the best free resource for quickly understanding Shakespeare. Once you understand the meaning, you'll appreciate the poetry of the original language.
As a native English speaker, born in England, I always enjoyed Shakespeare in the original language because I could understand many the nuances and plays on words, and because I could see the continuity between the language of Shakespeare and the language we speak today. This is probably not possible for everyone (I speak a few languages fluently, an this broader experience probably helps) and of course I need to read the footnotes, but the language of Shakespeare is not a foreign language to me.
Of course if it was spoken out loud in the original pronunciation I would probably understand very little of it.
