Ask any student about Shakespeare and more people will cringe at the sound of the name than break out into a smile. Those falling in the latter category might be the English majors, avid readers or just excessively cultured people but good for them for liking what many mortals don't.

If the title wasn’t enough of a hint, my feelings towards Shakespeare’s work are fairly ambiguous. Beginning in the sixth grade with a heavily abridged version of The Merchant of Venice, through high school with the original scripts Hamlet and Macbeth to university right now with Othello and Much Ado About Nothing, my opinion on Shakespeare has more or less stayed the same. Attempting to decode his writing style is tiring and time-consuming, and his idea of tragedy and comedy often feels downright absurd, but there’s definitely something timeless about it – people were reading Shakespeare hundreds of years ago and will continue to do so years after I’ve passed on. With that sort of eternal pull, you’ve got to acknowledge there’s something rather magical about how Shakespeare’s changed the way we look at the world. Once you get used to reading Shakespeare’s language, you will come to appreciate the depth behind his characters, the intricacies of his plotlines and the visuals his words create. The themes Shakespeare writes about are as true today as they were when he wrote his plays and poems, which is why movie adaptations like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, among others, captivate modern audiences.

I have to read Shakespeare for my college writing class. While I’ll complain about all the reading I have to do (the night before class, because procrastination), agonize over analyzing allusions and symbols and motives, and meticulously annotate important soliloquies, I’ve surely developed a newfound appreciation for the details the text reveals. Shakespeare is by no means easy to read, but if you put in the effort, it feels so rewarding. I dread the rest of Shakespeare I’ll have to read, but I can’t wait to grudgingly love it.