Why ‘problematic’ Shakespeare is in danger of being cancelled
Wokeness is coming for the Bard, to bury him not to praise him. I say “wokeness” like it’s some tangible blob – or mob. It’s a mindset. A social justice attitude spawned in the civil rights era has been rebooted in the past decade and come to dominate art as well as life, discerning all kinds of hateful prejudices, privileges and power structures through the prism of identity politics.
It’s entrenched in our theatre. Regardless of the popular support that the cavalierly outspoken Laurence Fox attracted for challenging the woke notion of white privilege, his “community” didn’t rally behind him. He embodies the woke era’s prime example of the person who should shut up: male, pale and stale. Genius he may be but Shakespeare, the acme of that formulation, is in the same boat.
A sign of how difficult things are already getting was inadvertently revealed at a press conference last week to launch the RSC’s winter season. Discussing the Henry VI trilogy, which he’ll direct this winter, and not all of which was written by Shakespeare, artistic director Gregory Doran declared: “Who wrote Shakespeare? I don’t care. Ultimately we’ve got this fantastic body of plays and I don’t care who he, she or they were in a way because we’ve got them.”
“He, she or they”! As Cassius says, berating Brutus, in Julius Caesar: “Is it come to this?” De-gendering Shakespeare himself? It’s as if Doran is prepared to throw the real-life (evidently male) author to the woke wolves (“If you prefer to think of Shakespeare as a she, fine”). So long as the body of the work can be left to be pored over in peace, the creator is immaterial. And yet, as the recent debacle involving ITN news anchor Alastair Stewart proved, there’s now no “safe space” where the canon can reside, sheltered from the culture war.
The Stewart case has wide ramifications. Even if you accept his defence – that his quote from Measure for Measure mid-Twitter-spat wasn’t done to convey a racial slur (a comparison between ignorant man and “an angry ape”) – that doesn’t (in the court of woke) invalidate his complainant’s umbrage-taking. The contemporary baggage we bring in must be given weight; what we infer matters, even if the original context doesn’t actually support that reading.
In theory, the world’s your oyster if you want to take offence at the plays anyway. Some have long caused concern: isn’t there actual antiSemitism in The Merchant of Venice, for-real misogyny in the knockabout of The Taming of the Shrew, and a crude negative stereotype in Othello’s descent into jealous rage? Yet there are also all kinds of incidentals that could be deemed problematic.
Dromio of Syracuse’s ribald riffing on the unsightliness of an ardent kitchen wench is one of the highlights of The Comedy of Errors: “She is spherical like a globe…” Can such blatant fat-shaming be justified today? What about Shakespeare’s casual connoting of whiteness and fairness with purity and goodness? Compare the “alabaster innocent arms” of the young Princes in Richard III, say, with that curse in Macbeth: “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!” Shakespeare may be, in Ben Jonson’s phrase, for all time, but he’s also the product of a patriarchal, Anglo-centric, proto-colonial age. To cut or not to cut will be the question. What if everything’s triggering?
Over the past few years, Shakespeare performance has increasingly marched to a “woke” drum. Some would say it has been galvanising, a corrective against conventionality and Bardolatry.
We’ve seen greater diversity in casting and much gender-flipping. Fine, OK. A traditionally cast production is now a rarity, ever more unthinkable. That’s less fine. Doesn’t it suggest that those getting funds to promulgate his work are in some way embarrassed by it, or are so worried about being labelled reactionary – or worse – they duck the fight?
There’s no mention of Shakespeare in Arts Council England’s new 10-year strategy. At the RSC at the moment, you can see King John (with a gender-flipped lead); aside from that, a play about the slave trade The Whip, and a musical that flies the flag for transvestism: The Boy in the Dress. He’s not on a main stage at the National. At the Globe, they’re doing The Taming of the Shrew in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, part of a season looking at “gender power dynamics”.
Sure, he’ll still be taught and produced: the market for the work won’t vanish, there’s an industry wedded to him. But if woke continues its ascendancy, the logic of its fault-finding mission (fraught with tensions between specificity and inclusivity) will render our national playwright as much taboo as totemic. Hasn’t the cancelling already started?
As the Alastair Stewart debacle proved, the canon can no longer be sheltered from the culture wars
Can the blatant fatshaming in ‘The Comedy of Errors’ be justified in the 21st century?