I was so lucky to have a teacher who could make Shakespeare less intimidating and who could help us to break out the meaning, see the pun or metaphor and move through the storyline at a pace that kept us riveted.She managed to show us his use of decasyllabic blank verse, took us to see Macbeth and Hamlet and we never felt like we were in a lesson, just spending time together looking at the same stuff and figuring it out. I wished I'd realised at the time what a gem she was as I never got the chance to thank her for showing me that Shakespeare wrote for the working class of his time and wasn't an elitist like many of the experts on the subject today seem to be.