At last.

Step aside, Coke vs Pepsi! I always hated you both, anyway.

Thank you, Peter Conrad, for focussing on a truly important debate, Shakespeare vs Dickens, in your entertaining article in today’s Guardian. [2] And to the nine writers who gave their more measured (cautious?) opinions in a separate article. [3](links below)

Never mind the hedging of people with reputations to maintain … Peter, you’re wrong. Wrong as Sheryl Crow’s cover of Sweet Child O’ Mine. Side note: Sheryl, if it made YOU happy, fair enough, but you could have just sung it in the shower and left us alone. [4]

It’s Shakespeare for the win. Shakespeare for all time. My reasons? They are as plentiful as blackberries.

And I’m really going to try to avoid being an apologist for Shakespeare. He and the big D are fighting mano a mano. “And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!’ [5] No mention, then, at all, of censorship, Treasons Acts (plural) and the risk of having your ears nailed to a plank, an extended stay in the Tower, or having your genitals cut off in front of a cheering crowd before your still-pumping heart is ripped out of your chest and held aloft.

No mention of those things at all ...

Firstly, then, Shakespeare shows whereas Dickens tells. No, he does. It might sound counterintuitive to you, but the one way Shakespeare shows is through soliloquy. Once he got into his stride, Shakespeare employed them to show us human beings working through moral dilemmas which many of us still have to wrestle with: never mind third-person summations of Lady Deadlock’s distress, how about Macbeth literally constructing a for/against list as he weighs up whether to commit regicide?

Or situations where the mask we all wear in our lives is cast off and we hear a character's truth? Like Richard III declaring war on the world because of the way it judges him according to his appearance?

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy Dickens’ tirades very much. They remind me of late 80s Ben Elton at his incandescent, anti-establishment best. Minus the swearing, of course. At heart I share their absolute fury at the unfairness of the world; at the way the odds are stacked against the little guy. For example, as a teacher of ten plus years’ classroom experience, Hard Times’ Gradgrind hurts me because I recognise him in the way too many schools are run and, as Sarah Perry says in the second article, in the dogma of Education Secretaries.

But who, in Dickens, has a rich inner life?

Again, what’s not to like about Dickens’ often witty, fun, pen portraits of his multitude of characters? Aren’t they all, at heart, caricatures, though? How much information do we need to create that rich, inner movie we readers have in our heads, if what we’re reading is spelled out for us?

Verdict? Dickens is for lazy readers! That’s right. Lazy.

Next, Dickens is just too bloomin’ clever for his own good. Too often and too obviously pleased with his skill, like a Victorian prose version of John Donne. Here I fully appreciate the irony that some readers might accuse me of the same, when I get going. Stephen King - somewhere in On Writing - talks about the moment when you suddenly become aware that a writer is the third wheel in your relationship with a story. It's something like ‘Look, ma, see how nicely I'm writing?’ - you have no idea how badly it’s irking me that I can’t find the exact quotation, by the way. [6] Despite the strictures of blank verse, a decent production of any Shakespeare play sounds natural and unforced.

If reading is like eating or drinking in the sense that they are acts of consumption, then too often reading Dickens is like sucking on an Oxo cube.

Verdict? Dickens is for sipping, and too much will lead to indigestion. You can gulp Shakespeare. I did a few years ago - a memorable triple-bill at the Globe left me footsore but elated with the experience.

Finally, and this is something that some of the celebrity panel alluded to, Dickens is just too rooted in time and place. And that’s entirely his fault, as the control freak I’ve already referred to. When was the last time you saw a Dickens adaptation set in the 21^st century? Or on a ship? [7]

Again, big fan of Victorian literature here. And of recent Dickens adaptations. But, necessarily (did I mention censorship, etc?), Shakespeare gives us so little that we can supply what’s missing ourselves, and I think that enables us to own Shakespeare in a way we can’t Dickens.

Verdict? Dickens is a time capsule, albeit a brilliant one. I’m with Ben Jonson: Shakespeare is ‘not for an age, but for all time’.

One last thing - if Quentin Tarantino ever reads this, please, please, direct Titus Andronicus.

REFERENCES

[1] Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (script), (London: 1994, Faber & Faber)

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/02/is-dickens-better-than-shakespeare​

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/02/who-is-better-dickens-or-shakespeare​

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CowwMR1hDPM TRIGGER WARNING: contains scenes of iconic guitar solos being tortured. I take no responsibility for trauma induced by watching this video. If you are affected by this, I suggest you contact Amnesty International.

[5] https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org​

[6] Stephen King, On Writing (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000)

[7] https://www.rsc.org.uk/hamlet/​

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About Abel Guerrero: I'm the 'upstart' in Upstart Tuition. I qualified as a teacher in 2013, and worked in the classroom until December 2024, when I decided my interests and skills were better fulfilled by 1-2-1 and small group tuition, resources, and courses. Whilst I'm on a mission to help you smash your exams, I feel I should warn you in advance that I am also trying to make you fall in love with literature. It's the best subject for learning about who we are, about the world about us, and how to navigate it.

I specialise in Shakespeare, poetry, and the Victorian / Dystopian literary genres. If I'm not reading, I'll probably be trying to grow chillies, with varying degrees of success. 🌶️

Need help? you can book a free, no-obligation chat with me via this link. Let's get together and discuss how I can help you.

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