If it's true that "a man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age", then the RSC's proposed initiative to introduce the works of the Bard to children as young as four can only be applauded with both hands. As long as you've made sure they've put their orange juice and felt-tip pens down first.
The argument goes that by the time most kids meet the plays in their mid-teens, it's already too late. Certainly the prospect of acting Shakespeare to audiences of pubescent school kids, wearing dove grey tights and a velvet codpiece while intoning words like "thee" and "thou", is enough to send the most hard-bitten thespian reaching for the Valium (please refer to my Bassanio in The Merchant Of Venice, at Billingham-On-Tees in 1988).
So why not start their education young, when kids are more receptive to strange words, and with their emotional barricades not yet erected? Of course, some of the Bard's plays are more appropriate for four-year-olds than others. I would eschew the comedies, for instance: it's hard enough to raise a smile from adult audiences with gags such as "Sowter will cry owt on't, though it be as rank as a fox", let alone from a room full of infants used to the more immediate humour of The Tweenies.
But the tragedies are also problematical for our younger punters: Titus Andronicus, for instance, may be a rattling good yarn, the sort of thing which would make the average episode of Byker Grove seem pale by comparison, but it also involves death by torture, a woman having both arms cut off and two young children murdered and baked in a pie. Best avoided unless you've got Esther Rantzen at the other end of the phone, just in case.
For the same reason Macbeth and Hamlet may also be inappropriate: although I suppose the meaning of the words could always be changed to make the plays more palatable for a younger age group. Pericles would be sure to appeal with lines like "Come gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles", while the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear might actually seem quite appetising to children as long as the "out vile jelly" line referred to raspberry flavour with chocolate sprinklings.
Nonetheless, my suggestion is to stick to the histories. With lashings of kings, queens, heroes, villains, swords, battles, chainmail, trumpets, proclamations and usually the triumph of good over ill in the final scene, it could almost be an episode of Noggin The Nog.
And who knows, perhaps the experiment will work? "Better three hours too soon than a minute too late", as someone once wrote. And we all know who it was, don't we children?
