Shakespeare and civilisation
My talk at ‘The Academy’, a symposium run by Ideas Matter.
This week I read a rather depressing article in the Wall Street Journal about a permanent exhibition at the reopened Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. According to the article’s author Edward Rothstein, the purpose of the new exhibition appears to be ‘to topple Shakespeare from his monumental status’. Hectoring placards urge visitors to ‘talk back to Shakespeare’ and berate him for his alleged association with colonisation and ‘whiteness’.
‘While Shakespeare was writing his plays,’ says one of the curators’ labels, ‘England was colonizing this land that we are currently standing on’. Quite what any of this has to do with Shakespeare is not made clear. ‘For far too long,’ another declares, ‘Shakespeare was seen as both the property of white culture and evidence of its supremacy’. By whom exactly? Certainly it is possible that a handful of racists have sought to appropriate Shakespeare to their own ends, but they would be fringe cases. It would be like claiming that the Westboro Baptist Church is representative of Christianity. Besides, if anyone is guilty of misinterpreting Shakespeare to promote racial division, it’s surely those responsible for this exhibition at the Folger.
This determination to undermine Shakespeare’s genius from those who are meant to be custodians of his legacy is sadly common in our blinkered identity-obsessed world. If this is how the curators at the Folger understand Shakespeare, then they haven’t read his work very carefully. There is surely nothing more insipid than a bunch of academic cultish midwits attempting to pull down a talent that is well beyond their comprehension.
I addressed this kind of banal ideological iconoclasm in a talk last year at ‘The Academy’, a symposium run by the charity Ideas Matter, and made the case that Shakespeare is one of the pillars of our civilisation. As I argue, to reduce him to a ‘dead white male’ is infantile, and we should reject robustly these attempts to destroy his enduring significance and our cultural heritage.
You can watch the talk in full here. As ever, please let me know your thoughts in the comments!
'cultish midwits' indeed. Who even takes these people seriously? Not anyone who loves Shakespeare, that's for sure.
Meanwhile, I am off to see the brilliant Lord Chamberlain's Men performing Twelfth Night next Saturday night. Tickets have sold like hot cakes. And, looking at the weather forecast, it may even be one of those rare outdoor productions in England where we don't have to take thick jackets, blankets and umbrellas -Yay!
Silly buggers - they need to remember that since before Shakespeare's time slavery was dominantly an African led industry,
Sure, white men bought slaves off African tribes who had enslaved people of other African tribes, and did horrific things to them, but this white guilt telescope is so bloody useless at seeing the wider picture...
and always manages to miss how the Barbary coast Muslims enslaved more white Europeans over a longer, and nearer to contemporary, time period than Europeans enslaved Africans.
What this has to do with Shakespeare, god only knows.