Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers.
Performance isn't just rote recitation.
In college however, my Humanities professors were better than I appreciated at the time. They forced us to think about the material and challenged us to defend our interpretations. As an Engineering student who just wanted the class to be over, I really missed out on a lot of good stuff.
I think a lot of classic American lit is hard as an American kid because it’s removed enough from today that you don’t get the nuances and also so influential that the storytelling feels trite, even if it was revolutionary at the time.