Tea at Trianon: Circumscribing Shakespeare

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 11, 2022

Circumscribing Shakespeare

From The American Conservative:

The Shakespeare Theatre Association, the Washington Post recently reported, is “trying to move toward a more inclusive membership.” It is “attempting to understand contrary perspectives, some rejecting the argument that Shakespeare’s texts are boundless treasures; that they may even inflict some harm.” This is part of a broader trend at “de-centering” or “revising” Shakespeare to address alleged systemic racism in the theater industry, which sometimes means dispensing with him altogether. “Seeking contemporary relevance, classical theaters are increasingly receptive to playwrights’ departures from original texts,” explains the Post. Recently, Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company staged the world premiere of Once Upon a One More Time, a feminist fairy tale set to the music of Britney Spears.
This is not surprising. Calls to end America’s honoring of the “canon” of Western literature and art have been rising for more than half a century, so of course Shakespeare must exit stage left as well. Allan Bloom catalogues much of this in his 1987 The Closing of the American Mind: students are increasingly ignorant of the “great texts” of Western civilization, while empty values such as “greater openness,” “less rigidity,” and “freedom from authority” are fashionable on American campuses. We can perhaps update the language to “inclusion,” “intersectionality,” and “safe spaces,” but the general theme is the same: Western civilization represents something oppressive, intolerant, and archaic that should be taken off its pedestal for the sake of diversity.
“You can make it all the way through K through 12, college and grad school, never reading a Black playwright,” an assistant professor of performance studies at State University of New York at New Paltz told the Post. “You won’t make it past ninth grade without reading Shakespeare. So then, what does that do to our culture as a whole?” I don’t know, but I presume he would say it perpetuates white supremacist, patriarchal norms, while demeaning the accomplishments of persons of color. “Shakespeare was the weapon that was used to tell us we were not good enough,” explained the head of the Bahamas-based Shakespeare in Paradise.
Well, perhaps sometimes we need to be humbled. Is it the worst thing to realize that others who came before us may have achieved an excellence we may strive for, but never attain? And what contemporary writer or playwright is arrogant enough to dare to compare himself to the Bard? We’re talking about someone whose corpus is considered brilliant not only for its aesthetic qualities, but for its depiction and analysis of the human person in all of his passions, failures, yearnings, and excellences. Theologians, political theorists, psychologists, and countless others have plumbed Shakespeare’s works for wisdom and instruction.
Moreover, it is not as if reimagining Shakespeare in a different historical period or culture is anything new. Akira Kurasawa’s 1957 film Throne of Blood reinterprets Macbeth, and his 1985 film Ran imagines King Lear in feudal Japan (the latter, I would argue, is one of the best films ever made). Ten years ago, I saw the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s performance of Much Ado About Nothing, reimagined in 1930’s Cuba (it was fantastic). That’s what makes objectively superior art and literature superior: It speaks so profoundly about the human condition that it can be translated between cultures and generations and still communicate eternal verities.
But many educators and artists don’t see Shakespeare that way. A teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento 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.” 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. (Read more.)