Not sure about Shakespeare. We suffered through Shakespeare in both English and Drama classes. I'm not sure that improved my appreciation. Other things did. I had to learn to love Shakespeare otherwise.
I watched "Hamnet" last night, which was okay, but I dread to think what that film would have been like if I was made to watch it at school.
If it’s taught well I think it can be very entertaining. There are lots of levels to Shakespeare and lots of very basic comedy. Watchman in Macbeth etc. the motives of characters are also explained well.
The only problem is the language.
I haven't read much of Shakespeare, but the lightbulb moment for me personally was the 1996 "Romeo + Juliet" movie with DiCaprio. The modern contextualization makes it so much easier to parse the period dialogue.
I think Shakespeare might just be a badly chosen set of "classics". Romeo and Juliet is so overdone in pop culture there's nothing interesting there, and the one or two others we had to read were just boring. But then I ran across Much Ado About Nothing (while still in school) and remember it being actually good.
> Romeo and Juliet is so overdone in pop culture there's nothing interesting there
The whole point is to read the actual primary text that has been so done, re-done, overdone. And hopefully to recognize there's some real beauty and drama in there