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Shakespeare is only secondarily "literature." It is primarily "theatre." To teach students the plays merely by reading them rather than performing them, or witnessing a performance, is absurd. You might as well take the kids to see the new Jane Eyre movie and claim you are having them read the novel.
One should no more teach Shakespeare by having students read the plays than teach opera by having them read the libretto.
There are wonderful BBC productions of the plays available on DVD. And that DiCaprio movie is excellent - Shakespeare would have loved it! (I had no interested in seeing that movie - my kids more or less forced it on me.)
Reading the script can be useful as a tool to help understand a play, and to teach vocabulary & usage. But one should not elevate the part to the position of the whole.
So the question "should high school students have to read Shakespeare" should be answered "Yes, Shakespeare should be taught in high school, but not by making the kids read the plays."
The play's the thing.
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