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Ritalin comments on The Classic Literature Workshop - Less Wrong
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My first experience of Shakespeare was through French translations, which I really loved. Later, when I learned enough English, I tried to read the originals... it was a suffocating exercise in frustration.
It wasn't until I read Brush Up Your Shakespeare that I learned to appreciate the original language a little better.
Actually, that's what interested me in this exercise in the first place; that it's "sacrilegious" and likely to attract ire, a state of affairs that I find silly.
Reading Shakespeare without footnotes is difficult even for native speakers. Some of the plays work well enough (although there will always be some passages that will be confusing), but the sonnets are mostly incomprehensible.
I didn't find the sonnets too confusing, and I'm not even a native English speaker.
To be honest, I had the opposite problem. Dialogue with no captions or directions or context? How am I supposed to guess how the characters feel?
And, honestly, moden actors take playing Shakespeare so damn seriously, they could be saying "ba ba ba ba" and still sound emotionally three-dimensional and intense and layered and stuff. I keep finding that the text often doesn't measure up to the skill invested in portraying it.