Quote:
Originally Posted by DrNefario
Dickens, Shakespeare and Melville are all pretty wordy by modern standards, but what really kills them, to me, is the dissection.
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Yes.
Shakespeare in particular. His plays were written to be performed, heard and seen, not read on a page with stops every few words to define an unfamiliar term. I think a good performance will make any antiquated words understood well enough by the audience to follow the plot and even get some of the jokes.
I think
Moby Dick is a bit too different from everyday prose for the average high school student.
As for Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities has the virtue of being relatively short, but I wonder if
Great Expectations or
David Copperfield, even in excerpts, might not be easier and better received.