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Notes -
Funny, I would hard disagree on the Shakespeare point. Sure, there will be even more words you have to look at the footnotes for, but Shakespeare's plays are written to be performed on stage, generally in a simple and natural meter, which inherently limits sentence length and complexity. Having trouble with To Be or Not To Be? Just read it like you were speaking it. Austen and the later Victorian novelists are the result of a tradition continually building on Shakespeare's English, making it more structurally complex and verbose to fit a reading public rather than a theatre audience (if nothing else, if you look at Victorian novelists, their most kudzu sentences are generally physical descriptions of a scene, which Shakespeare doesn't do much. Marlowe, yes, but rarely Shakespeare).
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