[melitta]

I've never read Romeo and Juliet

But I had to read Hamlet as preparation for my oral examination..It was very challenging, cause' we had to read the original version in Old English..

extract: (copyright by Shakespeare^^)
If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry:
be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape
calumny.

It was annoying, words like thee, thou or shalt aren't used anymore. It felt like reading a foreign language mixed with english^^ and the dictionary didn't help very much, it doesn't list all Old English vocabulary.

I think Shakespear meant something like this:
If they do marry, I'll give them this plague as their dowry, (the next sentence is imosspible for me to understand accurately) be as virginal as ice? (how is it possible to be as virginal as ice????) as pure as snow (something easy to understand...), you shall not escape calumny...

That's how I acted the hole time reading the book. There were only a few sentences were I hadn't had to look up the vocabulary in the dictionary.