Can Shakespeare survive the new puritans?
Identity politics has been a disaster for the theatre.
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, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.
These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (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 the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have 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 is 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.
Theatregoers 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. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical 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 Laurence 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 Disneyfied 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 some who attend such sessions voluntarily.
And in 2022, the Globe staged a new play called I, Joan, 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 could have been “non-binary” for similar reasons. She was even assigned they/them pronouns. According to Heyam, Elizabeth I “described themself 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 boring. While there is 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 chiropodist 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: “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 lovers’ 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 were explained away in similar terms. Never has tragedy been so tedious.
And so it was refreshing to see the current site-specific production of Macbeth at Dock X in London earlier this week. As much as I admire its stars, Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma, my expectations were naturally low. On making our way into the auditorium, the audience passed through a kind of warzone, complete with the rubble of fallen buildings and a burned-out car. Any sense of an immersive experience was impossible with so many punters taking selfies next to the car while carrying their plastic beakers of wine.
Gimmicks aside, once we were fifteen 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 as a soliloquy, and the scenes with the Porter and Hecate 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 which Shakespeare’s masterpiece is capable, and I had reservations about the choice to present Macbeth as an awkward and weatherworn veteran, but it was a fairly solid effort. And all it took was for the director to have 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 Transwomen 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.
Exquisitely written and a joy to read, Andrew! I am a frequent theatre-goer and I have been despairing about these ideas infecting theatre. I was looking forward to Terry Gilliam's musical production at the old Vic, pulled when a staff member felt "unsafe". Then the Joan of Arc primer on gender, which you have expertly skewered. I saw "The Doctor" which critics loved, but which, thanks to "colour-blind and gender-blind casting" had the audience confused. It was a play about a female doctor's authority in a male-dominated hospital - except that black women were cast as the white patriarchs, and a white man with a Southern accent played a black Irish character. Much of the dialogue concerned this character, which was bewildering - but as one Grauniad critic put it "the casting really kept the audience on their toes". God spare us this madness!
It started with ‘deconstructing’, it’ll end in rubble…brilliant article. Let me know when it’s dangerous to go back to the theatre. It’s such an embarrassment….