Problematic Shakespeare
A recent piece in The Daily Mail noted with evident disappointment that;
“Woke attacks on Shakespeare’s works have so far been relatively restrained” (Hands off the Bard!, 8/2/22).
Yet in their treatment of gender, race, religion, disability, and violence, many of Shakespeare’s works are inescapably problematic, a phenomenon often enhanced by editorial and performance traditions.
Without succumbing to the simplistic binaries of the media-driven “cancel culture” debate, this symposium aimed to survey Shakespeare’s troubled present and to chart possible futures.
Please read the summary below, provided by Exeter PhD student Sherin Babu, or if you would like to be sent the recording, email: .
Problematic Shakespeare, an online symposium by The International Institute of Cultural Enquiry (IICE) was held on March 7, 2022. It hosted a panel of academic speakers including Dr Nora Williams (Essex), Dr Naomi Howell (Exeter), Professor Ayesha Mukherjee (Exeter), Professor Philip Schwyzer (Exeter), and Dr Vicky Sparey (Exeter), and was chaired by Professor Regenia Gagnier (Exeter). Professor Gagnier introduced the symposium by stating that the idea for it had been born in lockdown, when she rewatched the 1967 production of Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and was surprised by how difficult she found the gender politics in it. Professor Gagnier decided to call on academic experts who think about Shakespeare and productions of Shakespeare and the history of Shakespearean production every day, and it resulted in this symposium a year later.
The panel began with Dr Nora Williams, who started by challenging the title of the symposium, as she stated that the word “problematic” is often used as a stand-in for more controversial words such as homophobic, orientalist, white-supremacist and more. She asserted that she was willing to state outright that “Shakespeare’s plays perpetuate misogynist violence and that they do that through their dramaturgy,” by upholding and maintaining patriarchy. This made a feminist or resistant reading of any given play difficult to achieve, even within an adaptive space of performance. She then went on to explain some of the interventions she uses when performing Shakespeare, specific to the play Measure for Measure. These include conceptualising Isabella speaking to contemporary survivors of rape, to drive home the lack of change and indicate the oppressive power that patriarchy still holds. Another is to constantly be aware of the power transfer that takes place to a Shakespeare director, teacher or professor, authority relative to Shakespeare, who himself is constructed as the ultimate literary and theatrical authority. This often forms the root of institutional resistance to challenge the problematics of Shakespeare. Dr Williams stated that she refutes this by transferring power to the players, and another intervention is to cut scenes without Isabella in them. She also said that the technique of having different actors play Isabella encourages the participants to make use of a shared part to represent an ethics of solidarity. She also addressed how these practice methods can be adapted to a classroom, through power balance exercises and allowing students to creatively engage through offering opportunities to adapt and intervene through exercises such as blackout poems. The takeaway is the same, to constantly ponder what it would mean for this to truly be Isabella’s story.
The second panelist was Dr Victoria Sparey (Exeter). She spoke of the interventions used in an undergraduate module called Rethinking Shakespeare. The module is designed to think about Shakespeare in terms of it being problematic, with particular focus on King Lear, As You Like It, and Taming of The Shrew. Students unpack these three Shakespeare plays and their meanings within meaning within historical and cultural contexts beginning with creating a word cloud of their existing understanding of Shakespeare, where words such as “universal,” “timeless truths” etc. inevitably appear. They then delve into the plays themselves, and Dr Sparey talked about the surprise expressed by students encountering the misogyny in a play such as The Taming of the Shrew for the first time. This makes them want to know more and engage with how this is problematic and what might be done. When teaching King Lear, Dr Sparey spoke of the classroom discussions that ensue when addressing the ableist tropes within the play, and of an exercise the students undertake where they are asked to edit the last 30 lines of King Lear. It results in a destabilisation of ideas about Shakespeare as that unquestionable and fixed figure, which is represented in the way the word cloud at the end of the module contains words such as “problematic” and “ableist.”
The third speaker, Dr Naomi Howell addressed the race element present in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. She spoke of the resistance that is raised, even from celebrated scholars, whenever Cleopatra is cast as a non-white person, and that it often invites criticisms of pandering and is seen as a case of racial concerns trumping acting ability. Within the classroom, this leads to discussions of how Shakespeare’s plays might then be less universal and raises many conflicting ideas about race and of blackness. This helps create a space to think about how to untangle some of the present-day assumptions that are intertwined, often implicitly, in how we think about race and gender.
Professor Philip Schwyzer, the next panelist, addressed the teaching of The Merchant of Venice. The classroom seminar focuses specifically on issues of anti-Semitism, race, and sexuality in the play. The question is raised, whether the play deserves to be cancelled, and what cancellation is in the first place. Students are asked to consider whether cancel culture is a real thing and what it means. The students’ definition often differs from the popular definition of calling out a person or institution for racist or bigoted behavior and refusing to engage with them since. What cancel culture means for the students is if the person or institution acknowledges the failures, is willing to apologise and make amends, and they are still “cancelled.” The question is then raised, does The Merchant of Venice deserve to be cancelled, one way or the other? The racism in the play is not integral and Portia’s racist lines about the Prince of Morocco can easily be cut. The argument that is raised then, is whether removing the lines feels like deception, almost like an attempt by a celebrity deleting problematic tweets, hoping not to be found out. So then the question becomes, whether The Merchant of Venice can apologise and make amends, i.e. can it be performed in its original form for entertainment and profit? The students have a debate on this followed by a vote. While the vote follows a fairly predictable outcome, the larger question being debated is whether a play has a right to be performed just because it is by Shakespeare. Which leads to the understanding that rewriting the play in any way, for instance by bringing Shylock back at the end, is not just a nod to “wokeness” but an acknowledgement that the play demands some resolution of its anti-Semitism. Professor Schwyzer ended on a thought-provoking question, as to how long even this confrontation and adaptation would make sense, and as to whether we simply need to stop performing or engaging with the play itself as Shakespeare wrote it.
The last speaker was Professor Ayesha Mukherjee, who spoke of her AHRC funded project called Famine Tales from India and Britain. She spoke of intertwining Shakespeare with contemporary economic and ecological concerns, especially famine and food insecurity. The historical links between Shakespeare plays and famine were explained by Professor Mukherjee, she described how her project considers whether the plays were simply archaic in that they respond to a historically specific moment of particular food crises which were no longer relevant, or whether this historical engagement itself offers ways of thinking through current concerns about food insecurity, ecological anxieties, and environmental change. She worked with two groups of artists for this project, one a set of traditional scroll painters from a remote village in West Bengal, and the other, graphic artists from urban Calcutta. The artists produced 6 famine tales of food insecurity from early Modern India and Britain. Professor Mukherjee spoke of the detailed and frequently difficult conversations with the artists about Shakespeare, his times, his stories, and what these might mean for them. The first thing that she found noteworthy was how swiftly both groups of artists were able to grasp the historical realities of death and famine in Shakespeare’s time and were able to appropriate Shakespeare as a storyteller into a figure from their own culture, representing a poet and philosopher. This was particularly noteworthy in the scroll painters who were unable to read Shakespeare’s text in the original language, and even with the complex process of translation involved, what emerged was an extremely complex, intercultural, multilingual, intertextuality. It allowed the subtle voicing of the artists’ own ecological concerns through Shakespeare, by, for instance the merging of the Thames and the Ganges, and the blending of the urban and rural landscapes of early modern Britain and modern India. They were also able to bring in elements of the ongoing food crises raised by the pandemic. Professor Gagnier raised a Chinese aesthetic concept called sedimentation, which is when groups and cultures come into contact and they absorb and change and transform each other, and ended with how we were now thinking more and more about the sedimentation of Shakespeare in different cultures.
It was an engaging and though-provoking event, with several new and interesting viewpoints to consider especially for someone like me who is just getting started in the field. Of particular note was the discussion that followed, cut short only by time considerations. Questions included whether it was time to defund or even cancel Shakespeare altogether, and whether it was time to dissolve the literary and historical authority he still assumes in academic settings. An excellent event from IICE and certainly looking forward to more.