Michael Murphy: The farcical attempt to ‘decolonize’ Shakespeare

A circa 1610 portrait of William Shakespeare, believed to be the only authentic image made of him during his lifetime, depicts the Bard in his mid-forties. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has commissioned an investigation into how the playwright’s work advanced “white supremacy.” Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images

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The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, custodian of buildings and archival materials linked to the playwright, has decided that Shakespeare was too white for their liking. So white, in fact, that the Trust commissioned an investigation into how the playwright’s work advanced “white supremacy.”

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Shakespeare’s plays stand accused of being a pillar of “British cultural superiority” and “Anglo-cultural supremacy,” compliments with which I shan’t quibble. The Trust was magnanimous enough, no doubt to the delight of continental esthetes who would like to claim him, to also implicate the Bard in “white European supremacy.” One wonders if the English can, in turn, be awarded some kudos for Dante — but I digress.

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Dr. Helen Hopkins, of Birmingham City University, conducted the research underpinning the project and has proffered some recommendations about how best to move forward. First, a mea culpa on the playwright’s behalf: the Trust should acknowledge that “the narrative of Shakespeare’s greatness has caused harm — through the epistemic violence.” Second, some humble pie: Shakespeare should be presented not as the “greatest” playwright, but instead as “part of a community of equal and different writers and artists from around the world.” Finally, Shakespeare must be “decolonized” forthwith. His work and legacy should be subjected to a full autopsy for any links to colonialism and Empire, as well as any “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful.”

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There is a handy rule of thumb to understand envy: it almost never announces itself. Fantastic yarns are spun to disguise that emotion more than any other. This project and its recommendations are one such yarn. Each charge is dressed up as probing cultural criticism, yet perspires with envy and resentment. The resulting odour borders on being intentional.

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Hopkins, preoccupied in the manner of a small child with a new toy with the word “supremacism,” appears oblivious to the supreme confidence with which she has appointed herself judge of what the rest of us may admire. I suppose one woman’s “narrative” of greatness is another’s global literary consensus, in a crowded field, over half a millennium. As for “epistemic violence,” one might highlight to Hopkins that living is a dangerous business, and, for most of history, humanity has been no stranger to casual blood-shedding that has mercifully become less commonplace. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of our Nature, his impressive study on the subject, attributes the global decline in violence in part to the growth in reading, which allowed people around the world to place themselves in the shoes of another for hours at a time. This is what James Baldwin was getting at when he wrote: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.” Baldwin was not so bereft of imagination as to find “Russian supremacy” in Dostoyevsky. Queen Victoria resisted similarly pedestrian interpretations when she read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel chronicling the life of a slave in the American south. She merely wept.