I’m a professional writer (believe it or not) but was one of the few in my school year who did not choose English to study at A-Level.
Back then, reading fiction felt like hard work to me. For my GCSE, I had to read Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It’s a classic. But it’s long, sad and contains an awful lot of dense and wistful description of the Dorset and Somerset countryside. I now live on the border of Somerset and Dorset – in the heart of Hardy’s Wessex. I love Wessex. It’s where I live. I enjoy seeing the hedgerows, oak trees and starling formations. I am still not hungry for lengthy verbal descriptions of all of the above.
Ducking out of English at 16 meant I dodged Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. I remember my friends calling Measure for Measure "a problem play" because it is not a comedy, a tragedy or a history play. But the real problem is the enormous coincidence at the end to resolve the plot. It would simply not pass muster in any movie these days, let alone a classic story. Why did Shakespeare put it in? The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot was originally published in 1922. It is not doing the poem a great disservice by calling it "wilfully obscure". Did even T.S. Eliot know what this strange collection of words he assembled actually meant? My fellow schoolmates felt that they did not and would never understand the poem.
