Because I work in the theatre I have seen many Shakespeare plays. What I find interesting is that it's very hard to produce a bad Shakespeare play. The text always wins over bad actors. The plays are also very versatile; you can do absolutely anything with them. Turn them into opera or ballet. Turn tragedy into comedy and vice versa. Best movie adaptations IMHO were Akira Kurosawa's "Ran", based on King Lear and Peter Greenaway's "Prospero"s Books", based on The Tempest. My personal favorite was an adaptation by the Noord Nederlands Toneel (northern dutch theatre company) of Macbeth where the stage set was a gigantic puppet theatre in with live actors performed the roles of sock puppets complete with velcroed-on cardboard drinking glasses. Whenever a player had a short absence from the play he slumped across the bottom of the frame as if the hand that was puppeting him had been taken out. And at the end the whole set exploded and fell apart.