ABSTRACT
I suspect that lexis on the whole presents the least difficulty to young readers of Shakespeare, once their panic has to some degree subsided or their curiosity is piqued (or they’ve been persuaded to make the best of a bad job). While lexis inevitably presents some difficulties, it’s probable that more difficulties in reading Shakespeare come from the grammar, particularly of more sustained passages. I put this to the test once by asking two GCSE pupils to look at an alphabetically arranged vocabulary list of a scene. One found no hard words; the other, less well read, quite a few. They then looked at the scene itself, and found it harder to follow than they had anticipated from the vocabulary. It may be suspected that these difficulties are not felt by younger readers alone.
