Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit.
Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers.
Performance isn't just rote recitation.
I guess I can't lump every English teacher into the same bucket, but in my experience, they aren't particularly skilled at explaining the context behind a lot of the stuff being taught.
I would agree wrt my High School teachers. They were basically competent, but not particularly good.
In college however, my Humanities professors were better than I appreciated at the time. They forced us to think about the material and challenged us to defend our interpretations. As an Engineering student who just wanted the class to be over, I really missed out on a lot of good stuff.
Frankly, Shakespeare is one of the few things I enjoyed reading in school. It was classic American novels I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t tell you why, but getting through something even as simple as Tom Sawyer was such a chore for me.
Twain can be tedious because he’s a humorist and we’ve heard those jokes a million times by now. Also he writes speech in dialect which now means nothing to us and makes him harder to read. I find him easier to read as an adult but he can still be a slog.
I think a lot of classic American lit is hard as an American kid because it’s removed enough from today that you don’t get the nuances and also so influential that the storytelling feels trite, even if it was revolutionary at the time.
The teacher makes a huge difference. My kids teacher somehow made The Odyssey a page turner for them and when the movie came out they were able to critique and delta the way the movie and book portrayed Odysseus. I was pretty impressed, because like the parent, The Odyssey and Shakespeare was a form of torture when I was in school.