I find the amount of references to both the Bible and works of Shakespeare interesting. Both are mostly lost on me as I have read neither, but it is interesting to see these cultural references tied in (and here, the footnotes are quite helpful). Between that, and Marx sarcastically referring to works of his contemporary predecessors as things like 'tricks of learned finery' brings a mild sense of levity to the text.

I found the reading became much smoother after getting past the four forms of value. Marx explains the simple form (A), the expanded form (B), the commodity form (C), and finally the money form (D). The amount of pages spent on the simple form and the expanded form give the impression that they are much more complex than what he's getting at. The summary he gives after reaching the money form describes the progression much more concisely.

This is the first time I have actually finished chapter 1.

Agreed with all of this; and also: the repetition is partly due to the methodology. If Marx talks about the same thing multiple times, it is often from different perspectives, like taking a photo of the same object from different angles, to get a complete view of it. So it's not so much a verbatim repetition, but instead a second look from another angle, to eliminate "one-sidedness".

This is basically how dialectical thinking works. A contradictory thing is understood in its totality only by understanding it from all sides, each side being limited. The classic example in Hegel is the contradiction between Being and Nothing, and their unity in Becoming, which is evident only after viewing things from the perspective of each Being and Nothing and realizing that they each move into their opposite. E.g. Being something is to not be anything else, which taken to the extreme looks like nothing at all; and Nothing itself appears as a state of Being with no content.

This dialectical approach, examining the same forms and content from different sides — e.g. from production, from exchange, from different roles in the productive process — this occurs both within each volume, and between all the volumes, with volume 3 being a sort of unity of volumes 1 and 2.