@mogui, it was more than half my life ago. But I make it a point to remember what I've read.
@NatCH, I think you're right about 9th grade being a worse time to read LOTF than 7th. Sorry about typing "the name"... didn't think that was the same as speaking it. (And I've been reading too much Harry Potter lately... I bet Dumbledore would say the name out loud!)
I was not typical as a young reader (and still am not, for that matter). But my kids like
Romeo and Juliet just fine. I think it helps a lot to see the plays performed first. In the case of R&J, we also took them to see
West Side Story first, and then when they saw R&J, explained that they would probably see some similarities, because WSS had been somewhat based on R&J. It helped make things more relevant to them. My older daughter, aged 16, who only spoke Mandarin until she was 11, easily followed the plot despite the archaic language and cried at the end. (Then my mom had her watch an opera of R&J... my mom is an opera fiend. I understand that went fairly well, too.)
Actually, now that I think about it, possibly part of the reason I enjoyed Shakespeare early on was because my mom had a book called
Twisted Tales from Shakespeare that was just amazingly funny and made me want to read the actual plays. I brought it in to school when we were all reading R&J and my English teacher read that entry out loud to the whole class. It was fairly popular all around.