Americans have a love-hate relationship with Great Britain, the Mother Country. Some Irish Americans understandably harbour a longstanding animus toward the ‘fookin’ Brits’, while others sneer with condescension at the monarchy and British colonial history. But virtually all Americans have traditionally admired British culture. No matter whether the culture is high, low or middlebrow – Noel Coward, James Bond or Harry Potter. Here in America we appreciate the inestimable contribution of the British. It is the standard by which all others are measured. And of course, the jewel in the crown is Shakespeare.
Which is why we here in the US are gobsmacked that the British are actually willing to piss all over the Bard in the name of ‘progressive’ bullshit. Apparently, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is to ‘decolonise’ its Shakespeare heritage sites in Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust wants to use these museum sites to explore ‘the continued impact of empire’ on its collections. This was prompted by research into the supposed role Shakespeare’s work has played in promoting ‘white supremacy’.
It should be embarrassing to even consider such drivel, but as George Orwell so presciently observed, ‘there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them’.
And, as if on cue, enter said intellectual, stage left: Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham, who collaborated on a 2022 project with the trust. As the Telegraph reported last month, Hopkins’s research claimed that the idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’. It presents European culture as the world standard for high art and promotes it through ‘colonial inculcation’, turning Shakespeare into a symbol of ‘British cultural superiority’ and ‘Anglo-cultural supremacy’. The ongoing veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of the ‘white Anglocentric, Eurocentric and increasingly “Westcentric” worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today’.
It would be a challenge to publish anything more mind-numbingly ignorant than that, but the Globe Theatre in London has certainly tried in recent years. In a series of seminars, titled ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’, which the Globe staged in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, academics taking part made several accusations against the Bard. These included the claims that King Lear was about ‘whiteness’ and that the character of Prince Hamlet holds ‘racist’ views of black people.
Lest anyone in Great Britain despair that the embarrassment is theirs alone, we have our own paragons of intellectual vacuity on this side of the Atlantic, too. These include Lorena German, chair of the National Council of English Teachers’ Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, a catchy name if ever there was one. German has been featured in the New York Times and is also co-founder of Disrupt Text, which, according to its website, ‘is a crowd-sourced, grassroots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative and equitable language [and] arts curriculum’.
German’s animus for Shakespeare runs as deep as that of the current British detractors. She has written that:
‘We continue to affirm that there is an over-saturation of Shakespeare in our schools and that many teachers continue to unnecessarily place him on a pedestal… This is about an ingrained and internalised elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonisation… Considering the violence, misogyny, racism and more that we encounter in Shakespearean texts, we offer up the notion that we can open our minds and classrooms to texts that celebrate the voices and lives of marginalised people, speak to the students in front of us and reflect a better society.’
Talk about not getting it – and this woman teaches children. The centuries of writings about Shakespeare’s universality and timelessness by scholars with far more gravitas than German are not hard to find, even in America. To see where we may be drifting, a particularly telling moment in the US came in 2021, when one of our top television journalists misidentified the source of that well-known phrase, ‘sound and fury’, as being from William Faulkner – it actually came from one of Shakespeare’s greatest passages from Macbeth. Not a terrible mistake by any means – except for the fact this journalist happens to have a degree in English literature from an Ivy League university.
The irony of these Shakespeare critiques, with their talk of power struggles between oppressor and oppressed, is that no dramatist ever explored the subject more fully than the Bard. What are Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Richard III if not about the struggle for power?
A love of Shakespeare is hardly a preserve of non-radicals. No less than Karl Marx himself read Shakespeare regularly, and he and his family would walk back from their regular Sunday picnics on Hampstead Heath, reciting dramatic extracts from Shakespeare’s plays to each other. Marx’s love for Shakespeare prompted Chairman Mao to promote the playwright when the Communists took over mainland China in 1949. The Bard’s plays were banned during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s by Mao’s wife, but have since been rehabilitated and are now more popular than ever in the world’s largest Communist country. Ho Chi Minh, educated in the West, enjoyed reading Shakespeare as well.
The new attacks on Shakespeare constitute a dispiriting departure from the Age of Enlightenment, leaving in their wake coarsened, deadened souls; our society will have a poorer understanding of human nature and humanity. These malefactors claim that their communal efforts will bend society towards justice. But in reality, without Shakespeare’s brilliance, we are less wise and our moral insight is diminished.
By sacrificing its premiere literary son to the demands of a band of deranged intellectual pissants, Britain isn’t just harming its own culture – it’s leaving the whole world much poorer, too.
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