I started reading Othello in my project to understand and like our greatest national writer. I chose Othello because it is one I had never studied or seen performed. I think I get the jist but still don't really understand much of the verse, even when I understand most of the actual words. When I was a lad I assumed that there was a small, well educated section of society who could understand Shakespeare and actually enjoyed his works. Otherwise why would people go to theatres to watch his plays. Now I am coming to the view that hardly anyone really understands a Shakespeare play without studying it first. The thing is, it is not just the words. I find it very difficult to understand what he is driving at much of the time. I wondered whether to his contemporary audience, standing in the Globe Theatre, it all came across clear as a bell. Apart from Shakespeare's works, the oldest English books I have read that were not translated into modern English (modern as right now) were Robinson Crusoe, written 1719, and The History of Tom Jones, 1749. I had no problems reading them. In Tom Jones there were many references and some words I did not know, but not so many they stopped me from following the book. I would usually look them up in the notes at the end of each chapter. Maybe I would get on better with some of Shakespeare's contemporaries. There were playwrights Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe. About fifty years later there was diarist Samuel Pepys.