The problem with decolonising Shakespeare

Scarcely a day passes without a major British institution announcing it is ‘decolonising’ itself. Most recently it was the turn of Shakespeare’s Globe, which announced a series of ‘anti-racist Shakespeare webinars’ as part of its ‘commitment to decolonising the plays of Shakespeare’. That brought me up short. At the time of Shakespeare’s birth, England didn’t have any colonies, although other European states did.