When I was a teenager, about 20 years ago. I read shakespeare without any issues. Beowulf was challenging but doable with effort and didnt require outside source. What has changed so much in the last 20 years that the teenagers should need a translation?
Your homework is to go find a teenager and ask them:
What is a bodkin?
What is "contumely"?
What is "dispriz’d love"?
What does "his quietus make" mean?
Finally, you can give them the entire passage and ask, what is Hamlet actually contemplating here?
A abnormally well-read teenager stands a chance at that last one... but only a chance. An average teenager does not.
I will be blunt. I don't believe you read it "without any issues". Either you're just saying that so you don't bear the dread stigma of "couldn't read Shakespeare", you had a commentary you were reading it with, or you don't even know what you were missing. That's just a single portion of one famous passage from Hamlet. The plays are rife with these issues, it's not like those are the four missing vocabulary things that you need to know to read Shakespeare and after that it's smooth sailing. I could read 18th century stuff in school fairly comfortably and read into the 17th century, I know what's that's like, and even then Shakespeare was something I could just barely catch the main plot for. The innuendo, the subtext, the historical interrelationships, much of the actual literature of the literature, no way. The change hasn't happened in the past 20 years, it's the past 100 at least.
And people need to stop pretending otherwise. People need to stop pretending that, oh, yes, I totally caught Shakespeare's commentary on the politics of medieval Italy, quite obvious really, who could be stupid enough to miss it it's so obvious to anyone? It's not helping. It's hurting people and turning them off to literature. It needs to stop.
Did you never read Shakespeare in school? You are not asked to read the bare text, there are glosses in the margins. Go look at the Amazon preview of a Folger library Shakespeare play, e.g. [0]. You also have a teacher to provide context and guidance. You are getting worked up into a tizzy in an attack on a straw man.
