Please,
let’s not be drongos. Calm the farm (or settle in The Green World): Shakespeare
is not being ‘cancelled’. That last phrase doesn’t mean anything, anyway,
beyond the mischief that can be done in the name of its opponents. And that’s a
lot of mischief. Look at Britain, Australia, and the United States, and the
‘culture wars’ and huffing in defence of the canon that have, quite comfortably,
accompanied real, lasting, damaging cuts to funding to the arts, humanist study
at the universities, the public world. Everyone looking for a chance to get
wound up on Shakespeare’s behalf these past few days should wonder at the
context. Touch, pause, engage…
I
Today
I attended a rally on Cuba Mall in solidarity with women protesting the
murderous tyranny in Iran. Those protests, one of the speakers said, would be
getting watched by all oppressed people across the region. Victory, in the face
of death, for women in Iran would mean something real for those dreaming of
freedom in Afghanistan, and facing real risks for their freedom. I faced no risks
myself, attending this protest. I went on with the rest of my day.
How
is this relevant? It reminds me that no
one who throws around the term ‘artistic Taliban’, in a place where we’re
able to read the Sonnets over brunch before a protest, is to be taken
seriously, on questions Shakespearean or otherwise.
II
Te
Matatini, for Kapa Haka in Aotearoa, receives, even after a fifty-percent
increase in funding this year, $2.9m in government funding compared to the New
Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s $19.7m, and the New Zealand Royal Ballet’s $8.1m. Why
is there such a difference? Why is the funding not equitable between organisations
and artistic traditions from the Māori world and the Pākehā world?
How
is this question relevant? Unless the argument is made for greater funding for
the arts, and greater support for all the traditions working on these islands,
what’s going on with Shakespeare? Why this outrage, about this particular sum
of money, for this performance work, now?
Why not both? My
boss put
it well: “A Treaty-based approach to
literary studies would mean [funding for Shakespeare and toi Māori] but we need
our uni leaders to step up & approve appointments in Māori Literature.
Students want this, staff want this, but uni leadership remains trapped in the
19thC.” Another colleague put
it even better: ““It
would be a massive, awesome act of decolonisation if we discovered our own
stories first and discovered Shakespeare afterwards […] Wouldn't it be great if
young people could come home and say, ‘Hey, Mum, Dad, I just found this story
and it's really similar to Hinemoana and Tūtānekai. It's Romeo and Juliet’.”
Do people going
on about how Shakespeare is “universal” or “our richest source” of insight
about being alive really mean what they’re saying? If his themes are universal,
are we all really still obsessed with the right circumstances and
justifications for rebellion against divinely-sanctioned monarchy? Or fretting
about monarchical legitimacy? Or – maybe you are, I don’t judge – worried
about how masturbation might be compared to usury, but how productive
sexual spending in a vagina isn’t the same as self-generating money in a bank? Really?
Maybe what’s different, rich, and strange about Shakespeare might be what’s
best, now, for us? Maybe, truly, admitting that lots of the jokes aren’t funny anymore
is OK? Maybe telling people comedies don’t need to be funny is a bit of an
admission of defeat? Maybe these don’t need to be the places we choose to have
our fights?
Anyway, if Shakespeare
is so much better than all the rest, how are The Young to know? What about
Kouka, Grace-Smith, Kyd, Beaumont and Fletcher, Tawhi Thomas, Kane, Chanwai
Earle, Rajan, Fletcher, Choi, Elizabeth Cary? How, unless we read more
playscripts and see more dramas, now, are we to make useful judgements?
III
Writing of
useful judgement, might we talk, for a change, about what’s happening now? I
loved my high-school exposure to Shakespeare, reading the plays aloud,
discovering criticism for the first time, getting anxious about all the Big
Themes. But that was thirty years ago, as are the memories of almost everyone
writing in this weekend. What are teachers doing now? How might that shape our
responses? What support might this then need?
IV
Speaking of
which, can we, please, avoid a culture war? All the yapping over this
relatively small grant denied and all the barking about Shakespeare getting ‘cancelled’
draws on a script and rehearsals elsewhere. Britain, over a dozen years of
austerity Tory rule, has seen coughing from above about The Canon facilitate
real cuts to actual learning, teaching, research in literatures in English, as Stefan
Collini has documented. The people frightfully keen on Western Civilisation
and the Menzies Centres in Australia have been equally comfortable on, again,
cuts to the actual institutions and infrastructure of culture there too. Think
of it this way: even if you love Shakespeare (I do), picking this as
your fight, now? In this economy? Unless you’re having a real discussion, and
proposing a real united front, with Māori arts organisations and practitioners
for money wherever it is needed then, really, you’re sharpening the knife for
your own poetico-cultural throat. Don’t do that.
Anti-Bard
right-onery is boring, granted. But what’s to be gained from Bardolatory? Where
are chances properly to learn Shakespeare – and the traditions of literatures
in this language more generally, for that matter? – getting lost? Again, follow
the money. What courses have been cut? What staffing has been denied? If
Shakespeare’s texts can be put to anti-colonial ends as so many have insisted
this weekend (I believe them!) then where is the wider infrastructural context
in which to make those ends legible? Professor (Emeritus) Sir Vincent O’Sullivan
KNZM (DPhil, Oxon) sees in this decision “an attempt actively to discourage a
new generation from […] most of English language and literature.” Perhaps he
might bring some of his (considerable) non-conformist talent and scorn to some
rather more pressing barriers to the new generation accessing that language and
that literature: debt, managerialism, diminished universities, lost chances.
V
These
things don’t signify nothing, but they don’t signify too much neither: what is
(in its national terms) a modest sum of money denied; a few headlines; a
handful of links to click through. Then on to the next outrage. But this is how
politics, nowadays, gets aestheticized: gurning at cancel culture is for today
what groaning about political-correctness-gone-mad was for yesterday. None of
the arts will gain from these rounds of scoffing and hissing and public
culture, generally, is diminished with each tedious iteration. Already Chris
Bishop has
tweeted at how ‘disgraceful’ CNZ’s decision was. No matter
the carving out of funding for the humanities under his government last time,
nor the closure of libraries and places in which to read Shakespeare from his
colleagues in Britain. The outrage machine rolls on.
VI
Thinking
on the ‘poor naked wretches’ with their ‘houseless heads’ enduring the ‘pitiless
storm’, Lear reflects
O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take
physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what
wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux
to them,
And show the heavens more
just.
Shakespeare matters, sure. But it’s only by
knowing what matters more than Shakespeare that we can get a measure of his
measure. Crowing about cancel culture takes us further from that goal. We need
to calm down.
