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I’ve heard of Russell Brand. Making me better informed, perhaps, than teenagers four hundred years hence. Testing his staying power, he is to be studied alongside Shakespeare under a new proposal by the august Oxford, Cambridge and RSA A level examinations board. Should we listen to opera on youtube, was the debate on Wednesday morning. Isn’t Glyndebourne for toffs, John asked yesterday. In the Accessibility versus Academia debate, I have a confession which some Radio Four listeners may find disconcerting: I am on the side of accessibility. Perhaps because I’m such a fan of Shakespeare, who wrote for profit not publication, for loutish apprentices as well as louche aristocrats. After all, his contemporary Sir Thomas Bodley, who had the vision to restore Oxford University’s library and a desire to house every book published in England, would no more have dreamt of accommodating Shakespeare’s popular scripts than... well, than we would think to study popular entertainment today. A couple of weeks ago Dame Helen Mirren said no one under fifteen should be allowed to read Shakespeare. Whilst I disagree about the age limit – in my experience, any child entertained by anything verbal can be entertained by Shakespeare – I’d go further: no one should ever read Shakespeare at all. Not until we have heard and enjoyed so much of his work in performance that we really can’t resist. A friend and her teenager were revolted by the film Bad Neighbours. When she showed me the criteria for the Fifteen category I was shocked, having finally agreed to take our ten year old to Titus Andronicus. True to the original, the Globe Theatre’s production seems to break most of these censor’s taboos. So why is it all right if it’s four hundred years old? A few weeks ago I was studying Paul’s letter to the Ephesians with my classicist father. Struggling to make sense of it as we were, I asked exactly what a particular word meant. “Ah,” he said. “If it were Sophocles I could tell you. Every word of Classical Greek is precise. But this is κοινη, common Greek. It just isn’t that accurate.” If popular writers like Shakespeare and Paul of Tarsus are worthy of study, why not the language of texting or rap? Well, there is another test: not just how many people love it at any one time, but over how much time do many people love it? I was interested, during the discussion on Rameau yesterday, to learn that Johann Sebastian Bach was not as popular in his lifetime as his very accomplished sons. Nor Shakespeare as popular as Ben Johnson. No one doubts their superior genius today. More popular than Jesus, John Lennon famously claimed. Possibly true, for a moment, in the West. But over the centuries, throughout the world, the common Greek of a fisherman, a taxman, a doctor have changed many, many more lives even than the sublime language of Sophocles or Shakespeare.