Jonathan Bate

During the Government__ recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare__ interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.