Shakespeare’s ‘Decolonizers’ Are Making Much Ado About Nothing

It was only a matter of time until William Shakespeare was decolonized. After all, to paraphrase the Bard himself, he doth bestride the narrow literary world like a colossus. He is the cornerstone of English literature and has written plays and poems that today’s ideologues find problematic.

This was the recent assertion of the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, an NGO that “owns several buildings in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, England and a collection of personal documents of the writer’s.” Charged with overseeing the legacy of Shakespeare, the trust has concluded that the genius playwright’s works promote white supremacy along with “racist, sexist and homophobic” narratives. 

Consequently, the trust will issue more trigger warnings about the plays, downplay Shakespeare’s significance, and apologize profusely for his excellence. In short order, it will remove Shakespeare from his current pedestal and place him alongside other writers of different cultures, and it will assist Western audiences to “uncover the hidden stories linked to specific objects and re-examine what they can teach [them] about the impact of colonialism on [their] perception of history of the world and the role Shakespeare’s work has played as part of this.”

Many critics of this effort have rightly questioned this effort to criticize and qualify Shakespeare in the vain hopes of lifting more marginalized voices to literary prominence. As writer Katya Sedgwick explains, decolonization efforts in the forms of knocking down statues, slandering classic literature, revising and fabricating history, and even changing the rules of mathematics are all doomed to failure. At most, they will simply make the world uglier, dumber, and less real.

However, beyond the pathetic effort of trying to take Shakespeare down a peg, it’s important to recognize the pervasive relativism and narcissism behind it. I encounter this frequently as an English teacher. Students and many educators will criticize Shakespeare’s plays because they don’t understand them, and they will rate other writers higher than him because they are easier to consume. 

This is because Shakespeare’s work pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in language. His plays and poems manage to condense a ridiculous amount of nuance, depth, and verbal grace into relatively few lines. Every word and phrase has multiple meanings and angles, offering a tremendous amount of material for the reader or listener to ponder and appreciate.

Moreover, even in his comedies, Shakespeare weaves in complex, universal themes with superlative sensitivity. While “scholars” today deride Shakespeare as a racist for his depiction of the Moorish general Othello, a sexist for “taming” an obstreperous woman in The Taming of the Shrew, a fascist for composing Antony’s moving eulogy for Julius Caesar, or a dirty old man for writing a play about two underage minors in love in Romeo and Juliet, these reductionist takes are completely wrong. Rather, Shakespeare poses poignant questions on the nature of jealousy, sex dynamics, political power, and the clash of erotic and familial love, among innumerable other issues.

For this reason, I have always loved teaching Shakespeare. Yes, I have to translate it for my students, and yes, getting through a whole play with a classroom full of bored adolescents is a slog, but I learn something new every time I teach it. To my students’ unexpected delight, I always share my newest revelation and argue with them about it. It has surprised them to discover that Brutus was not some champion of democracy but an elitist snob who hated the masses and envied Caesar’s popularity. I also let them know there are actually three families in Romeo and Juliet: the Montagues, Capulets, and the Escaluses (the family of the prince, Mercutio, and Count Paris), which puts a twist on the power dynamics in Verona.

It becomes clear when teaching and reading Shakespeare that he really is the greatest of all time. He was a verbal genius with a vast breadth of knowledge, producing plays in a hyper-verbal (though not yet fully literate) culture. To compete with him is futile, and to ignore him only leaves us so much poorer. We can only try to learn from him.

Instead, current literary scholars prefer to keep their pride, which is what this is really all about. To fully experience Shakespeare is to be intellectually and aesthetically humbled. On some level, modern readers will immediately recognize that something like Hamlet can never be written today. Our geniuses don’t produce dramas like it, and our audiences wouldn’t be able to sit still for it, let alone recognize its greatness. 

Worse still, our egalitarian, commercialized culture doesn’t encourage the creation of beautiful literature like Hamlet. The closest we come is producing a faceless live-action prequel to an animated Disney knockoff of the story of Hamlet. Even then, such feature-length films are falling by the wayside while most people mindlessly scroll through bite-sized videos curated by a computer algorithm. 

At least it’s multicultural and accessible, which is how so many leftist elites evaluate the West’s vast cultural inheritance. Such criteria might be given a veneer of social justice (“decolonization”), but so much of it is simply ignorant, insecure philistinism. 

The British may be fine with flushing away their literary patrimony (a story more tragic than anything even Shakespeare could conceive), but Americans should cherish it all the more. Not only are Shakespeare’s plays and poems a fundamental part of Western arts and letters, but they are an enriching influence on all educated humanity. 

We should read and watch Shakespeare’s plays at every opportunity, grateful he hasn’t been taken away from us. More than any other writer, he indeed shows us there are more things in heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in our postmodern philosophy. 

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.