Cancel The Green World

 

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.