> Shakespeare from around 1600 is rewarding but pretty much needs a translator into English to be understood by moderns. Nobody in 1600s England spoke the way

> Shakespeare from around 1600 is rewarding but pretty much needs a translator into English to be understood by moderns. Nobody in 1600s England spoke the way Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare was writing poetry. His plays are famous for their use of iambic pentameter especially, which is beautiful to hear and read but not a natural part of English prose. To pick another example more-or-less at random from the same era, the work of Thomas Hobbes is much less poetic and, therefore, substantially more readable. The major stylistic difference I can see is that they were absolutely addicted to what we'd now consider overlong, or even run-on, sentences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes Leviathan: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207