Hey VIPs —
I majored in English, and if I had the chance to do it over, I’d definitely pursue STEM instead. I like to say that I managed to graduate just before they succeeded in slipping gender studies into the English curriculum — before gender studies was its own major, the professors had to sneak it in somewhere. I’d have thought it would have belonged in psychology or sociology, but English was ripe for takeover.
Just last month, for Gay History Month, the Globe Theater’s head of research “uncovered the truth behind Shakespeare’s sexuality.” Was he gay? No, he wasn’t.
Was Shakespeare gay? That is the question…
🌈 This #LGBTQplusHM, our Head of Research, Dr Will Tosh, uncovers the truth behind Shakespeare’s sexuality in this instalment of #ThatIsTheQuestion…https://t.co/I6C9yi32MI
— Shakespeare’s Globe (@The_Globe) February 21, 2023
If Shakespeare were gay, he’d be safe from being purged from the canon as just another straight white man. But now there’s another line of attack against Shakespeare: All of his works had to do with racial identity, and his plays and sonnets were central to the construction of “whiteness” in his time.
"Shakespeare’s work, the collection argues, was central to the construction of whiteness as a racial category during the Renaissance, and white people, in turn, have used Shakespeare to regulate social hierarchies ever since." https://t.co/1a1I0B9H4d
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) March 10, 2023
“A new book argues ….” Daniel Pollack-Pelzner writes for The Atlantic about a new collection of essays edited by Arthur L. Little Jr. entitled, “White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite”:
A striking example comes in the first essay of White People, by the late Imtiaz Habib, a founding scholar of race in early modern England. He takes up the opening line of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 1,” which implores a handsome young man to reproduce: “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” The key word here is fairest. In Shakespeare’s day, fair could mean physically attractive or morally just. It could also refer to complexion. More influential, it could be used to link attractiveness and justness to whiteness. When the Duke of Venice approves of Othello’s virtue, for instance, he calls him “far more fair than black.” (Is it any coincidence that the answer to the fairy-tale question “Who’s the fairest of them all?” is “Snow White”?) The scholar Kim F. Hall, another contributor to White People, demonstrated the racial valence of fair almost three decades ago in her field-defining study, Things of Darkness —a dynamic work whose implications are still contested. Although I’m in Hall’s camp, not all Shakespeare scholars agree with her ideas. As a result, it’s still common for people to read passages such as those that open “Sonnet 1” without acknowledging that a paraphrase could basically be “We want the whitest people to have more babies.” Habib calls the “Sonnet 1” opening a “declaration of the desirable eugenic privilege of white breeding,” which is the kind of bracing take, both unsettling and compelling, that this collection offers at every turn.
“The kind of bracing take … that this collection offers at every turn.”
See, this is the kind of crap I’d be assigned if I were to take my Shakespeare course in 2023.
It's an inexhaustible font of content.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) March 10, 2023
This reminds me of an article I read ages ago about feminist analysis of Shakespeare in which one of the arguments was that the real goal of the conspirators in Julius Caesar is to downgrade Caesar to a woman by making him bleed. 🤣
— Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@CathyYoung63) March 10, 2023
That take cost someone $350,000 in out-of-state tuition.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) March 10, 2023
Is the "overly politically correct" type of wokeism USA Today/Ipsos would have us believe is disliked by a minority of Americans?
— Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) March 10, 2023
Why did you put this in front of me, Noah
— Grant Addison (@jgrantaddison) March 10, 2023
This reminds me of the time I was treated to a rant about how Frozen was actually about women getting their periods and men being afraid of it.
— MB (@PAEasy64) March 11, 2023
What a horribly depressing, dare I say monochromatic way to view the world. It must be awful to be these people.
— John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt (@debeehr) March 10, 2023
Who reads Shakespeare and comes up with a take as awful as this?
— Ilko Birov (@ilkobirov) March 11, 2023
Seriously, just pic.twitter.com/UzqwNmFa6S
— Jamie Dissent (@JamesDissent) March 10, 2023
"Abolish whiteness" is their rubric. Everything flows from it.
— S. Maria Shreve (@s_shreve1) March 11, 2023
That’s not hyperbole. “Whiteness” has been defined separately from “white,” so it’s OK to say you want to abolish whiteness, which is evil. White people can stick around if you’re able to extract their whiteness. And Asian-Americans — they’re just white-adjacent.
So now they want to cancel Shakespeare. Flat out ridiculous.
— Deirdre Robinson (@DeirdreDrdr) March 10, 2023
Yes, because as the original post says, white people have been using Shakespeare to “regulate social hierarchies.”
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Delta ends sponsorship of ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ after staged Trump assassination https://t.co/IM8hfgesWx
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 11, 2017
