1. I saw Hamlet at PCPA last year, so I know the basics of the storyline.(Spoiler alert: If you don't want to know what (kind of) happens, stop reading now.) It's about a prince whose father suddenly died and less than a month later his mom marries his dad's brother, and Hamlet thinks that his uncle poisoned his father in order to become king so he decides to kill him. Then he kind of has a thing with Ophelia whose father Hamlet kills on accident and she goes crazy and commits suicide (or something along those lines) and that's all I remember. It's pretty much typical Shakespeare.
2. I know that Shakespeare devoted his life to writing his plays and sort of abandoned his family in order to pursue his dream of being a playwright (at least that's what I learned at OA freshman year). Also, he was married to a woman named Anne Hathaway and she was way older than him.
3. Students "involuntarily frown" when they hear his name because despite how great he's considered to be, the fact is that his work is very old and hard to understand and boring. Freshman year we went over Romeo and Juliet in detail and it made me realize that Shakespeare was actually pretty funny, but you would never catch his jokes today if you saw it in a theater or read it because it requires in- depth analysis.
4. I don't know about making it an "amazing experience" but if we could read it in completely modern English it would be more interesting for everyone, but then that kind of defeats the purpose of how he wrote it because it was in iambic pentameter and all that. I just like it when we read something like Shakespeare and then we have in-class discussions about it because I think it helps everyone to understand it better.
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