Yes, and what is also interesting to note is that the audience of Shakespeare's time would have been much much better than us at listening. Listening for the subtlest of innuendo, change in intonation and all manner of things that we are just frankly rubbish at. Can you imagine what it would have been like, packed in to the Globe at one of his plays? It was not the civilised experience that one is accustomed to associate theatre with today. You really had to listen if you wanted to hear anything! This accounts in part for why we can struggle to understand what on earth he is going on about sometimes.

Shakespeare wrote his plays in a stylized, poetic form of a dialect spoken in England 400 years ago. We find him difficult today not because we are poor listeners—some of us are, some of us are not—but because 400 years of language change has made much of Shakespeare's language opaque to us. Look at any page of Shakespeare and you will recognize most of the words, but they will be used in senses and phrasings that are different from what we normally expect. As we try to figure out what these word mean, we struggle to keep up or seriously misinterpret Shakespeare's meaning. It is a bit like trying to follow a difficult lecture being delivered in a very noisy room. Remember that Shakespeare's audience were treated to plays written in a dialect that they spoke and heard everyday of their lives. If Shakespeare or his contemporaries could travel to our time and hear our language, they would be just as baffled. If you said to your Elizabethan visitor "Obviously, you are still adjusting to our culture," Shakespeare might have thought you were saying in an awkward, though poetic, way, "By standing in our way, you are correcting the way we tend our fields." Communcation would certainly be a challenge. Check out my verse translations of Shakespeare's plays into modern English at http://www.fullmeasurepress.com.