How to read Shakespeare

Recently I've been re-reading plays of Shakespeare that I studied at school.

It's often stated that, without an inspirational teacher, a poor dose of Shakespeare can inoculate you against an appreciation of The Bard later in life. I guess that my teachers were as adequate as most, and therefore failed to totally prevent me from enjoying the great classics later in life.

The question is: how should an inhabitant of the 21st Century read a work written for an Elizabethan England?

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to undertake a month-long German language course run by the Goethe Institute - one of the major providers of language training in Germany. Their advice to those learning the language on how best to read anything from a newspaper article to a novel seemed to be eminently sensible and practical:

First, read the passage from beginning to end just to get the gist of what it's about.
Second, identify the words and phrases that were difficult or unclear, but use the overall framework of the passage to hint or guess at their meaning.
Third, only when a particular phrase that seems to be crucial for an understanding of the passage eludes you should you reach for the dictionary.

I've regularly applied this approach not only to articles that I've been reading in German, but also to Shakespeare, with surprisingly successful results!

It's very easy to overlook the fact that Shakespeare's plays wouldn't have become popular in the playwright's own time had they not contained such fast moving plots and dramatic tension. If you read Shakespeare in the same way that you'd read a contemporary thriller, it's surprising how the problems of archaic language seem to evaporate!