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Perhaps those who carp on about the badness of the Bard should be reminded that he was no stranger to offence. Dont you know I am Richard? hissed Elizabeth I after watching Richard II and finding the Plantagenet kings deposition too close to her own experience with the Essex rebellion. One should also point out that sometimes Shakespeare issued his own trigger warnings through his Prologue (the start of Romeo and Juliet with its talk of death-markd love is the ultimate spoiler), as if he knew that controversies were important as long as you didnt offend too much.

But it is not just universities which are proving to be a barrier to Shakespeare. The insular, sometimes toxic world of the theatre Twitterati has become a breeding ground for those who shout the loudest to effectively cancel him. The result is that it sometimes feels as if the default status is to tackle him as if he is a bad thing. Take the Globe, set up by the great Sam Wanamaker, to increase our understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare. The Globe (when fully functioning) should be a joyous celebration of his work, but there is a danger that it is very much becoming a place where the craft of production is playing second fiddle to ideology; where a recent production of Richard II became a statement about post-Empire attitudes as we left the European Union.

If Shakespeare is, professionally speaking, put in the hands of ideologues, where that will leave some of the greatest theatre practitioners of our age? Robert Ickes Hamlet (first staged at the Almeida in 2017) was one of the best I have ever seen. It was a modern production, with some bold directorial innovations which werent to everyones taste, but it was also expert in highlighting the universality of the plays themes, of action, revenge, honour and death.

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Shakespeare is under threat from campus censors and Twitter mobs - Telegraph.co.uk