What often makes Shakespeare difficult is that he and his audience had a shared background so a lot of allusions are lost on a modern audience.
Even Chaucer has a lot of quite readable passages. Take a look at this side by side original and modern English versions of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/CT-prolog-para...
What often makes Shakespeare difficult is that he and his audience had a shared background so a lot of allusions are lost on a modern audience.
Even Chaucer has a lot of quite readable passages. Take a look at this side by side original and modern English versions of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/CT-prolog-para...