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Like most people my age, I did Shakespeare at school. I know, "did" sounds awful here, but that's how we phrased it at my school. We didn't read or perform his work; we did it, because we were told to. Frankly, I hated it. I remember dragging my feet on the way to English class, the thought of reading yet another chapter of Julius Caesar draining me of all enthusiasm. I went to a standard secondary school in Northeast England. The teachers were OK, but we didn't have a drama department and the English teacher was not, shall we say, the most animated. He'd occasionally show us a video of a for-TV version of a Shakespeare play, which many of us just saw as an opportunity to draw rude things in each other's the textbooks. To be honest, it's no wonder that a recent survey by the British Council found that the works of William Shakespeare are more popular and better understood in places like Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Turkey than in Britain. This, experts surmise, is probably to do with the fact the translations are easier to grasp than the original English text. Such was my total lack of interest in the Bard back then that, when in my 20s I was offered a job at a newspaper in Stratford-upon-Avon, I was completely thrown when my mother exclaimed, "Oh, Shakespeare country!" Of course, it took only minutes for the playwright to come up in a pub conversation with my new colleagues. "You don't like Shakespeare?" cried one with enough gusto to cause definite spillage among the people stood around us. "Well, er, no," I replied. "I just don't get it." | 
