Jenny Agutter defends literature’s ‘dead white men’

THE DRIVE to rid schools of “dead white men” like Shakespeare will leave children at the mercy of literary fads, Jenny Agutter has said.

The actress urged teachers not to remove literary greats from school curricula on spurious grounds.

“Don’t remove someone who is dead and white just because they are dead and white,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “My feeling is that the best writing crosses time and social backgrounds.”

Earlier this month, Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said schools must look beyond “dead white men” like Shakespeare, Pope, Dryden and Shelley to aid diversity in the curriculum.

Agutter, a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Foundation charity, said: “When writing is really extraordinary, it belongs in the present as much as it did in the past.”