My most important new year’s resolution was cast aside this week. I had vowed that in 2022 I would eschew writing about the infinite idiocies of the woke and concentrate instead on bringing to light important, worthy causes. In other words, it was a pledge to make the world a better place, instead of just moaning. Wednesday gave me an excellent opportunity to put this plan of mine into action, because it was ‘World Spay Day’.
A group of animal rights charities had come together to nominate this day in order to raise awareness about the many, many millions of cats in the world that need spaying. This is a serious and greatly under-estimated problem and I had resolved to hold an open seminar on Zoom showing how a simple spaying procedure could be done at home, using only ordinary garden secateurs, a B&Q staple gun and some black masking tape. I also had a section entitled ‘How to catch your cat’, drawn from my considerable experiences over the past 20 years.
As I fixed up my webcam and began to shave and spreadeagle the cat ready for my lecture, I felt a warm feeling flood through me, the feeling that I was at last contributing something to the world. But then as I idly flicked through the internet, waiting for the appointed time of my broadcast, I came across the name Jacqui O’Hanlon and all my good intentions dissolved into nothing. I could not go on. It was back to the same ol’, same ol’. As Samuel Johnson put it: ‘The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken.’ You got me in one, Sam, mate.
Jacqui O’Hanlon is the director of learning and national partnerships at the Royal Shakespeare Company and in a sense, she is not the real problem. Still, even by the standards of Now, she seems to be a magnificently irritating human being and you will not be surprised, when you read what follows, to learn that she has been bunged an MBE. Jacqui sees her job at the RSC not as someone who might promulgate an interest among young people in our greatest ever playwright, but instead as someone who will tell the kids what an absolute bastard he was. Her job, she says, is ‘exposing the challenges that are in the text’, all the awful things this bearded, bigoted Midlands scribbler put down on paper at a time when, sadly, people didn’t get cancelled for such stuff. ‘There is language that is racist, there is racism… there is sexism… there is ableism,’ she explained. That is why a play such as All’s Well That Ends Well should be seen through a prism of ‘toxic masculinity and consent’, as the RSC recently put it.
She’s not alone in seeming to loathe Shakespeare. As Dominic Sandbrook reported, the Globe recently ran an ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare Project’ (of course it did) in which one participant, Madeline Sayet from Arizona State University, pronounced of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘They do have these violent colonial implications… If you’re reading Shakespeare’s plays and you’re not seeing any sexism or racism, then there’s a lot of education that I think, as a human being, you need to be looking at.’
If they find Shakespeare so grotesquely offensive, why would they want to work in theatre?
Ms Sayet added that anyone who thought Shakespeare was the greatest dramatist of all time was guilty of white supremacist thinking. Well, OK, people are allowed a contrary view about Shakespeare. The question is, if they find Shakespeare so grotesquely offensive, why would they want to work in the theatre? If I were on the interviewing panel of the RSC, looking to make a senior appointment, I would suggest that ‘having a vague affection for the writings of William Shakespeare’ was a kind of non-negotiable prerequisite. Just something like: ‘Yeah, he’s OK, I quite like those plays and shit.’ But perhaps such a stipulation would not be inclusive.
What happens, then, when this view of Shakespeare reaches the stage? In Ola Ince’s 2021 production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe, the cast removed lines that they didn’t like and replaced them with slogans declaiming ‘the patriarchy’ and rants about mental illness. Presumably Ms Ince and the cast thought themselves greater dramatists than was Shakespeare. It was, according to our reviewer, Lloyd Evans, beyond awful: ‘Scruffy, rowdy, poorly acted and tasteless.’
Worse than any of that though is that the reductionist approach to Shakespeare, where everything is seen though the prism of one of our elite’s banal progressive obsessions, means that the plays lose their complexity and their depth and — in the case of Romeo and Juliet — their wonderful language. They simply become placards scrawled by gauleiters from the Tyranny of Now. Richard III is about lethal corruption and power and the fact that the title character is ‘deformed, unfinish’d’ is not the crucial point, even if his deformities excused, in his mind, his various deceitful actions.
To argue that such a play legitimises unpleasant tropes about disabled people is to ignore everything in it that is dramatic and cathartic and intellectually important. Perhaps this is why Evans, sitting in the Globe cringing at the modernist take on Romeo and Juliet, was able to report that he was surrounded by scores of bored and yawning teenagers. They get that hectoring lowbrow propaganda every day in school. They probably hoped Shakespeare would give them something different.
What do we do about it? Gawd knows: it’s far easier to spay a neighbour’s cat. I notice that the RSC is sponsored by, among others, Samsung and Land Rover. I have never owned a Land Rover but I do have a Samsung phone and it is useless. So, Samsung, spend a bit more money improving your product and none whatsoever sponsoring a one-time institution which has lost the point of its existence.
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