Ah yes, The Bard of Avon. William Shakespeare, English poet, dramatist, and actor, often called the English national poet, is widely considered the greatest dramatist of all time. I was 14 when I read my first Shakespeare play in school, Romeo and Juliet, and from that moment on, I was hooked. I admit that I had trouble with the language. There was a disconnect for me, until I watched the play come to life in the well known 1968 film version by Zeffirelli. All of a sudden, it clicked for me. I get why we sometimes are overwhelmed when reading Shakespeare though. Though the language is only one linguistic generation away from ours, its full of words we don’t even use anymore. As well as having to deal with poetic license, versification and archaisms, the grammar and spelling rules were still not established at that time in history. The dude has been credited by the Oxford dictionary with creating over 3000 new words.  As quoted by Louis Marder, “Shakespeare was so facile in employing words that he was able to use over 7,000 of them—more than occur in the whole King James version of the Bible—only once and never again.”

Yeah. So if you are one of those who doesn’t “get” reading Shakespeare, don’t beat yourself up over it. There’s another way to enjoy Shakespeare, as I learned the first time round in high school. Now that the history lesson is over, let’s get to why I wrote this post. My favourite Shakespeare plays, which I not only love to read, but also on occasion have made the leap from the page to favourite film as well. Join me after the jump and find out which made the cut.

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