Chloe Zhao may have co-written and directed Hamnet (a film about William Shakespeare’s son), but she claims that she couldn’t understand Shakespeare’s words and had to rely on the actor Paul Mescal to help her. You might have thought that Zhao, who spent her sixth form years at Brighton College (where, one hopes, she at least sniffed at some form of Shakespeare), could have bestirred herself to read one of the many editions with glossaries, or even to bone up on the CliffsNotes, but no. Instead, she is simply contributing to the enduring, frustrating idea that reading Shakespeare is ‘difficult’, as if it were on a par with analytical philosophy or Judith Butler wanging on about hegemonies. 

Shakespeare has been an essential part of the cultural life of all classes and age groups at least since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I have a copy of Much Ado About Nothing, inscribed with my grandfather’s careful signature, John Womack, and the date, 1925. He was five years old. I wonder how many children of a similar age are given Shakespeare for Christmas now, a century later, even in curtailed form? Too complicated for their iPad-guzzling brains? Try That’s Not My Bunny instead.

He had a keen eye and ear for the demands of a hungry theatre-going audience: he knew........

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