Reading Shakespeare's works

How many of you have difficulty reading his works without annotations and how many of you don't? I belong to the former. Those who belong to the latter group may wish to share some tips. :)

I take Shakespeare very seriously, and when I read a play for the first time, I actually read it three times. The first time I refer to the notes as little as possible, just to get the general idea of what's going on. Then the second time I read in more detail, and make sure I understand every line. The third time I read for deeper meaning, imagery, ambiguity, etc.

I'm finding that the more I get used to Elizabethan English, the easier it is to read him without notes. A lot of the difficulty is just due to vocabulary and usage that was standard at the time. For example, "still" meant "always" then, kind of like "toujours" in French. "An" is "if", and so forth.

The grammar was also different -- verb agreement didn't follow the same rules.

I refer to the notes and sometimes have to use dictionary as English is not my native language. But the best way to understand deeply Shakespeare's plays is reading for two or three times as slobone said. I re-read some plays and in each reading find a new thing. And sometimes, I listen to the audiobooks, too. It is a great help for me!

There is the simple Shakespeare, and the complex Shakespeare. To understand the work is easy, to truly understand it is difficult. Take this line from Romeo and Juliet for instance. Right at the beginning, when we first hear Tybalt:

What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?

That's 3 puns in one sentence. Good luck spotting that on a first read without any side-text.

I belong to the latter and I reccomend Shakespeare with footnotes, like Signet, Penguin or Oxford. Better still, there is No Fear Shakespeare and Shakespeare on the Double that does a direct translation from the Shakespeare text to modern.