Bardophobia

Why are activists so frightened of Shakespeare?

In King Lear, the character of Edgar, in disguise as Poor Tom, continually rails against an imaginary ‘fiend’, a kind of devil that perpetually follows in the footsteps of all men. Describing this foul entity to his father, the Earl of Gloucester, he says: ‘His eyes / Were two full moons. He had a thousand noses, / Horns whelked and waved like the enraged sea. It was some fiend.’

Edgar is envisaging a personification of despair, but it could be any deep-seated fear that pursues us throughout our lives. For some activists, it’s the spirit of Shakespeare himself who occupies their every third thought. They dismiss him as a dead white male whose body of work was created simply to promote the interests of other dead white males. They can think only in terms of group identity and so are blind to his genius.

George Bernard Shaw coined the term ‘bardolatry’ for the excessive worship of Shakespeare, and so we would be wise to refer to its antithesis as ‘bardophobia’. This week it was reported in the Telegraph that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, a charity dedicated to the preservation of buildings connected to the bard in his hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon, has decided to ‘decolonise’ its collections. With the usual earnestness of identity-obsessed activists, its spokesperson has intoned the necessary boilerplate about how they must ‘create a more inclusive museum experience’ and that in the Shakespearean canon one may find ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’.

I have written on UnHerd this week about how tedious it is to see this kind of faux-radicalism from national institutions. While in many quarters the woke movement is lessening its stranglehold on society, in others it is tightening the grip. In particular, the arts industries and those committed to our cultural heritage – libraries, museums and galleries – appear to be irredeemably captured. This latest gesture by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust might suggest that the rot is too deeply entrenched.

Of course, there is nothing new about Shakespeare being appropriated to promote ideological worldviews. He did not write morality plays, and so it is often difficult to detect where he stands on any particular issue. This is why Coriolanus has been interpreted by some as pro-democracy and others as anti-democracy, or Julius Caesar has been simultaneously read as pro-populist and anti-populist. Depending on the emphases of the performances and the direction, the plays can be staged either way.

But once every director is marching in lockstep, mincing the texts into the bland pulp required by the priestlings of wokeness, the theatre scene is inevitably enervated. The Globe Theatre in London holds annual ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’ webinars which assemble ‘scholars and artists of colour from a wide variety of backgrounds to examine Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of race and social justice’. In early 2020, a video was released by Sheffield University which claimed that Shakespeare was studied not because he produced ‘the best work’, but because he has historically been a ‘better fit’ in an academic culture of whiteness.

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