In these heady early days of the second Trump administration, it is easy to start assuming that the left’s cultural ascendancy has crested and is now receding. Over in Britain, it’s a completely different situation: the country is suffering under the far-left government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and the left’s cultural hegemony looks as complete and impossible to challenge as it did here a few years. The latest target of the Marxist destroyers is none other than William Shakespeare.
The Daily Mail reported Sunday that the Bard’s “birthplace will be de-colonised over fears that portraying his success as the 'greatest' playwright 'benefits the ideology of white European supremacy.’” And so the madness continues. Shakespeare’s birthplace needs to be “de-colonized”? Who colonized it? As of 2021, 92.7% of the residents of Stratford-upon-Avon were white Britons, the same people who have been there since time immemorial. But now they are colonizers in the own homeland, the land of their ancestors.
This is absurd, but the left’s insanity has a purpose. Socialist internationalists want to destroy nation-states and create an international megastate. In order to make their destruction of nation-states, they want to destroy the cultural and national identity of the people, so that there will be as little resistance as possible. They are focusing on the West because of the West’s global cultural influence: if the ancient civilizations of Britain, France, Germany and their offspring, the United States, can be destroyed, the rest of the world will fall into line readily enough.
Or so they think, anyway. And so in the short term, cultural landmarks such as Shakespeare and his works have to be discredited and vandalized, so that Britons and English speakers will no longer take pride in them, but will instead be ashamed of them. A people who are ashamed of their heritage will not be interested in defending it.
And so the Daily Mail states that Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, which “owns buildings in the playwright's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon,” now plans to “'create a more inclusive museum experience.'” In search of the left’s exclusionary inclusion (excluding those who are actually the children and heirs of the civilization in which Shakespeare lived and worked), the Trust “announced it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised that Shakespeare's ideas were used to advance 'white supremacy' ideas.”
Who raised these concerns? Leftist British academics, of course. “In 2022, a research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins at the University of Birmingham postulated that the idea of Shakespeare’s ‘universal’ genius ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy.’ This is because European culture is portrayed as the standard for high art and the playwright as a symbol of British ‘superiority.’” This idea has supposedly “caused harm” — how? To whom? And so the researchers told Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust to “stop saying Shakespeare was the ‘greatest’ but part of a community of ‘equal and different’ writers globally.”
Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, meanwhile, weighed in with the predictable leftist idolatry of victimhood: “The trust also said that some of its items could contain language or depictions that are racist, sexist, or homophobic.”
And so Shakespeare’s works themselves have been treated as if they were a pack of cigarettes: “Some productions of his works have been slapped with trigger warnings for misogyny, racism and ‘problematic radicalised dynamics’ that link whiteness to beauty.”
Related: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre: ‘Trans People Are Sacred. We Are the Divine.’
At the Globe Theatre, a reconstruction of the theater that originally produced Shakespeare’s play, this nonsense has been front and center for years: the place actually holds “anti-racist” seminars to hash out just how evil Shakespeare’s plays really are. And “in 2023, The Globe gave Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream a ‘misogyny and racism’ warning.”
If the woke virus isn’t checked, Britain will by these means lose Shakespeare, among so very many other things, and a people who have no idea that they are the children and heirs to a civilization that was once great will submit meekly to whatever the leftist authoritarians have in store for them. That’s the frankly insidious idea behind the destruction of Shakespeare, and yet it is likely that only after he is well and truly “de-colonized” will anyone realize that there was actually a great deal of value in his eloquence, his vision, and his remarkable insights into human nature. Will Britain, and the West, be able to rebuild after the destroyers have done their work? We can only hope.
