Shakespeare is canceled

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Now that progressive activists and the BLM have rounded up all the Founding Fathers and Confederate leaders for annulment, they were finally going to have to dig even deeper into history for new targets. So why not Shakespeare? According to the professors who founded the #DisruptTexts group, this is definitely a good idea. They believe Avon’s bard should either be taken out of school curricula altogether or renamed in a way that drains significant criticism of her work as a symbol of white supremacy and colonialism. I know. (Washington Times)

For the new breed of teachers, William Shakespeare is seen less as an icon of literature and more as a tool of imperial oppression, an author who should be dissected in the classroom or banned from the curriculum entirely.

“This is about white supremacy and colonization,” said the teachers who founded #DisruptTexts, a group that wants basic elements of Western literature removed or subjected to harsh criticism.

Anti-Shakespeare professors say fans of the plays ignore the author’s problematic worldview. They say Shakespeare readers should be required to deal with the “whiteness” of their thinking.

A teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota, reportedly said that she taught her students Marxist theory by reading “Coriolanus”. Another high school teacher from New Jersey bragged about posting a “toxic masculinity analysis” to his students while reading 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 sort of 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 admit that I am not a big fan of the Bard’s work. I must have read it in school, but I never found it particularly convincing. I was never a fan of poetry, and its plays were written in an earlier form of English that didn’t exactly come out of the language of a child who grew up working on a farm. But it’s history, and a basic knowledge of the classics never hurts anyone looking for a full education.

As for the lack of “cultural sensitivity” on Shakespeare’s part, give me a break. He was the product of his time and of the society in which he grew up, like everyone else. If these teachers want to point out specific examples from Shakespeare’s body of work that are said to be offensive, I’d be happy to take a look. But the point is, they are trying to judge a man who has been dead for over 400 years by standards that have been relied upon for nothing in the last generation.

If you really want to criticize Shakespeare for something, try to solve the mystery of whether or not he wrote all of his plays and sonnets. There has been a heated debate for a very long time as to who the real author of these classic works is. If you could somehow prove that he stole other people’s work, or if history mistakenly attributed some of the work to him, then you might have a reason to cancel it. But it seems unlikely that such an ancient mystery will be definitively solved.