You’re Bard! Shakespeare is cancelled at college, and my mirth becomes a feast

More than 400 years after William Shakespeare posed his famous ‘‘to be or not to be’’ question Aotearoa has finally answered by picking the latter and cancelling the playwright.

In news easily mistaken for satire, Creative New Zealand, the government’s arts funding body, has refused to fund a Shakespeare festival for college students that’s been running annually for about 30 years. In it, students perform bits of Shakespeare’s plays and by all acounts have a blimmin good time doing so.

The reasons behind the council’s decision are all jumbled up in word-shaped nonsense much like those of the bard himself, but come down to Shakespeare’s relevance in a modern day country that must decolonise.

The festival’s genre is ‘‘located within a canon of imperialism and missed the opportunity to create a living curriculum and show relevance’’, is one of the ways the board put it.

And although they acknowledged the festival’s strong youth engagement, and positive effect on students, their ultimate decision was, well, it was not to be.

Of course the people behind the festival oppose both the decision and reasons behind it. The Shakespeare Globe Centre’s Dawn Sanders told The Guardian the board’s assumptions about relevance were ‘‘totally wrong’’.

More than 120,000 students have taken part since the festival’s inception and Sanders said a huge number were Mā ori, Pasifika and other ethnic minorities who adapted Shakespeare’s works in modern and culturally meaningful ways.

Ultimately, the festival will go on but will do so without the $30,000 from the arts council; money that represents 10% of its costs and will have to be found elsewhere. It has received $376,381 from Creative NZ since 2012. Whether the council asked any of the teenagers who’ve taken part in the festival for their opinion is unclear, though it’s obvious the issue is both complex and far from over.

But as the arguments for and against filling young minds with the wafflings of an Elizabethan playwright or Jacobean writer play out, I can’t help be a little bit delighted. Shakespeare sucks. He sucks because he’s been done to death, he sucks because he’s often unintelligable, but most importantly he sucks because we’re not allowed to say he sucks.

Admitting you don’t enjoy

Shakespeare is akin to annoucing you don’t like babies, actually it’s more akin to announcing you eat babies. It’s the literary equivilant of the vegetarian at the barbecue, which, for the record, I always am.

My generation was just one of many that had Shakespeare forced down our throats. We learnt excerpts by rote, regurgitating countless doths, ofts, thys and thees pedaled by manic-eyed English teachers convinced they were doing god’s work.

Nobody cared if we didn’t understand it but if we dared say we didn’t like it there was hell to pay. I was booted out of my fifth form class by a teacher apoplectic with rage after I declared one of the plays boring. It was. Still is.

Copping to a dislike of Shakespeare’s work might be uncomfortable but those who do will find not only are they not alone, they’re also in eminent company. Leo Tolstoy, John Dryden and Voltaire are just a few famous haters, though their criticism pales into comparison with George Bernard Shaw’s.

‘‘...It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.’’

Anyway, the undeniable upside of this modern-day cancelling is that it’s allowed us other haters to finally speak up. Just don’t do it too loudly and definitely don’t do it too long.

Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. I’m off to read Stephen King.

‘It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him’ GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE