Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Dull as ditchwater, Carol Vorderman dubs William Shakespeare, in one of those incendiary slurs that may blow up and hoist the maker with his own petard (Hamlet, 3,4). To the dull, all things are dull, one might reply; though Portia says, in that Merchant of Venice speech uncannily stuffed with Countdown-style sums, that "She is not bred so dull but she can learn".
But where should she - or anyone - begin to learn? The true target of that fit of pique was not Shakespeare as such, I would argue, but the idiocy of a school system so crazily eager to split bright teenagers into "arts" and "science" specialists. Thus Carol trips merrily down her numerical path to fortune while her counterparts on the other track can hardly add VAT to showroom prices.
Talented popularisers on both sides of the dumb divide have a never-ending job. Yet their achievements, of late, have proved assymetrical. A true Golden Age of science writing has flourished for two decades, neatly symbolised by the latest set of lapidary essays from Natural History magazine by Stephen Jay Gould (The Lying Stones of Marrakech; Cape, £17.99). Gould began in 1973 and will quit, at number 300, in 2001.
Over exactly that time-span, many of his most gifted coevals on the arts side have plunged into sunless forests of literary theory, or pseudo-political rhetoric, from which they are only just emerging. Treat "Shakespeare" as a ruling-class conspiracy, and the urge to spread his virtues will not be strong. Hence the shortage of expositors willing to tell Vorderman how, and why, to try again. Thankfully, however, this self-loathing academic phase has almost passed. Someone should give her Jonathan Bate's superbly lucid and lively The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador) - and come back in six months' time to check the results.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments