By Grace Hatchell- 2026 Update
Now then. Grace needs a word with you.
Not a lecture. Not a list of reasons with bullet points and sub-headings. Just a quiet word, here in the village, about a man who has been dead for four hundred years and somehow keeps turning up everywhere I look.
His name, as I suspect you already know, is William Shakespeare.
I’ve been delivering post long enough to know when something keeps coming up in conversation. And Shakespeare — whether people love him, dread him, or still have mild flashbacks to a dog-eared copy of Macbeth at school — keeps coming up. So I thought it was about time I sorted through what’s actually in the satchel on this one.
The honest truth about school Shakespeare
Here’s the thing nobody says loudly enough: most of us met Shakespeare at entirely the wrong moment.
We were handed a play in a classroom, told to read it out loud in turns, and somewhere between “thou dost protest too much” and a classmate doing a very unfortunate impression of Juliet, the magic got buried under anxiety about pronunciation.
That’s not Shakespeare’s fault. That’s just bad timing.
Because Shakespeare was never written to be read quietly at a desk. It was written to be performed — shouted, whispered, wept, laughed at, and felt in a room full of people who couldn’t look at their phones. The words come alive completely differently when someone is standing in front of you delivering them. Trust me. I’ve seen it happen to audiences who arrived looking mildly suspicious, and left talking about it all the way to the car park.
What he actually wrote about
Strip away the language — the thees and thous, the verse, the elaborate insults — and look at what Shakespeare is actually dealing with.
Ambition that quietly destroys everything it touches (Macbeth). A family so committed to a grudge that two young people pay for it with their lives (Romeo and Juliet). A man so consumed by jealousy that he dismantles the one thing he loved most (Othello). Power, grief, loyalty, betrayal, the particular cruelty of being misunderstood by the people closest to you.
These aren’t historical curiosities. They’re Tuesday.
What makes Shakespeare endure isn’t that he was clever with language — though he was, extravagantly so. It’s that he was uncommonly honest about people. He didn’t tidy human beings up. His heroes make terrible decisions. His villains have understandable motivations. His comedies hide something painful underneath the laughter. That’s not what dusty old literature looks like. That’s what real life looks like.
The productions that prove it
One of the things I love most about this job — sorting through what’s happening on stages across the country — is watching directors find new doors into Shakespeare’s work.
A Shakespeare play set in 1940s Europe, or a contemporary classroom, or a dystopian near-future isn’t a gimmick. It’s a director saying: look, this still fits. Put it anywhere and it still fits. And they’re right. The fact that you can transplant these stories into almost any era and they hold together is itself the argument. Stories that fragile don’t survive four hundred years. Stories that true do.
I’ve sat in audiences — at grand theatres and tiny fringe spaces alike — and watched people who arrived indifferent leave genuinely moved. Not because they were supposed to be. Because something in the play caught them off guard and told them something true about themselves.
That’s not a small thing.
So — is he still relevant?
Yes. But not because he’s on the curriculum, or because the RSC says so, or because certain phrases have embedded themselves so deeply into English that we quote him without knowing it (and we do — “break the ice”, “wild-goose chase”, “heart of gold” — all Shakespeare, all still in daily use).
He’s relevant because the questions he kept asking — who deserves power, what do we owe each other, how do we live with what we’ve done — are the same questions we’re still asking. Loudly, urgently, and often not very well.
Shakespeare didn’t answer them. He just held them up to the light and let the audience sit with them. Which is, if you ask Grace, exactly what the best theatre has always done.
Spotted a Shakespeare production worth talking about? Slip a note into Grace’s Postbox — the satchel is always open.
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