‘All the men and women merely players’

“Woe is me because I am borne a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth,” Creative New Zealand may well have groaned after the Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ’s application for $31,000 in funding took the stage around the world.

While $30,000 is no mere egg, failing to garner this grant wasn’t going to stop the event from happening next year.

But, lo, deep in an 11-page document no one beyond Creative NZ and the Shakespeare Globe Centre read lurked a viper to be loosed in an act most foul.

It held an assessor’s opinion that Shakespeare is “located within a canon of imperialism” and the application “missed the opportunity to create a living curriculum and show relevance”.

The situation, and disappointment felt, were ably addressed in a letter to the editor of the Weekend

Herald, published on September 24. There the matter may have rested . . . but what fates impose, that men must needs abide; it boots not to resist both wind and tide.

The “imperialism” quote was unleashed in a poorly researched missive; thespians and their patrons muttered into their beards and mustered outrage. Suddenly, the tale went around the globe, with inevitable simplifications and exaggerations. Soon, it was difficult to discern fact from fiction.

Was Creative NZ really the “cultural Taliban” clad in a korowai cloak? Was Will Shakespeare a starvelling, elf-skin, dried neat’stongue, bull’s-pizzle, and stock-fish of imperialism?

Should Creative NZ be hoisted upon a petard of its own making? Hardly: what this teaches us once again is that if words matter then context is still king.