Cancel Culture — Shakespeare Under Attack
Rich language. Complex characters. Themes that still echo today — love, betrayal, honor, bravery, and political intrigue
Courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org
George Orwell, in 1984, predicts that by 2050 but perhaps even earlier, “all the literature of the past will have been destroyed: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron… transformed into something opposite to what they were before.”
There is a growing “cancel culture” movement in the U.S. that is sure to spread to other Western countries. These agenda-driven paid agitators whose job is to destroy cultures at their roots.
More and more so-called educators are calling for a purge of all white intellectuals and classicists from the curriculum, justified by Marxist arguments that such literary figures are the products of white privilege and need to be purged from the curriculum and the library archives as well.
“Cancelling” people and books, paintings, or music, has become a favorite preoccupation of those who would rather see history as a sanitized script edited in favor of their view than as a richly textured record of human thought and activity woven through centuries of changing dialectics.
Lately, it’s Shakespeare, one of the “dead white men” accused of crimes, including racism, colonialism, and sexism. Shakespeare’s racial commentators are seeking to take an author of incredible complexity whose brilliance entails creating vivid, multi-layered characters, raising moral questions, and reducing him to one thing.
Who, for them, to be white or not be white is one of several queries.
There have been crusades to cancel Mark Twain’s novel, Huckleberry Finn. There have been campaigns to obliterate some of America’s top twentieth-century writers like Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Philip Roth for “misogyny” and “bad relations with women” and Norman Mailer for using the word “negro” in the title of one of his books.
Bad enough, but William Shakespeare? What a thought!
It’s hard to imagine a Shakespeare play overhauled by history or considered irrelevant. Many people are affected by Shakespeare even though they don’t think they know much about him. Everyone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet, and most people can recite at least a couple of lines from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” oration.
Everything, especially art, has to be seen on the day it was made. Today we live in a different society with different moral codes. And these plays by Shakespeare are timeless as they talk about deep-rooted problems and emotions.
Does that have anything to do with humanities in higher education disappearing?
Recently, The New Yorker published a piece titled “The End of the English Major.” The piece points to several factors, including that students in higher education reject important works as “problematic,” and some maintain that only postcolonial creations are valid.
Such thinking is disarming. A strong humanities education helps build critical-thinking skills, which many younger generations need improvement in, such as seeing the world from a fuller vantage point.
Studying humanities and western civilization allows us to explore human experiences and the human condition from various perspectives, including philosophy, history, religion, literature, art, and language.
Race-obsessed activists, bureaucrats, and academics have been hard at work trying to destroy a towering genius who has had an immeasurable — and profoundly edifying effect — on our culture.
Shakespeare’s work has infused itself into Western culture
Like the Bible, Shakespeare’s works are full of moral dilemmas and religious references that still ring true today. His contribution to humanism brought a new psychological realism and wisdom to drama and created believable characters, all different individuals showing humanity’s rich diversity. Shakespeare drew on classical and Renaissance ideas about the importance of reason, humankind, and human individualism. “To thine own self be true,” counsels Polonius in Hamlet, a vision of personal integrity that is fundamentally humanist in its stress on individuality rather than conformity.
What is it about Shakespeare that so captivated the mighty economic and social history?
Education reformers argue that there is plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny in Shakespeare. While some will say that this is absurd since the author of the plays was not writing essays or articles. Still, in the dramatic plays, in which he merely portrayed various social phenomena, agenda-driven academics seem intent on promoting their schemata at the expense of a literary figure once revered and celebrated by all.
I find the current criticism of Shakespeare as a means to destroy cannons absurd and regrettable, and the process is now quite advanced. All are designed by an academic-journalistic network that wishes to overthrow the canon to promote their supposed program of social change.
It seems that if we read the Western canon to form our social, political, or moral values, we’ll become worshipers of selfishness and exploitation. After all, we should not read in the service of ideology.
On the contrary, artistic power enables us to learn how to see ourselves and our confrontation with our mortality.
We must admit that there is a qualitative difference between Shakespeare and every other writer: originality. Shakespeare remains the most original writer we will ever know. No one, I mean, no one, has matched him as a psychologist, thinker, or rhetorician. He is the greatest dramatist, poet, and prose writer in the history of the language.
We need to remember that Shakespeare was a man of his time
He was a writer of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries whose works exhibit sixteenth- and seventeenth-century methods of thinking and, like all distinguished writers, say something to us as well. He captured the spirit of his time — presenting blood, obscenity, passion, and politics to packed-out Elizabethan playhouses — and reverberated down through the centuries.
Timeless.
People who did certain things that were normal in their time but are now met with abhorrence exist, and nothing can change that. Removing reminders of them — such as plaques and statues — brings no benefits — on the contrary, it weakens the richness of historical detail and context and paints a false picture of history.
Thanks for your analysis. History is history. To erase it is to erase humanity. Now, how ridiculous is that?