I ONCE heard a leading scholar argue that it was a shame that Shakespeare’s work had to be spoilt by stage performances, an attitude exemplifying the snobbery that Chris Jury describes in his recent demolition of the so-called Shakespeare cult in this newspaper.

Although academics can gain pleasure from examining the texts and preparing their erudite lectures, the plays were never meant to provide bewildering examination grist for generations of kids who mostly, as a consequence, will never wish to engage with Shakespeare again.

But, as any teacher who has experienced the excited involvement of a young audience enjoying a live modern production knows, the “difficulties” that make classroom textual studies a pain disappear as the language is brought to life through the chemistry of theatre.

No-one needs to be a linguist to be gripped, in the hands of fine actors, by the predicament of a Hamlet or Macbeth or held by the comic self-delusion of a Malvolio. After all, they see the same situations reworked in many a TV thriller or comedy.

Apart from his “obsolete form of English,” Chris criticises Shakespeare’s plotting and dramatic structures compared with modern dramatists’ skills. This argument may have had some relevance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the “well-made play” provided the dramatist with a template.

But modern drama has long escaped from the necessary prison of naturalism. Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard and many other major writers of the immediate past and present would fail Chris’s strictures.

He is of course right that Shakespeare has been appropriated by the cultural establishment as a national icon to support their Great Britain mythology. But a classic is a work that speaks not only to its own time but to the human condition, with all its changes, through the ages.

There may be a future time — although I doubt it — when King Lear will not draw empathetic recognition with families living with ageing relatives or Romeo and Juliet engage teenagers struggling with troublesome hormones.

But, until then, Shakespeare touches the quick of present problems facing us today. To understand the present we must attempt to understand our past and Shakespeare realised this when he used ancient Greek and Roman history to illustrate the same social and political tensions that beset his own time.

The tremendous successful live transmissions of National Theatre and RSC Shakespeare productions in cinemas throughout the country have reached audiences well beyond the middle-class snobs who so irritate Chris. Modern productions, in the hands of creative directors — even of the less popular plays — can, and often do, educate while they entertain.

They draw out parallels in the portrayal of the political and personal power play that exists as much in our world, struggling to emerge from capitalism, as in Shakespeare’s, which contended with the demise of feudalism.

Chris, you have every right not to like Shakespeare. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.