Wednesday
I’m not usually one to bash a fellow Shakespeare enthusiast but an article by one Casey Chalk in the American Conservative has me riled up. (Thanks to Rebecca Adams for the alert.) According to Chalk, Shakespeare is currently under assault by the forces of diversity and inclusion. Or as the article’s title contends, “The push by Shakespeare companies to abandon Shakespeare in the name of diversity seems driven by resentment of his greatness and our smallness.”
My instant reaction was, “Huh? Who’s pushing to abandon Shakespeare?” I combed through Chalk’s article and didn’t see much evidence of a Shakespeare decline, much less of “resentment of his greatness” being the reason. Chalk’s major examples are:
—a Washington Post article that, while it reports on Shakespeare theatre companies scrambling in the wake of the pandemic, gives only one example of Shakespeare getting booted for something else—that being D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company staging Once Upon a One More Time, a feminist fairy tale set to the music of Britney Spears;
— an assistant professor of performance studies at State University of New York at New Paltz who says that Shakespeare is edging out black playwrights; and
–a “teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento [who] told the Post several years ago that she does not like Shakespeare because she ‘cannot always easily navigate’ him. She adds: ‘there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.’”
These three meager examples lead Chalk to this overblown conclusion:
Put more bluntly, Shakespeare the dead white male is too distant to relate to non-white, 21st-century students. This same thinking has much to do with the abandonment of Shakespeare on stage.
This is patronizing and demeaning. What about 20th-century urban “ethnic” youth whose first language was Italian or Polish? Are Latino kids incapable of being inspired, challenged, or taught by someone simply because his language and culture are different from theirs? If Shakespeare represents an excellence not only of the English language, but of storytelling and human psychology, wouldn’t we want all people, regardless of race or ethnicity, to know him?
To sum up Chalk’s contention: because one Shakespeare theatre put on one non-Shakespeare play; because an assistant professor of performance studies said that too many Shakespeare productions were depriving Black playwrights their time in the sun; and because a California high school teacher several years ago complained about the difficulty of teaching Shakespeare to high school students, we’re supposed to accuse the left of being patronizing, demeaning, and resentful of greatness.
To be sure, Chalk also quotes (from the Post article) Tai Verley, artistic director of Philadelphia-based Revolution Shakespeare, saying, “This pedestal we have put him [Shakespeare] on should be smacked down to the floor!” Chalk misunderstands the quote, however. Verley is not attacking the Bard but bardolatry–which is to say, the blind worship of Shakespeare.
In my experience, there’s no better way to ruin Shakespeare for students than to tell them to genuflect before his greatness. By contrast, Shakespeare shines for them once you show how deeply and imaginatively he grasps key issues that they care about. The Post article reports on recent productions that creatively find new ways to do this:
New varieties of that elasticity [in presenting Shakespeare] are evident in shows by writers of color who are using the dramatist as inspiration. The 2022 season of Cal Shakes near Oakland, Calif., for instance, consists entirely of Shakespeare adaptations by Latina and Black playwrights: a bilingual Romeo y Juliet by Karen Zacarias and a modern-verse Lear by Marcus Gardley. In Manhattan last summer, the single attraction of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park was Jocelyn Bioh’s critical and popular hit, Merry Wives, based on The Merry Wives of Windsor and set among the West African immigrant community in Harlem.
These efforts should excite Chalk. After all, he tells us he’s a fan of Japanese director Akiri Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Ran, which are renditions of Macbeth and King Lear respectively.
Another way to ruin Shakespeare for audiences is for Brits to inform the rest of the world that they’re superior because Shakespeare was British. This is a problem voiced in the Post article by Nicolette Bethel, an anthropology professor and head of the Bahamas-based Shakespeare in Paradise. Bethel observes that Shakespeare “was the weapon that was used to tell us we were not good enough.” Something similar occurred when the British colonized India, causing Indian nationalists for a while to push back against Shakespeare—not because of his works but because of how the colonialists used him to denigrate works like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Once Shakespeare was judged on his own merits, he became as popular in India as he is in the rest of the world.
Chalk misreads the Shakespeare conference described in the Post article as a program to topple Shakespeare rather than as an attempt to put him to the test to see what new perspectives emerge. As it turns out, Shakespeare is strong enough to withstand a great deal of testing, and the Post author notes that everywhere he witnessed “an abiding respect” for the Bard. Indeed, for all of Chalk’s complaining, there is no evidence of a widespread abandonment of Shakespeare on stage, and I guarantee that Shakespeare is universally taught in American colleges and universities—with any declines due more to reductions in humanities and arts requirements than in the actions of politically correct literature professors. I can report that, in my Sewanee English 101: Composition and Literature class, tomorrow I’ll start teaching Twelfth Night and follow that up with Othello. (I’ll conclude the course with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.)
Chalk, who has written a book entitled The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands, apparently wants to write a sequel, Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Shakespeare Lovers Living Their Faith in Multicultural America. He complains about leftwing resentment but appears intent on using the straw man of diversity fanaticism to inflame rightwing resentment.
Which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up the rightwing culture wars these days. First Critical Race Theory, which isn’t actually taught, and now Shakespeare Skepticism, which also isn’t happening.