Shakespeare was an empty vessel. He doesn’t need decolonising
The insidious view of the Bard as ‘problematic’ ignores the fact that he was free of ideology and open to endless interpretation, says Dominic Cavendish
So very interested in the ineffable, he enjoys leaving us irresolute
At what point do we acknowledge that Shakespeare is getting badly enmeshed in that side of humanities research that looks at representation through an ideological prism to the extent that a salvage operation may be urgently required to help haul him free?
This week we have reported on the latest online seminar organised by the Globe about Shakespeare and race – part of a series called “Antiracist Shakespeare”. A Zoom about
The Tempest between a few academics – watched by small numbers – might not sound like a cause for alarm. But it has, once again, raised eyebrows.
Madeline Sayet, a theatre director and assistant professor at Arizona State University, stated that there were “things in the plays that are really harmful to contemporary audiences”. That, and the host’s advisory at the start – that the topics arising from looking at Shakespeare through the lens of race and anti-racism “can be triggering and uncomfortable” – is in keeping with a tendency at the
Bankside venue to treat audiences as though they need to keep a dose of smelling salts at the ready. Which is ridiculous. The summer production of Romeo and Juliet carried warnings about “depictions of suicide, moments of violence”, as if battle-hardened urbanites needed hand-holding.
But between the idea that it’s a laughing matter or the stuff of outrage lies a valuable point of scrutiny – because this latest event reinforces the insidious growing view of Shakespeare as intrinsically “problematic” and, moreover, in need of “decolonising”. A key cluster of assertions made by Sayet includes the thought that we have deified the Bard: “When you say Shakespeare isn’t God, people can’t actually handle that information.”
The suggestion is that it was colonial power structures that helped to create this totemic figure. “The plays aren’t neutral, they do have violent colonial implications attached to them.” It’s as if Shakespeare was a warship that docked at country after country, offloading a cultural cargo that had the resistless force of an imposed religion.
It surely makes infinitely more sense, though, to view Shakespeare and his work as a kind of empty vessel, carried on the currents of history, the writing at once shaped by his own imagination and his own age but open to manifold shifting influences and interpretations.
He seems to have let everything flow through him, and the dramas scintillate through their quality of fluidity and flux; they reach resolutions but never arrive at definitive conclusions. A perfect case in point is The Tempest itself, so infused with a sense of cultural collision, and the dynamic between coloniser and colonised, without that lying in the realm of fixed judgment.
Far from according the “coloniser” Prospero the aura of rightful authority, the play besets him with valid resistance, identifies ugly flaws – in his petulance and possessiveness – and in the resentment of his slaves, ethereal Ariel and earthy Caliban, it unlocks extraordinary lyricism. “You taught me language; and my profit on’t/is, I know how to curse,” rages Caliban, and that’s a devastating comeback, one of the Bard’s finest lines.
Of course, The Tempest can be aligned in performance with particular political readings – one of the greatest of recent times was the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Company South African staging starring Antony Sher’s Prospero opposite anti-apartheid activist John Kani as Caliban. Our sympathies were – understandably enough – with the latter.
Is The Tempest upholding an Elizabethan world-view? It’s clear, looking at the work of another author hailed as a genius, Rudyard Kipling, that he was a product of his (imperial) age. Agatha Christie’s writing, you could say, bore the imprint of British Empire too. TS Eliot succumbed to the vice of anti-semitism. But where is the equivalent in Shakespeare?
So interested in the ineffable, Shakespeare enjoys leaving us irresolute. Why does Iago hate so much? What is it that so possesses Macbeth and his wife? Is there ever a moment as Prince or King when Hal isn’t acting? Isn’t Shylock as much a wounded, reeling father as he is an abused, retaliatory moneylender? The plays are performable in mere hours, but teem as humanity does, drawing you back again and again. Do they still please? Undoubtedly. Were they designed to do more than that? It’s a moot point. In his book Shakespeare’s Freedom, the American scholar Stephen Greenblatt argues: “Shakespeare’s texts were brought into the literary marketplace under the sign not of obligation, duty, self-improvement, academic prestige or aesthetic seriousness but of pleasure.”
He seems to have striven to make them tingle with flesh-and-blood immediacy and living, breathing irreducibility. The director Simon Godwin, behind the National Theatre’s spellbinding lockdown Romeo and Juliet, made a similar point in a web-discussion I hosted with him earlier this year. “His intention was to create a really thrilling show for his audience. If we see him as showman it takes the pressure off us to confine ourselves in one agenda or another.”
“Agendas” are the bread and butter of scholars’ lives – fed, of course, ultimately by Shakespeare’s own industry. There’s no stopping academics from saying and writing what they please. The issue comes when “the debate” becomes ringfenced, not sufficiently open to challenge and loaded with contemporary presumptions. The Globe asserts that such discussions don’t shape the approach to their productions; yet the reproachful intellectual sideshow from an aggrieved commentariat, encouraged as part of the building’s raison d’être, may impede the creative freedom that artists and audiences feed on.
Shakespeare was no rigid ideological structure, then, but a unique “container” open to all influences and available to allcomers; he mustn’t be anchored, fixed, allowed to rust in imposed ignominy. “Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops,” sighs Romeo. In two lines, Shakespeare takes your mind further and higher than an hour’s scholastic discourse can muster. Those who run the show at the Globe and elsewhere would do well to remember that.