The text is unchanged, but the setting is contemporary gangs in Florida (or California?). The on-screen action, as well as hearing the text spoken with all the right rhythm and emotion makes it much easier to get the meaning.
As for reading, I believe the Arden Edition are the best-regarded annotations. I somehow ended up playing Macbeth in College and spent hours with the text, but it takes a lot of effort to start enjoying all the nuances, and having to perform may have made it easier to stay motivated.
(also non-native English speaker)
And read some of the poetry.
Take a scene like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHAAH8PCnMo. Just listen to the rythm and poetry and how the intensity builds, and appreciate how great actors make the text live.
But there are a wealth of great Shakespeare films. Often they are creative in how they stage the story, like Ian McKelleans Richard III, which takes place in a kind of 1930's fascist Britain. This might seem disconcerting at first, but the original plays didn't care a lot for historical or geographical accuracy anyway.
Be aware that Shakespeares strong points are not plotting and pacing. Movies and stage version often cut and rearrange a lot to satisfy the modern audience. Also the stories are typically taken from somewhere else, so the genius of Shakespeare is not the overall story, but rather in the poetry and the language and the unique characterizations.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn3...
> If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny. In 50 years time they probably won't understand it at all and the object I'm looking at now carries just such a social meaning, self-evident to an Elizabethan, hard for us to read today. It's an English woollen cap of the 16th century, a sort of flat chocolatey brown beret
[...]
> Our hat unlocks a whole language of social difference and a whole structure of social control, both expressed through clothes and sometimes enforced by law. A Parliamentary statute of 1571 stipulated that every male over the age of six had to wear a woollen cap like this one on Sundays and holidays. The law was a shrewd device for supporting the English wool industry, but it was also designed to reinforce social divisions by making them visible.
> It was not in fact every boy and man that had to wear a cap, noblemen and gentlemen wore hats instead. The 'capped' were the lower echelons of society and for them, not wearing the cap was breaking the law. Shakespeare's Uncle Henry, not quite grand enough to qualify as a gentleman, was fined for not wearing his woollen cap. Everybody in Shakespeare's audience took all this for granted and everybody in this society wore a hat as a badge of social identity. Not to, would suggest that something was seriously amiss.
I've never watched a Shakespeare play but I can't imagine understanding people speaking early modern English if I can't even understand it very well reading it and having the luxury of going over the sentences again and again.
I'm not a native English speaker and am very inclined to start reading Shakespeare soon. Any advice on how to get started? Do I just read his plays first? Any other commentary I should read? Who are the authors whose work in Shakespeare must be read by people like me?