No YOU decolonize
Now from the other main branch of looney tunes – the people running the Shakespeare Trust announce that Shakespeare wasn’t all that and besides he was white so let’s all stop paying any attention to his stupid old plays and poetry.
William Shakespeare’s birthplace is being “decolonised” following concerns about the playwright being used to promote “white supremacy”.
Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust owns buildings linked to the Bard in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust also owns archival material including parish records of the playwright’s birth and baptism.
It is now “decolonising” its vast collection to “create a more inclusive museum experience”.
Hang on. Wait just a second. I have a better idea. How about the people doing this get different jobs so that people who actually see the point of Mr S can take over. Wouldn’t that be both simpler and less destructive?
The trust has stated that some items in its collections and archives may contain “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”.
Well yes. Things have changed over the past four centuries, so naturally Shakespeare’s thoughts won’t be identical to our much purer thoughts…and yet, if you actually pay attention to the plays, you eventually notice that he wrote a lot of very meaty roles for the cross-dressed boys to play. You eventually notice that he created a lot of highly intelligent, witty, brave, mouthy female characters. If you read his contemporaries at all you’re struck by the contrast. There aren’t a whole hell of a lot of Rosalinds or Violas or Cordelias in Webster or Jonson.
The process of “decolonising”, which typically means moving away from Western perspectives, comes after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s genius was used to advance ideas about “white supremacy”.
The claims were made in a 2022 collaborative research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham.
The research took issue with the trust’s quaint Stratford attractions, comprising the supposed childhood homes and shared family home of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, his wife, because the Bard was presented as a “universal” genius.
This idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy”, it was claimed.
The best thing about this is how strikingly original it is.
The “[decolonization] typically means moving away from Western perspectives” thing is uncharacteristically direct. Pretense usually obscures that aim through talk of oppression and justice and inclusion and other ways of knowing.
I’m getting sick of seeing things I like or love (e.g., The Lord of the Rings) be called white supremacist, gateways to the alt right, and generally problematized in service of a cultural movement rooted in effing Marxism.
Dear anti-colonialists, I am greatly in favour of promoting indigenous voices over those of the colonisers. More indigenous playwrights can only be a good idea, right?
OK, I see that you agree. And it’s important that previously colonised peoples are able to get access to the words and wisdom of their ancestors, too. Yes?
Shakespeare was an English playwright, living in England, writing in English, for English audiences. He and his works are part of the heritage of indigenous English people.
HANDS OFF, YOU WIBBLING GRIEVANCE GERBILS!
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Thanks for the laugh!
How dare he not have seen 400 years into the future and see how silly people have become! (I doubt it would come as a surprise.) It’s not white supremacy, it’s literary supremacy.
tigger:
Exactly so. They oppose Western “perspectives” even in those regions where those perspectives were born. It really shows that their “decolonization” label is just a bit of misdirection.
Shakespeare is being ‘decolonised’ all the time. His work is performed all over the world, in different languages, reflected through different cultures. It would be great if the Shakespeare Trust wanted to research and focus on that.
The Irish, Welsh, and Scots might differ.
(Says the guy named Coppola)
I’m not sure that I understand your point, Bruce. ＼(°o°)／
The Irish, Welsh, and Scots have plenty of indigenous writers of their/our own (depending on ancestry; I’m Welsh, Irish and English, my husband is Scottish).
There have been people living in tribes all over the British Isles for tens of thousands of years; I believe that counts as indigenous.
“It’s not white supremacy, it’s literary supremacy.”
Boom.
True, but a large number of his plays were set outside the British Isles and featured a cast of non British characters.
And not only, as Ophelia pointed out above, did he write strong female characters, he also, to the best of my knowledge, wrote the only play of his era wherein a Jew was granted sympathy and honour. In another play set outside Britain.
What will this inclusivity include? The works of Christopher Marlowe? Robert Greene? Perhaps a whole room dedicated to Ben Elton would be nice.
Oh, yes. The plays themselves weren’t all about England, or royalty and the upper classes (although many were, of course; had to keep the sponsors happy). They also brought great and classic stories from other countries into English theatre, and couldn’t have had a more ‘diverse’ cast unless he’d included aliens from another planet.
His work has survived all these centuries precisely because they are about timeless themes of human behaviour, regardless of the changing fashions and mores in the interim.
These ignoramuses who bleat about fixing a museum of Shakespeare of all places in order to pander to their eccentric worldview really ought to be tied to a theatre seat every Friday for nine months and made to watch all the plays. They might learn something.
Tigger:
Terrible idea. That gave me flashbacks to secondary school English Literature, being made to sit through weekly performances given by a company who were to acting what Trump is to diplomacy. It was many years before I could even consider giving Shakespeare a second look.
It also wouldn’t work, for two other reasons. One, they’ve been mentally captured by Theory, so everything they perceive is filtered through the Critical lens. Two, most of them aren’t equipped to discern literary quality in the first place.
I say neither of these things lightly. The Critical Social Justice way of looking at the world is both totalizing and easy, whereas actually understanding and appreciating literature requires real effort and engagement. It demands the ability to entertain an idea or premise without assenting to it. To do that, however, is fundamentally beyond many of these nit- and midwits, and incompatible anyway with CT’s totalism.
Just think of all the times you’ve seen trans apologists mechanically following the standard playbook while looking smug and superior. They really do believe they’re the smartest people in the room, because the ideology provides them with simplistic tools that make them feel smart.
Funny how all over the world, millions of people have died (or been killed) trying to win for themselves the values and “perspectives” that these fools would dismiss and discard, values and perspectives they themselves currently enjoy and use. But of course they’re only enjoying and using them “ironically,” or turning them around to self-destructively undermine them, or “transgress” them because they’re just too goddamn smart to actually believe in them, and can’t understand or take seriously anyone who does.
My tuppence-worth on the “whitness” of Shakespeare:
Let’s allow, for the sake of the argument, that there is racism in his plays. Well, OK; but that’s not enough. We need to know more about whether that putative racism maps on to today’s definition of racism; and I don’t think it does. And I take Othello as my case-in-point.
Here’s a trivial starting-point: Othello is a tragedy. This means that, in Shakespeare’s handling of the form, the titular character is brought down by a flaw in his own character. For Macbeth it’s ambition; for Hamlet it’s over-thinking; for Othello it’s jealousy. But the titular characters of a tragedy are all high-status people: people you’d want to be, in effect. Were they just plebs like you or me, their ignominy would not be tragic, because they’d’ve been ignominious from the beginning.
What else do we know about Othello? He’s black. So he’s an admirable black man. More than that: he’s not just a visiting prince from Egypt, and so a passing curiosity or noble savage character; he holds high military office in a European state. This means he must command respect both from his peers and from the men he commands, skin-tone notwithstanding.
And this must have made sense to Shakespeare’s audience. This stands spelling out. It must have been perfectly straightforward to a 17th-century costermonger that a black guy could have been in charge of a European army, and been worthy of respect, and married a nobleman’s daughter, because if any of that were not true, the tragedy simply wouldn’t have worked. One might as well have written a play about Caliban or a dog holding a place among the Venetian nobility. In that case, his being brought low would not be a tragedy, but the restoraton of order. Othello would be a kind of comedy; it would never have succeeded as a tragedy. But it isn’t, and it did.
Now imagine another world, in which Shakespeare lived in (say) the nineteenth century. Could he have written Othello then? That’s not nearly as clear, because racism – as we see it – was by that point A Thing. There would have been something faintly obscene about the premise of the play.
And so I think it’s fair to deduce that even if you want to say that Shakespeare was racist, you can’t just help yourself to it. You’ve got to be able to say precisely how, and you’ve got to be alive to the possibility that you’re being deeply anachronistic.
Elegant.
[…] a comment by Enzyme on No YOU […]
I seem to have missed this post, I don’t know why. But I shall add my penny’s worth.
I wonder if Rabelais, Dante, and a number of other mediaeval & Renaissance writers are bering ‘decolonised’ in other parts of Europe. But what really concerns me is this: what does this ‘decolonisation’ consist in? I have tried to see the full Telegraph page, but you are asked to sign up to see a few free articles, which I did – but then you are presented with a request that you should subscribe anyway.
A few words along the lines of “some items in its collections and archives may contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’” don’t help you to understand what ‘decolonisation’ might mean.. And what does that ‘may contain’, which seem to be the Telegraph’s words, not the Trust’s, mean? Do these ‘items’ contain such ‘language or depictions’ or not? And what are these ‘items’? Might they include the musings from ’the lady from Maryland’ who is quoted in M.R. Ridley’s Arden edition (1958 – and still, so far as I know, extant)) as writing, among other things, that ‘Shakespeare was too correct a delineator of human nature to have coloured Othello black, if he had personally acquainted himself with;f with the idiosyncrasies of the African race…. Othello was a white man.” (there are all sorts of italics for emphasis that she puts in and that I am unable to reproduce here)? Or what? When we are given no idea of what this ‘decolonisation’ consists in, it is hard to resist the idea that the Telegraph is merely giving fodder to the prejudices of its mostly ‘anti-woke’ readers – although at the same time the bleatings about ‘deconolisation’ , whatever that might mean, from the Trust don’t help matters.
Shakespeare set so many of his plays in distant times or distant places partly because it allowed him to address political and other issues without calling down the wrath of the (fortunately rather incompetent) censorship of the time.
Perhaps I should say that it is possible to admire a writer without in any way agreeing with his political or racial views. For example. I admire Kipling as a writer without agreeing at all with a great many, or even most, of his views.
Regarding ‘colonisation’ the word ‘shogun’ in Japanese is a shortened version of 征夷大将軍, which means “Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force Against the Barbarians”, the barbarians being the Ainu people of Northern Japan, the remnants of whom now live in Hokkaido, their language largely lost. Or one might think of the Indonesian take-over of Western New Guinea in 1962, and the resistance which continues to this day.
Regarding Bruce Coppola’s & Tigger’s points, I reviewed mostly contemporary poetry for a well-known poetry magazine in Britain for many years, and sought to introduce (not only contemporary) Welsh, Scottish & Irish poetry in addition to English poetry. I still find it extraordinary that most English people are happy to remain unaware of the existence of one of the great poets of the Middle Ages, Dafydd ap Gwilym, a contemporary of Chaucer; extraordinary, too, the refusal to pay attention to poets writing in Gaelic, whether Scottish or Irish, and the resentment felt by such as Philip Larkin towards a great poet like Hugh McDiarmid for writing in Scots.
@Enzyme – very well put. The nasty characters (Iago, Desdemona’s father) abuse Othello for being black; the nice characters (Desdemona, Cassio) have no problems with it. It would have been impossible to put on Othello in the southern states of America up to the 1960s, I would guess. Othello thinks Desdemona may have problems with his blackness when he is uncertain of her loving him – but she doesn’t.
This just made my day. Thanks.
@ Coppola “The Irish, Welsh, and Scots might differ.”
The English can claim Shakespeare – they are rightly proud of the lad from the Midlands who made good in London. He did of course write for one Scotsman – King James I/VI for whom he wrote Macbeth, flattering him with his ancestry and including the witches – James I/VI was a great believer in them.
He gives a nod to the Welsh in Henry V (who calls himself a Welshman) to suck up to the Tudors.
A bunch of Scottish football supporters travelled to London and when they saw a statue of Shakespeare they called him a crap Robert Burns – a literary person would point out that they are very different kinds of poet – but it is heartening that football supporters would claim a great poet as their own.
Shakespeare of course belongs to everyone – he is played in India – Kurosawa the Japanese director made a great film of Macbeth – “Throne of Blood”. The theme of searching for power and then holding on to it makes for murder is universally applicable. A theme can travel out of its time and country.
I am reminded of a play I once saw about the prisoners on Robben Island putting on Antigone – this play about doing what is right in defiance of an oppressive power evidently had resonance with them.
This sort of nonsense will pass, as bowdlerising of Shakespeare passed.
We saw a play this weekend called “The Margariad”–basically the three Henry VI plays plus Richard III boiled down to two hours, with Margaret as the connecting thread. It was mostly Shakespeare’s words, though with a few sometimes cheeky asides to help the audience keep track of who was who and what was happening, and just a bit of antiwar sloganeering (“We kill people and take their shit”). Seven actors–two men and five women, two of whom were black–playing about 20 roles (with a different Margaret in each act). I don’t know if that counts as being decolonialized, but it was a lot of fun, a word I never associated with the Henry VI plays.
And King Lear with “Ran”.
Tim: You aren’t going to get a straightforward definition, because mystification rules the day with Theory. Here’s an example from a book on Decolonizing the University.
Just like with trans, this kind of vague talk lets them “dumb things down” in whatever way they want to persuade the current audience.
And I just noticed that the favorable blurb about the book on the Amazon page is from the Cambridge prof who made headlines back in 2020 by proclaiming, “White lives don’t matter.”