Shakespeare Set to Be Decolonised at His Own Birthplace

SALLUST

You might have thought that some of Britain’s most sacred cultural items might be sacrosanct and immune from the wave of ‘decolonising’ hysteria and self-loathing that has seeped across the nation like mustard gas, asphyxiating everyone and everything in its path.

Think again. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has joined in the fun, according to the Telegraph:

Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust owns buildings linked to the Bard in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust also owns archival material including parish records of the playwright’s birth and baptism.

It is now “decolonising” its vast collection to “create a more inclusive museum experience”.

This process includes exploring “the continued impact of Empire” on the collection, the “impact of colonialism” on world history, and how “Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this”.

The trust has stated that some items in its collections and archives may contain “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”.

The process of “decolonising”, which typically means moving away from Western perspectives, comes after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s genius was used to advance ideas about “white supremacy”.

The claims were made in a 2022 collaborative research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham.

The research took issue with the trust’s quaint Stratford attractions, comprising the supposed childhood homes and shared family home of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, his wife, because the Bard was presented as a “universal” genius.

This idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy”, it was claimed.

This is because it presents European culture as the world standard for high art, a standard which was pushed through “colonial inculcation” and the use of Shakespeare as a symbol of “British cultural superiority” and “Anglo-cultural supremacy”.

Veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of a “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly ‘West-centric’ worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today”.

Belonging to a wider phenomenon of the talentless woke trying to make themselves relevant and important by slagging off those who are – or were – far more able than themselves, this latest development has some precedents:

The Globe Theatre in London ran a series of seminars titled ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’ which promoted scholarship focused on the idea of race in his plays.

Academies taking part in the series made a number of claims, including that King Lear was about “whiteness”, and that the character of Prince Hamlet holds “racist” views of black people.

According to one book (Don Jordan’s The King’s City, Abacus 2017), Shakespeare was responsible for coining or providing the first ever recorded use of 1,582 English words. The Birthplace Trust puts the total at over 1,700. Perhaps those should all be on a decolonising list so we can stop using them too. They include ‘worthless’ – no price for guessing what that could be applied to here – and ‘we have seen better days’, which we certainly have.

Worth reading in full. You can also read about the story here.

Via The Daily Sceptic