Turn the suspicion inward, buddy
The campaign to make everyone stupider continues.
The “disproportionate representation” of William Shakespeare in the theatre has propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”, according to researchers in an £800,000 taxpayer-funded project.
Funny how they never mention class, isn’t it. Could that be because they are all, to a person, bourgeois as fuck?
But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that Shakespeare is not “disproportionately” represented. His representation is proportionate, because he was better than anyone else. He just was; sorry if that hurts the feelings of people who aren’t as good at their jobs as Shakespeare was at his.
The researchers want to challenge the “normative trend” in “classical theatre” arising from “the disproportionate representation of William Shakespeare in scholarship and performance”.
In response they are mounting a production of a comedy by Shakespeare’s contemporary John Lyly, Galatea, which features characters disguised as the opposite sex. The researchers say the play offers “an unparalleled affirmative and intersectional demographic, exploring feminist, queer, transgender and migrant lives”.
Um. Have these people even seen or read any Shakespeare? At all? He features characters disguised as the opposite sex in some of his plays. Hello, Twelfth Night? As You Like It? They’re all about characters disguised as the opposite sex.
They say the play “has almost no stage history since 1588”, adding that “Diverse Alarums”, the name of the project, “will transform this state of affairs with a unique combination of methods, ranging across early modern studies, practice-as-research, audience studies, qualitative research, trans, queer and disability studies”.
I wonder if it has ever crossed their minds that that could be because it’s not all that good? That if it had been all that good it probably would have had a stage history after 1588? That neglect is not always a mistake? That good things are better than bad ones?
It’s not some kind of weird put-up job or conspiracy of the bosses that Shakespeare can still find an audience. It’s because he was so damn good at his job. Ben Jonson discovered this to his own surprise when he read the First Folio. He had seen Shakespeare as a rival and as over-rated by the company (The Queen’s/King’s Men), but when the First Folio was published and he whipped through it he had to admit the guy had a talent.
Writing for the website Before Shakespeare, Andy Kesson, the project’s principal investigator, said that “masculinity and nationalism were crucial motivating factors in the rise of Shakespeare as the arbiter of literary greatness” and that “[w]e need to be much, much more suspicious of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary theatre”.
No, we really don’t. That would be a suspicion too many.
Oh my — how will Shakespeare’s work ever survive this scathing criticism?
The less quality, more shite advocates have spoken!
Tell me you’ve never fucking had Shakespeare even as part of a high school English class without telling me you’ve never fucking had Shakespeare even as part of a high school English class.
Domino: I think it’s less likely that they never had Shakespeare even as part of a high school English class than that they completely lack the capacity to apprehend that which makes literature great. It’s this that makes them unable to accept Ophelia’s observation:
They actually can’t discern quality from shit on the basis of artistic merit, so they use another basis. To them, quality is a matter of how well something conforms to their political ideology and how much it opposes other ideologies. They’re less capable of appreciating Shakespeare than the people who say that something is good “because it has so many themes” and who can’t wrap their heads around the idea of qualitative difference in thematic development and treatment. Or that a story is good because it has twists. (I shudder.)
There really are people who can’t see beauty, which can be hard to accept for those of us who can, just as it’s hard to accept that some people are tone deaf, can’t visualize objects, or don’t have an internal monologue.
I suspect that for some people their knowledge of Shakespeare’s work is limited to a selection of Cliff’s Notes and Upstart Crow.*
*Highly recommended if you haven’t already seen it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart_Crow
Forgot to add that also reminds me of the (apocryphal) tale of the young man wanting to impress his young lady with his love for The Yarts who took her to see “Romeo and Juliet”.
At coffee after the play, she expressed her dismay saying it was “nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together”.
Thing is, the thing about Shakespeare is that he let the subject(s) speak. That’s anathema to the ideologues.
I have noticed that theatre conferences and contests are now dominated by ‘woke’ ideology. Where they used to try to find good plays, they now try to find ‘good for you’ plays. Those written by people of color, QUILTBAG writers, disabled writers, and writers who express only the ‘approved’ line are preferred. A lot of contests now are actually highlighting those, and telling you upfront that Karens need not apply (not in those terms, of course)
I suspect Shakespeare has been deemed unacceptable simply because he is so good. So good that his works have lasted for 500 years, and are still performed and taught. He was white, male, and English, so instead of acknowledging he was the best, they assume that is why he is still being performed (never mind that there were a lot of white, male, English writers that are not performed today, and probably many we have never heard of, even those of us with a background in theatre).
It’s also the case that people believe he wrote for an elite audience, because his language is so noble and high-sounding. They simply have no understanding of his audience at all; his works are bawdy, full of common people, ridiculing the elite, and mocking pretensions. The language is a challenge, yes, but with a little effort and repetition, you can begin to understand, and you will be sitting with your jaw-dropping at some of the themes he develops, and the way he develops them.
Some theatres are beginning to return to the origins in making Shakespeare’s plays the passionate, emotion filled, sex and drug filled (mostly alcohol of course, and no rock and roll) renditions, removing the effect of those like Laurence Olivier who performed the noble sounding Shakespeare.
I think another reason Shakespeare is important is that he really is, of the extant playwrights, the first of the modern playwrights. His stuff moved beyond the stale themes of the morality plays and into real life. That’s why modern theatres can perform them; they work in a modern setting. To neglect Shakespeare is to neglect the history of the field (which is unfortunately all too common; I know a ton of scientists who have little clue about the marvelously complex, global history of science).