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 it’s not women who come out worse) but it should be noted that of the three failures in the Pointless debacle, only one was male.

But I do wonder what normal people (if such creatures exist) really think about readers or, more specifically male readers. I don’t think we’re yet at the point Gary Shteyngart predicted, where people can confidently express nausea at the very notion of books, but I am sometimes conscious when reading in public of what might best be described as sideways glances, and not the nice kind. Today I found myself on a train, opposite a woman even older than me, who seemed to be scowling at the tome I was carrying. To be fair, I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I was reading that annoyed her, or the specific book, which happened to be Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, once notorious for its depiction of sapphic naughtiness. So, just to irritate her even more, here’s a bit that made me laugh.

Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting fatter, like bubble gum you blow. Finally we came to the moment, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside. I told my mother about it, and she said it was because I ate sardines for supper. The next night I ate sausages, but I still had the dream.