“Shakespeare’s works,” the School Library Journal tells us, “are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir.” There follows a litany of complaints from school teachers who have dropped the world’s greatest writer because, being white, he supposedly has nothing to say to black students.
It is in the nature of Shakespeare that we each bring our own experiences to him. If you take a certain satisfaction in finding misogyny and racism everywhere, you will find them in Shakespeare.
To be honest, I struggled a bit with “misogynoir,” or a dislike of black women. As far as I can make out, there are no black women in Shakespeare’s plays. There is a Dark Lady in his sonnets (her skin is said to be dun and her hair black), but she gets pretty good press. I can think of three black men in his plays, of whom one, Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, the gruesome pastiche written at the start of Shakespeare’s career, is portrayed negatively and two, the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice and, of course, poor Othello, broadly positively.
I struggled, too, with the allegation of homophobia. Insofar as we can infer anything from his corpus, Shakespeare seems to have lusted after both men and women. But, in an age when homosexuality could not directly be acknowledged on the page, literary homophobia wasn’t really a thing. Perhaps “misogynoir” and homophobia simply have to be included automatically whenever racism and sexism are mentioned, forming a kind of leftist compound noun that means “a thing I don’t like.”
The classism is undeniable as, alas, is the anti-Semitism. Every Shylock I have seen on stage or screen, from Dustin Hoffman to F. Murray Abraham, plays the role more sympathetically than a bare reading of the text mandates. Our modern sensibilities demand it. But we can’t escape the words themselves. Shylock is not a nasty piece of work who happens to be Jewish. He incarnates the most vicious and damaging anti-Semitic stereotypes, being ruthless, clever, greedy, legalistic, and anti-Christian. His trial becomes the trial of an entire religion, the moneylender being trapped in an Old Testament obsession with justice, unable to accept the New Testament message of mercy.
I find that scene excruciating to watch. But if Shakespeare offers prejudice, he also offers tolerance, decency, diversity, and respect. The reason he towers above every other writer is that his humanity is fathomless.
Most critics are nonplussed by Shakespeare’s almost magical ability to speak to them personally, to seem to know their circumstances. G.K. Chesterton took it for granted that Shakespeare was a fellow Catholic. Goethe was convinced that he was a kind of spiritual German accidentally born in the wrong place. Jorge Luis Borges saw his creative ability as godlike. In a short story, he imagined the Almighty telling the deceased playwright, “I dreamed the world as you dreamed your plays, my dear Shakespeare.”
Such a divine intellect must, by definition, transcend categorizations of race and sex. Thus, Maya Angelou, encountering Shakespeare for the first time at school, was “convinced that he was a little black girl.”
This very universality upsets woke academics. For Jeffrey Austin of Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, there is harmful “whiteness” implicit in the claim that Shakespeare is universal.
Ayanna Thompson of Arizona State University complains that “Shakespeare was a tool used to ‘civilize’ Black and brown people in England’s empire.” Well, yes, and white people, too. Reading Shakespeare civilizes us all. Indeed, it elevates and ennobles us all.
Shakespeare’s relevance, his humaneness, the vastness of his intellect, what John Keats called his “negative capability,” these things are the strongest possible refutation of bigotry, far stronger than any anti-racist statement.
When the woke call Shakespeare irrelevant, they don’t mean that his language is incomprehensible, his characters remote, or his plots implausible. They mean he was white. In their smallness, they are unable to appreciate what he has conjured into existence. Consider, for example, Sonnet 29:
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope …
For Maya Angelou, there was only one way to explain those lines. “Of course he wrote it for me. Of course he was a black woman. I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman.”
That miraculous applicability, the essence of Shakespeare’s greatness, is now held against him, precisely because it contradicts the claim that we are all defined by accident of birth and physiognomy. Identity politics is the only creed you can bring to his plays and be diminished by them as a consequence.
