Question

How does our modern perspective fail in analyzing old works such as those of Shakespeare?

Answer 1

You could answer this question in about a dozen different ways. First I would say that our modern perspective of immediate gratification limits our engagement of Shakespeare. Most people cannot tolerate long, clever exposition that has multiple layers of meaning - we want "literature bytes" like sound-bytes. Direct, unambiguous communication that doesn't require us to think, but simply to parse. Another way to answer this is that much of our modern communication is based upon this method of evaluation. We don't really think, talk or write the way that English speakers did in Shakespeare's period. We aren't expected to have exceptional vocabularies and the whole notion of having the appropriate word for the appropriate moment is almost entirely lost in our culture. This is one of the reasons why one of the most common verbal tics in our generalized cultural idiom is "like" - we always describe everything in terms of what they are "like". This is "like" that because we don't have the actual words to describe precisely what we mean. There are many, many other possible interpretations of this question so feel free to just Bullpellet it and move on with your life. It's really open-ended.