Shakespeare can be the most boring writer in history if you can't understand him. Here's how you can decipher Shakespeare and enjoy his fun and fabulous plays.

Learn Elizabethan English: Even Snug Did

Language is the biggest obstacle to enjoying Shakespeare's plays. In Queen Elizabeth's time, when Shakespeare wrote his plays, people spoke differently from how they do today. They used more flowery expressions, but they also used very crude terms as well. Add an actor's accent, real or fake, and the dialogue can be even more challenging.

Many people—even Shakespearean scholars—have difficulty understanding his plays for the first 15 minutes or so. After that, you begin to pick out words and themes, and it gets easier. But there are short cuts to understanding Elizabethan dialogue.

Renaissance Fairs can be a fun, live-action approach to understanding Shakespearean speech. Most performers at these fairs attempt to copy Shakespeare's wit and style, and adopt vocabulary from that era. After a day of listening to the plays and jests and one of these fairs, and you're well on your way to understanding Shakespeare.

Remember that, even in Shakespeare's day, people didn't always speak as they do in his plays. Sometimes, Shakespeare was being a poet hoping to impress his audience with how eloquently he phrased speeches. At other times, he used dialogue to explain to the audience what had happened earlier, or offstage.

Also, people used different contractions from the ones that we use today. For example, "ere" meant "ever," and "ope" was short for "open." To make matters worse, Shakespeare invented words, and even scholars argue about their meanings. So, don't expect to understand every word in every Shakespeare play. Nobody does.