TRIGGERnometry - Can Shakespeare Survive the New Puritans? - Andrew Doyle

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Identity politics has been a disaster for the theatre. Andrew's Substack: https://andrewdoyle.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile.com. The Puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of adulterers, adulteruses, whore masters, haws, bords, panders, ruffians, roars, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane and godless persons. Those were the words of the Plemicist William Prynne from his histromastics, 1633.

He was eventually to get his way in 1642. when the Puritan-led Parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public's appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare's work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned. Now the Bard faces another breed of Puritan,

more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to be the most conformist of, of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrong think is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare's plays that I've seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today's audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.

Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate. the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show's content, he's willing to accept it. I suppose it's like going for dinner in an especially pious household and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal. Theatre goers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold.

Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work, we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare's opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A.L. Rouse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare saw through everybody equally. Neither Prince nor Porper escapes his skeptical gaze.

Even in Henry V, written at a time when England was gripped in a patriotic fervour, Shakespeare ensures that our hero is morally ambiguous. When Lawrence Olivier made his government-funded nationalistic film adaptation during World War II, he was compelled to excise the moment where Henry, at Agincourt, orders the French prisoners to be killed. It simply wasn't on for this paragon of Englishness to behave so ruthlessly. If you're looking for a Disney-fied world of goodies and baddies, Shakespeare isn't for you. But this is precisely the world imagined by the high priests of critical

social justice, those killjoys who have invaded the theatre industry and seek to deprive us of our cakes and ale. You're either in lockstep with every aspect of their doctrine or you're on the wrong side of history. And when an ideology captures an organisation, that organisation ceases to function effectively and becomes a mere conduit for the propagation of the creed. The two major companies responsible for producing Shakespeare's works, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe in London, are now seemingly beholden to the tenets of wokeness. The Globe regularly holds anti-racist Shakespeare webinars, which assemble scholars and artists of colour from a wide variety of backgrounds to examine Shakespeare's plays through the lens of race and social justice.

It sounds like some kind of punishment, but apparently there are people who actually attend those kind of sessions voluntarily. And in 2022, the Glover's Loeb staged a new play called I-Jone, which presented Joan of Arc as non-binary on the basis that she was powerful, independent and wore armour. Presumably a female Joan of Arc would have been too busy knitting, gossiping and shopping for shoes to fight the English. To accompany the production, an activist academic called Kit Heyam was invited to write an essay in which it was claimed that Queen Elizabeth I first could have been non-binary for similar reasons. She was even assigned they-them pronouns. According to Hayam, Elizabeth I described themselves regularly in speeches as

king, queen and prince, choosing strategically to emphasise their female identity or their male monarchical role at different points. One thinks of the Queen's famous speech to the troops at Tilbury. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king. For the literal-minded, this wasn't a declaration of strength, but a coming-out party. The decline of the Globe theatre has been ongoing for some years now. Former artistic director Emma Rice, who was perhaps the first to use the Globe as a springboard for identity politics, even admitted that she found Shakespeare a boring. While there's nothing wrong with that, it does seem odd that she found herself applying for the job.

It's a bit like training to be a coropidist when you can't stand the sight of feet. And when the current artistic director Michelle Terry took on the role in 2018, she made it clear that diversity and inclusivity were her priorities. As she said to Time Out magazine, I think this binary way of looking at gender, looking at the world, has reached a tipping point. We're doing a gender-blind, race-blind, disability-blind production of Hamlet. That show didn't go well, as one critic waspishly mused.

To leave or not to leave, that is the question. In 2021, the Globe produced a new woke reimagining of Romeo and Juliet in which the drama was reinterpreted as a comment on mental health. The lover's obsession for each other was presented as some kind of mental disorder, with statistics about depression among teenagers projected onto a screen above the stage. The suicides at the end of the play were explained away in similar terms. Never has tragedy been so tedious. And so it was refreshing to see the recent site-specific production of McPythe,

Beth at Doc X in London. As much as I admire its stars, Ray Fines and Indira Vama, my expectations were naturally low. On making our way into the auditorium, the audience passed through a kind of war zone, complete with the rubble of fallen buildings and a burnt-out car. Any sense of an immersive experience was impossible, really, with so many punters taking selfies next to the car while carrying their plastic beakers of wine. Gimmicks aside, once we were 15 minutes into the show, I felt a sense. of relief. This was actually Shakespeare's play, updated to a modern setting, to be sure, but otherwise intact. There were some textual modifications here and there. Duncan's entrance

was postponed so that the captain's account of the battle could be delivered in the form of a soliloquy, and the scenes with the porter and Hecatee were removed. Something is always lost in such interventions, but these are minor grumbles, and at least we weren't subjected to moralistic hectoring disguised as drama. This production may not have soared to the heights of of which Shakespeare's masterpiece is capable, and I had some reservations about the choice to present Macbeth as an awkward and weather-worn veteran, but it was a fairly solid effort. And all it took was for the director to have some faith in the text and the immense power of Shakespeare's words. The show worked precisely because it didn't attempt to force the square peg of Shakespeare into the

round hole of intersectional monomania. When the fashionable beliefs of our time are imposed onto historical works of art, they are invariably denuded of much of their profundity. The two gentlemen of Verona will always be preferable to the two trans women of Brighton and Hove, because the universal human themes of love, friendship and infidelity are far more exhilarating than tokenistic identity politics. Shakespeare will endure far longer than this current ideological fad, however much its disciples try to tear him down. He defeated the Puritans during his own lifetime, and we can be sure he'll do so again. If you enjoyed this video, please do check out my substack where these articles appear weeks in advance. There's lots of other material there too, so please check out

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