For many students, there’s no classroom battle as challenging as the annual unit on Shakespeare in English class. His language is outdated; words like “thy,” “fie” and “wherefore” are sprinkled into each of his pieces in such a large quantity that, to the uninterested teenage eye, Shakespeare’s meaning and purpose seem convoluted and muddled.

In order to combat this negative connotation and give relevance to Shakespeare’s text, teachers often attempt to reinvent his plays by pointing out his genius use of poetry and Elizabethan word choice. In fact, the classic “Shakespeare is like a rapper” trope happens so often that it’s become a cliche, mimicked in everything from movies to Saturday Night Live. But the current problem with how we learn Shakespeare is that it varies too much from how we read and analyze other novels. If we focused on other aspects of his works, like his characters and story, his words would be a lot easier to swallow.

For the past three summers, I’ve participated in a Shakespeare performance summer camp. That’s right. Without any threat or blackmail from my parents, I willingly agreed to spend seven weeks of my precious break time delving deep into one of the Bard’s plays and performing it for the community.

When faced with performing the farcical Comedy of Errors, we were told to knock Shakespeare’s language off the pedestal it usually resides upon. We avoided blankly reciting his words, choosing instead to search for the emotion and character behind them. This took me by surprise: learning about Shakespeare’s plays had always been followed by a lengthy discussion of how magnificent his language was.

As the summer weeks passed, I realized why we were encouraged to look beyond the poetry. I memorized lines as lines. I examined my character’s actions as actions. I took Shakespeare at face value. Sure enough, it became evident that his genius seeped far below the surface of his poetic dialogue and soliloquies. In fact, the less I focused on the quality of his writing and the more time I spent studying the story, the more I grew to appreciate his craft.

The Bard’s characters are complicated and flawed. His plotlines can be seamless, and oftentimes just as genius as the words we tend to focus on when studying his plays. At its core, Shakespeare’s work has arguably more literary value for its insightful creativity than its linguistic eloquence because his work charmed audiences, not readers.

All of these elements, although somewhat apparent from simply reading the plays, shine the most when the plays are performed, University of Texas San Antonio professor Alan Craven told Ovations, a publication from UTSA’s College of Liberal and Fine Arts. He echoed what I had found to be true: Shakespeare becomes easier to follow and more engaging in general when his plays are allowed to exhibit more than just the language.

Shakespeare wanted his characters to evoke strong emotions in his audience. He wanted the audience to root for one character and hate another. By reading about the characters off a page at a desk, choosing to focus on the beauty of his language rather than the brilliance of the plotlines and characters, we miss a large part of what Shakespeare was all about.

I don’t mean to devalue Shakespeare’s writing. We should very well discuss its brilliance in English. After all, it’s called English class for a reason. But my time performing his plays has taught me that we should be talking about so much more. We should, at least for a discussion or two, set aside the text and admire the stories and characters for what they are: well-rounded masterpieces.