I think it had to happen sooner or later. Now that progressive activists and BLM have assembled all the founding members and confederate leaders for cancellation, they will eventually have to dig even further into history for new targets. So why not Shakespeare? According to the teachers who founded the group #DisruptTexts, this is definitely a good idea. They believe that the Bard of Avon should be completely removed from school curricula, or that it should be remarked in a way that casts significant criticism on his work as a symbol of white supremacy and colonialism. I know. (Washington Times)
For the new kind of teachers, William Shakespeare is seen less as an icon of literature and more as an instrument of imperial oppression, a writer who must be dissected in class or banished from the curriculum altogether.
“It’s about White supremacy and colonization,” said the teachers who founded #DisruptTexts, a group that wants staples to be removed from Western literature or to tolerate criticism.
The anti-Shakespeare teachers say fans of the plays ignore the author’s problematic worldview. They say that readers of Shakespeare should be expected to address the “whiteness” of their thinking.
A teacher from St. Paul, Minnesota, is quoted as saying she gives her students the Marxist theory when they read “Coriolanus”. Another high school teacher from New Jersey boasted that she issued ‘toxic masculinity analysis’ to her students when she read Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare died in 1616. England was certainly a colonial power at that time, but the vast majority of Shakespeare’s work was not rooted in any celebration of colonialism or ‘whiteness’. He wrote about royal families and ordinary people. What these activists are angry about is the fact that Shakespeare was white and masculine. So that means he has to go.
I will admit that I am not a big fan of the Bard’s work. I had to read it at school, but I never found it particularly convincing. I was never a fan of poetry and his plays were written in an earlier form of English that did not exactly roll off the tongue of a child who grew up on a farm. But he is part of history and a basic knowledge of the classics does not hurt anyone who is looking for a well-rounded education.
As for the lack of “cultural sensitivity” of Shakespeare, give me a break. He was a product of his time and the society in which he grew up, just like everyone else. If these teachers want to refer to specific examples in Shakespeare’s work that are supposedly offensive, I would like to look at them. But the fact is that they are trying to judge a man who has been dead for more than 400 years against standards that were first raised from the air last generation.
If you really want to criticize something about Shakespeare, then try to solve the mystery of whether he wrote all his plays and sonnets. There has long been a debate about who the true author of those classic works was. If you could somehow prove that he stole the work of others, or if history wrongly attributed some of the work to him, you may have a reason to cancel him. But it seems unlikely that a mystery of old will be solved for good.