I highly recommend Much Ado for those new to Shakespeare... it was one play that he wrote entirely in prose, avoiding all that blank verse iambic pentameter stuff... Also, Beatrice is one of the best female character in any of his plays.

And, yes, its the modern interpretations that make her out to be a feminist. Contemporarily, she was played as an undiluted shrew.

But I consider that evidence of Shakespeare's remarkable skill as a writer. Real people, like their fictional counterparts, exist in the context of their overall culture -- people are people, and their general behavior hasn't changed much over the last 400 years. What has changed is the culture's attitudes toward that behavior. If Shakespeare wrote entirely from his culture outward, his characters would come off as hopelessly dated and 1 dimensional. But he was an astute witness of people, and that was his artistic center, which leaves his characters open to different interpretations through the ages...