It's a tragedy that most English classes don't have field trips. Going to an actual Shakespeare play would probably change many people's minds than having to direct it in book form.

What clicked for me was after being forced to read The Merchant of Venice in grade 9, I suddenly saw all the cultural references ("I want my pound of flesh" or "All that glisters is not gold") in movies, music, etc. I remember watching Strange Brew and somebody mentioned that it's basically Hamlet and you can't unsee it once you realize which movie character is matched to which Shakespeare character.

Over the years I've been to several adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it was a ton of fun every single time.

I was preparing to heavily disagree with you before that "because". I'm French speaking, one of my highschool English teachers made us read Romeo and Juliet, and it's different enough from modern English that my brain just couldn't understand anything at all. Thank god Sparknotes already existed in the early/mid 00s cause I would have fluked that class so hard.

Funnily enough I never read the translations, so can't speak as to how accurate your affirmation is, but I can see it happening for sure. I'd say it depends on the style of the translation. I've seen some try too hard to preserve the tone of the original.

Now, maybe I was convincing myself that I understood in high school when I’ve in fact it not, but I found that reading it aloud and trying to say the words, as if you were the character (acting, if you will), made it much more understandable.

We often didn’t just get sent home with a copy of Romeo and Juliet and then get asked to write an essay.

We went through it, a bit at a time, in class. With a very good teacher. Not just helping with word and phrases, but digging in a little bit. And at the end we watched a performance of it.

I think that made it so much easier to appreciate, and it made it a ton easier to read and appreciate Julius Caesar or whichever ones we did next.

And like… that was 30+ years ago for me, but I feel like I see echoes of that stuff all the time.

This is a really good point. My wife and I produce a history podcast where, right now, a lot of it draws on primary sources such as letters, diaries, etc. from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The ones in German she translates into English, but it feels "wrong" to change someone's words that are already in English.

The net result is that it's easier (for me) to understand a letter written by someone in a translated foreign language than one written by someone in English from the same period.

Well yeah. Look no further than the "brevity is the soul of wit" quote. It's taken at literal value when, in context, you know it's a joke, a potshot at the expense of the character saying it, who's anything but brief in speech.

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