About Shakespeare and Winterson

Not a little consternation a few days ago when contestants on BBC1’s evergreen quiz show Pointless were tasked with identifying a Shakespeare play with ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the titles and half of them couldn’t manage it. (Guesses included ‘The Inspectors’, ‘The Story of the Witches’ and my favourite, ‘King Richards’.) Colour me distinctly unsurprised. The oft-trumpeted policy that “every British child learns Shakespeare” really means that every British child spends a year being fed enough pre-chewed gobbets of either Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice (neither of which has ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the title) to enable them to pass a GCSE, after which they don’t need to read another Shakespeare play again, ever.Not everyone is relaxed about these gaping holes in our cultural knowledge, hence the so-called Illiterate Boyfriend trend, in which women test their beaux on the pronunciation of difficult words. It’s meant to highlight widening education gaps between the genders (and let’s just say that…