Does anyone really like Shakespeare? And if so, which is your favourite?

So, wanting to be a literature student, I've had to read Shakespeare, and write about Shakespeare, and learn about him, pretend to like some of his things, analyse them to the point of breakdown and basically know everything there is to know about certain works.
Now I love The Taming of the Shrew. I also love the film with Elizabeth Taylor but that's not the point.
I hate, as in absolutely detest, Romeo and Juliet. The films are OK but the written play, I hate it. I also don't really like A Midsummer's Night Dream, but remember this is only my opinion.
So, as the title says, do you like Shakespeare? And if so, what do you like? His sonnets, his plays, what?

I think his work is largely irrelevant,

It's not in current English, the plots are hardly breathtaking, and dissecting his work for 'meaning' is a colossal waste of time given that his primary motivation would have been money and royal favour.

This is superb trolling !I initially composed a response, then realised Barden is a genius!

I really hate reading Shakespeare's works. I don't enjoy any of them. Agree with other posts that plays are meant to be watched, not read.

The first question I asked my new teacher at the start of the A2 year was 'Are we doing Shakespeare' as I was already filled with dread...I literally cheered in my seat when she told me we weren't, we were going to be doing 'The White Devil' by John Webster in place of Shakespeare text.

I think his work is largely irrelevant,

It's not in current English, the plots are hardly breathtaking, and dissecting his work for 'meaning' is a colossal waste of time given that his primary motivation would have been money and royal favour.

1) So?

2) So? Who gives a crap about plot? "Woooo! Events in sequence!!!"

3) Nobody looks for 'meaning'. What people look for are effects, ideas, dramaturgy, that sort of thing. None of these are compromised by the possibility that Shakespeare only wrote for personal gain.

1 - Lack of educational value and diversion away from useful material.

2 - Therefore its boring, and if its not educational or interesting, what's the point?

3 - All one does in school when it comes to Shakespeare is slave away as to what he meant in the linguistic sense (i.e. translating it into modern English) and what he meant in the literary sense. Are you honestly telling me that your English lessons didn't mostly talk about 'imagery' and "what he meant by x"? Never once was I even presented with the notion that maybe, just maybe, Shakespeare wanted to sell tickets. Of course this compromises the depth of his work, as it assumes that something very simple must have greater depth when it probably doesn't (think Occum's Razor).

1) So there's nothing educational about studying how Early Modern English was written and spoken?

2) There are more important things than plot. I really don't see why his plots are 'worse' than any other writer's.

3) Maybe it isn't taught very well in school, but you're clearly referring to it being taught at a pretty basic level. Even at A Level it is pretty decently taught and made interesting--imagery is an important part of how everyone speaks, not just Shakespeare's characters, and 'meaning' is something that bad English students talk about and assume teachers do too but actually isn't something that critics really look for in texts (besides the kind of glossing you're talking about where you need to make sure everyone actually understands what characters are saying). There is plenty of evidence that Shakspeare both took pride in his work as an artist and needed to ensure an income--otherwise why would he write things like Venus and Adonis or The Rape of Lucrece both of which, being mini-epic poems, groundlings would have little interest in? It's incredibly reductive to say firstly that Shakespeare was only interested in money and that secondly because of this none of his work is worth thinking about. Have you considered that all of the effects and uses of language and ideas that I'm talking about might be the very reason why he was successful financially? He had a financial incentive to write good plays, and part of what we do in English is think about how those plays are so good and why they were so financially successful..

Sounds like you ought to be a film student, not a literature student. Literature involves the written word, some of it takes some work to digest, understand and appreciate.