[gmw]

Seems to me that most of the older classics have been played around with for so long that there's not much left to spoil for most of them. Even the Muppets did Quasimodo. I knew most of the story of Moby Dick decades before I read it. I read the first couple of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series which are (at least in part) collections of spoilery-jokes about classics. Come to that, I've read several books like those where knowledge of classics is assumed, and for the most part I get by even if I haven't read the particular classic because of what I've absorbed over the years. I've also read book reviews of modern books that compare stories to classics so that knowledge of a classic becomes a spoiler to the new stuff.

In summary: I think it's polite to be careful with newer or more obscure works and hide the spoilers. But with well-known classics I think the ship has long since sailed.