One thing of the English world that I wholeheartedly admire is the ability and will to keep the classics alive. In Italy we have this disastrous tendency to keep our Authors under glass, to be uncritically admired or nothing else…

Hardly a way to promote independent thinking or an active love of literature, alas – and, as a result, Dante, Manzoni and the others languish under thick layers of dust and the unconfessed boredom of schoolchildren, while Shakespeare is very much alive.

Take, for instance, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Billy.

It goes back to 2012, when the RSC commissioned to the Brothers MacLeod the creation of an animated character called Billy (Shakespeare), to appear in short animated movies as, assisted by Francis the Piglet, he hunts for inspiration…

The result is adorable, with a lot of metafictional and nonsense touches…

See Billy as he writes – or at least imagines – his plays here. And read Billy’s Bloggerel, a series of delightful posts in iambic pentameter built around the question of Where Do Ideas Come From.

It is also because of little things like Billy (and the fact that they are not branded as sacrilege!) that Shakespeare is very much alive – as opposed to a marble fellow who wrote boring plays you must read for school…