Attention, Western thinking: Now William Shakespeare is being “decolonized”

Its end has been heralded several times. But the wave of wokeness is far from over. And the mischief it's capable of causing can now be seen in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's hometown. Stratford is a center of international tourism. Here, you can visit the places where Shakespeare, his mother, his wife, and his daughter lived, and experience Shakespeare in his own place.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) governs Stratford. Founded in 1847 to preserve Shakespeare's birthplace for the English nation, this trust has built a vast archive of Shakespeareana. It has transformed the house Shakespeare bought in 1597 into a museum celebrating Stratford and its greatest son.

In this idyllic little town, with its immaculately renovated Elizabethan houses, its pubs, and tea rooms, where Al Pacino once lay in Shakespeare's bed to get closer to his spirit, the management of what is arguably England's oldest cultural foundation has decided to embrace the ideology of decolonization. The collection is to be "decolonized." The project has been underway since 2022, but the Daily Telegraph only recently brought it to light.

In 2022, the society asked a young academic from Birmingham City University, who was writing her doctoral thesis on the collection, for her opinion. Helen Hopkins, who had previously been relatively unnoticed in Shakespearean scholarship, suggested that the society acknowledge the role Shakespeare "was forced to play in creating and maintaining the imperialist narrative of cultural superiority."

This is sociologically speaking, and it means: Shakespeare, too, is ultimately nothing more than a guilty, dead, white man. The text by the previously unknown Helen Hopkins contains several samples from the repertoire of woke phrases. Those who appreciate Shakespeare support "white, Anglocentric, Eurocentric, and generally Western views that continue to spread misery in the world today."

So Shakespeare, the universal genius, the playwright whose works are performed all over the world, is a driver of "the ideology of white European superiority"? His plays are still performed all over the world four hundred years after his death. His themes—jealousy, love, betrayal, hatred, and meanness—are as touching as ever.

When she first read Shakespeare, says the Black American writer Maya Angelou, she was convinced the author must have been a Black woman. "He understood me," she says. For Helen Hopkins, however, it is a certainty that Shakespeare's work, its reception, and the exhibition in Stratford exert "epistemic violence." And, in her view, there is only one radical cure for this: the exhibition must be "cleansed of Anglocentricity and colonialist thinking." Then the "social inequality inherent in imperialism and associated with Shakespeare's global status" will be combated.

It's as if you're in the wrong movie. What arrogance lurks in this ideological gibberish? Of course, Shakespeare was Anglocentric. His plays are full of epistemic violence and nasty jokes about the French, Spaniards, Italians, Jews, and Turks, not to mention the Scots and Puritans. Much of it is politically anything but correct. Shakespeare never left England. However, with the exception of Virginia, there were hardly any colonies in his time.

The son of a glove maker, he was well-read and drew on everything he read in Plautus, Ariosto, Montaigne, and Boccaccio for his dramas. He was a hardworking thespian. His plays were appreciated not only at court. London's working men flocked to his performances, as did the educated. He adapted the texts to the respective audience, transforming everything into a stage play intended to shock, amuse, horrify, but above all, entertain.

Shakespeare had a great gift for explaining what he meant. "A typical trick," wrote Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. "He always had a big five-dollar word ready, but also the 25-cent explanation." People understood him and his messages.

Katharine Birbalsingh, one of England's most well-known teachers and head of one of the most ethnically diverse and successful schools in London, called the decolonization of Shakespeare "ludicrous" in an interview with the "Spectator." Shakespeare is "untouchable," she says. Four Shakespeare plays are read and performed at her school each year. For her, it's clear: It's condescending and arrogant to say that understanding Shakespeare depends on the reader's skin color.

Children are children, whether brown, black, or white. And everyone, Birbalsingh is convinced, understands Shakespeare: "Anyone who claims that ethnic minorities can't understand Shakespeare is spreading racism," says she, who herself has dark skin and identifies as British and Western. "We must learn from Shakespeare," is her clear verdict. "Does a Jew not bleed?" she paraphrases Shylock from "The Merchant of Venice": "Shakespeare understood that."

The man who created proto-feminist characters in his plays, who made cross-dressing commonplace in "Twelfth Night," doesn't need decolonization. Authors like James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, and Rabindranath Tagore have revered his universalism, his genius. Shakespeare's art is diverse and inclusive. And he is read by everyone. Otherwise, would young people go to the theater to see "Romeo and Juliet"? Would there be "Shakespeare for Dummies"?

The decolonization frenzy of the academic who is "clearing out" the museum in Stratford could be summed up in the words from "Much Ado About Nothing": "In a false quarrel there is no true valor." The people who come to Stratford to learn more about Shakespeare, to understand him better, are the ones who suffer the most.

Shakespeare's great achievement is that, even centuries after his plays were written, no academic scholarship is required to understand them. Thus, the Fool is often the source of highly insightful views. "This," says Stephen Greenblatt, "fits well with Shakespeare's view that intelligence in the world is not distributed according to university degrees." Leave Shakespeare alone.