To read, or not to read, that is the question students ask when assigned to act and learn Shakespeare’s plays.

There’s students who adore Shakespeare and will eople can eventually minor or major in college. There’s students who absolutely hate his work and think it is waste of time. There’s students who don’t care and find his work boring. Sophomore Aidan Leizerov said, “I don’t really care about Shakespeare and his works are quite boring to read.”

Living to the age of 52, he wrote at least 37 plays in his lifetime. Students usually read one of them a year and may analyze poems by him in class too. One of the most known and referenced, “Romeo & Juliet” is assigned to freshmen students here. Other grade levels read “Hamlet”, “Macbeth” and others.

If we’re still reading them today, there must be a reason for the complicated language he wrote in. It’s hard for students to decipher when they don’t have a background for his type of language. “I think in each of his works he had different meaning. I think he was just examining his society at the time,” junior Nathege said.

Even though his plays were written in the 16th and 17th century, schools across the world still spend a great amount of time reading them. There’s lessons and tests based off of his writing technique and language

Being assigned to read and analyze Shakespeare’s plays in high school is a given. In the movie, Dead Poets Society (1989), set in 1959, the teacher (Robin Williams) convinces his students that Shakespeare is not like what they believe he is to be, a wasted studious assignment. Somewhere under the repetition and prose of Shakespeare, there is a lesson. “Students should be assigned Shakespeare because analyzing his writing helps students get a better understanding of language,” freshman Alex Mockensturm said.