I figured I’d just add to this thread; I just read King Lear on my flight/layover to Chicago today. Pretty darned gripping! I think the de-eyeing of Glouchester has got to be one of the most evil things I’ve ever read.
Have you heard Monty Python’s version of King Lear? It’s on “The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and The Holy Grail.”
The line to which you were responding (“brush up your Shakespeare and the women you will wow”) is a line from the song Brush Up Your Shakespeare from the musical Kiss Me, Kate (music by Cole Porter).
I think these were the ones I watched back in the 80’s. They’re FABULOUS. I still have Much Ado About Nothing on VHS tape, and I still love to watch it. Cherie Lunghi as Beatrice and Robert Lindsay as Benedick are just wonderful. I actually used to dream about Robert Lindsay because of this production. 
I saw King Lear in that series too. I was in Texas on a temporary assignment for IBM, watching Shakespeare alone in a hotel room. I sobbed my eyes out and was a wreck the next day because it was so emotionally wrenching to me.
I think it helps if you get used to reading stuff in an older style. 18th and 19th century lit can help tune your ear to Shakespeare. When I go to a Shakespeare play, I have to kinda settle in and let my ears get tuned to what’s going on. The actors make a HUGE difference – a good actor can really bring the words alive. Too often the lines are spoken too quickly for modern ears to parse easily. IMHO, anyway.
In high school, I had the same problem the OP had. I think I was trying to understand Shakespeare like prose plays of today. It wasn’t until I read that his writing was not English prose at the time but was purposefully overly flowery, poetic, symbolic, whatever you want to call it, that I learned how to read his works.
When I was 14, I read Richard Armour’s Twisted Tales from Shakespeare that somehow ignited my interest, and I took several classes on the Bard through high school and college because of it. To this day, when I see a performance, I am still reminded of Armour’s parody that made it more accessible for me.
Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare is highly recommended [post=4632072]here[/post].
He is a great explainer. If this doesn’t do it, nothing will.
The protagonists die at the end – practically the definition of a tragedy – although not a revenger’s tragedy like Hamlet, where *everyone *dies in the end. 
Well … don’t forget the singing goats.
Nitpick: True tragedies have songs about goats. The goats don’t sing: they get sacrificed to the gods.
Ever seen a goat being sacrificed? I tells ya, they sing.
As their throats are being cut?
There’s a lot that goes on before they actually lose the ability to vocalize. Blood sacrifice is a noisy and messy affair.
Finally I’m understanding a lot of what went on in Shakespeare’s tragedies, and in the even bloodier tragedies of his contemporaries, like Marlowe and Webster. How could I miss those goats?
And you all thought Shakepeare was a crypto-Catholic.
I bet he loves The Merchant of Venice.
I’ve had the displeasure of seeing some awful theatre in my time, and Shakespeare does a pretty good job in comparison. Macbeth and Othello have enough plain nastiness in them to keep my attention, certainly.
An interesting thread, and one that suggests the following may be worth stating for the record.
What you like is up to you. Liking Shakespeare does not mean you are an intellectual, or a cultured person, or a good one. Not liking Shakespeare does not mean you are stupid, intellectually weak or a philistine.
Not liking something is not the same as It sucks.
Those who like Shakespeare sometimes over-state his importance, legacy and achievement - and the same goes for fans of almost anyone or anything else. Those who do not like Shakespeare sometimes do the reverse, and err on the side of being too dismissive.
It is possible to like someones work and yet make allowance for his shortcomings and weaknesses. It is possible to dislike someones work and yet give respect and credit for his achievement.
The point about Shakespeare is not that he was a flawless genius, and everything he wrote was of incomparable greatness. The point is that a lot of the time what he wrote was rather ordinary, but when he IS good, he can be pretty hard to beat.
It is not surprising that some find it hard to understand Shakespeare. Language changes over time. He was writing 400 years ago, so of course it takes a little effort to learn what some of the words and phrases actually mean in modern terms. It`s up to you whether you want to make that effort. Many would say it is worth it, and not really as challenging as it may first appear. Some would disagree. As with everything else, taste and personal aptitude may vary.
One point worth making is that some teachers, books and guides are more helpful than others at helping you to figure out what the language means and why the good bits have stood the test of time (many posters to this thread are trying to help you find the good sources that really work). If you have tried some teachers / books / guides and did not find them very useful, you could try some others.
One reason why some people are enthusiastic about Shakespeare is that he was very good at writing about what is sometimes known, perhaps rather grandly, as the human condition. In other words, he was good at writing about themes and situations that most people can relate to, and illustrating some of the conflicts and problems that crop up in life time and time again. He was so good at this, that many of his insights and views seem to hold up well four hundred years later - which is quite an achievement.
I have an honours degree in English Literature, and some of my exams were specfically about Shakespeare. I dont particularly like Shakespearework, and there are many other authors and playwrights whose work I prefer. But I respect what he achieved, and I can see why each new generation seems to discover something worthwhile in his work. I understand why he is still discussed and taught, and why his work is still performed, and I know that some of his poetry is absolutely outstanding.
My advice to you: ignore the Shakespeare industry and people who drone on and on about him as if he was the only great writer in history. Be slow to dismiss his work, because theres some good stuff in there. Accept that maybe you just havent been given the right kind of help to appreciate his work and its reputation. If Shakespeare just is not for you, maybe try revisiting his work in a year or two. You may find he is a lot less sucky than you thought!
John Donne and Edward Lord Herbert, approximate contemporaries of Shakespeare, competed with each other approvingly to see who could write the most “obscure” poems: poems dense with metaphor, allusion and abbreviated references. The pleasure in these virtuoso performances is precisely in the fact that they take all of your concentrated mental power to puzzle them out. I see some of this in Shakespeare’s motivation too, which is what St. Cad may be talking about. Here is an example of Donne’s obscurity:
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
Alexander Pope thought Donne’s satires were worthwhile, but too obscure. So, he helpfully re-wrote some of them.
I thought Shakespeare was a closet Pagan, myself.
I concur. Walker Percy’s The Loss of the Creature specifically mentions Shakespeare’s works as one of the great losses of modern teaching. That and dogfish:
"But since neither of these methods of recovering the dogfish is pedagogically feasible-perhaps the great man even less so than the Bomb-I wish to propose the following educational technique which should prove equally effective for Harvard and Shreveport High School. I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards. I am serious in declaring that a Sarah Lawrence English major who began poking about in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester; and that the latter upon reading on her dissecting board:
*
That time of year Thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold-
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.*
might catch fire at the beauty of it."
- Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature