Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). In Great Britain, one of the country’s greatest monuments is now being demolished – the memory of Shakespeare is to be adapted to the dictates of the current cultural madness. Ultimately, this will mean censoring entire sections of his work.
In recent years, a disastrous trend has taken hold of making culture disappear. This can be seen at the most basic level, when traditional seasonal celebrations are cancelled in kindergartens because their religious origins might offend some people. But there is always another option – namely, to include other celebrations in the calendar. The difference between the two options – cancelling everything in order to achieve supposed neutrality and broadening the spectrum – is that in the certainly less costly and therefore cheaper version of cancelling, the experience of shared humanity is no longer possible, whereas broadening the spectrum makes it possible to experience what connects us.
But there are even deeper levels. In the United Kingdom, Shakespeare is now to be ‘decolonised’ because his works have been used to propagate ‘white supremacy’. The Shakespeare Trust, which owns various Shakespeare-dedicated institutions in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon and manages a wealth of archival material on Shakespeare, now wants to ‘decolonise’ its entire collection and says it wants to explore how ‘Shakespeare’s work played a role’ in colonialism.
This is an argument that could be used to abolish shipping and money, and the military anyway, whose role in colonialism was certainly far more decisive than that of Othello or Richard III, but that would be a confrontation with the material world and its realities, and that is precisely what this whole movement fears like the devil fears holy water.
When Shakespeare wrote his plays, England was experiencing its great cultural flowering. The great peasant uprising of 1381 had not yet succeeded in abolishing serfdom, but it had nevertheless largely disappeared by the end of that century and was finally abolished by Elizabeth I in 1574, during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The English aristocracy had been kind enough to largely exterminate itself in the Wars of the Roses (what was left of it after the Hundred Years’ War against France), and it was mainly London cloth merchants who took their place. Under Elizabeth’s father, England had broken away from the papacy, a conflict that was fought with all the fervour of a religious war, but which was essentially about bringing the remaining feudal possessions of the Church under control.
During Shakespeare’s lifetime, internal conflicts had been pacified, at least temporarily; England had only its colonies on the British Isles and a small patch of what would later become the United States, and the great colonial power Spain had lost its armada, which had been sent to subjugate England, in a storm in 1588, when Shakespeare was probably fourteen. The British slave trade had not yet begun; the first Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619. The plantation economy that would later drive it, with sugar cane and cotton, had not yet been invented. At that time, the trade was mainly carried out by Spain and Portugal.
It was a time of relative prosperity and freedom, a model for what Germany could have been if the struggle against serfdom had not failed so fatally there in 1525. Shakespeare’s plays describe the battles of the Wars of the Roses, the long struggle between the houses of Lancaster and Gloucester for supremacy, from a relative distance, as part of something completely new at the time, a national history in which the personal loyalties that governed feudal relations can be dissected in all their advantages and disadvantages.
There is, of course, much in Shakespeare’s work that seems strange to us today, such as The Taming of the Shrew. But there is also Shylock’s monologue in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, in which the moneylender Shylock, who is actually the villain of the play because he demands a pound of flesh from his debtor, gains greatness in a few sentences with his claim to human equality: ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ In Julius Caesar, the recourse to Roman history also anticipates the republic. Quite a few literary historians see in the character of Caliban in the storm a first portrayal of the victims of the beginning of colonial rule. Drama lives in the space between, and therefore offers the richest view of the society in which it arises, and few views encompass as much as Shakespeare’s, to which the respite in the upheaval (which was to be followed after Shakespeare’s death by the English Civil War, which then found expression in the far more depressing Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes) contributed a great deal to this.
The announced changes to the Shakespeare Trust were triggered by a research project he conducted in 2022 in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, which concluded that declaring Shakespeare a ‘universal genius’ is part of a ‘white, Anglo-centric, Eurocentric and increasingly “Western-centric” worldview that continues to harm the world today’.
Now, there is no law in the world that says that in order to love Shakespeare, one must ignore the Indian ‘Mahabharata’ (which Peter Brook filmed so magnificently in the late 1980s) or consider the Chinese social portrait Jin Ping Mei to be inferior. Strangely enough, it used to be possible to perceive the entire stream of human culture as one long conversation, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present day, but this is precisely what moral absolutism makes impossible, confusing the excuse used with the intention.
At the end of the 18th century, European colonialism in Africa was predominantly justified in Europe as a fight against the slave trade; in reality, it was about conquest and subjugation. Does this mean that the fight against the slave trade is inherently wrong? The British, in particular, used this motive at the beginning of the same century to strengthen their control over the sea routes, and in fact it was hardly in the interests of the prisoners when the slave traders’ ships were sunk along with their cargo. This does not make the genuine fight against slavery reprehensible, any more than Shakespeare is reprehensible because bloodstained British colonial officers in India liked to read him or see him on stage.
What about Martin Luther? On the one hand, he was to German what Shakespeare was to English with his translation of the Bible, but on the other hand, he also had very dark sides with his militant opposition to the peasant uprising and his very clear anti-Semitism. Belittling historical figures or erasing cultural achievements from memory (Martin Luther has already shrunk considerably in the decades I have been observing) does not change the circumstances of the present, even if its advocates imagine it does. But it does something else: it diminishes our awareness of the contradictions that every human being carries within them, as well as our awareness of historical dynamics.
(Which is why it is completely absurd to consider ideologies such as cancel culture or gender madness to be Marxism – they know neither dialectics nor are they materialistic in the philosophical sense, but rather the exact opposite of both).
How fortunate that nothing is known about Homer except his work, otherwise he would have to be removed from the canon because he beat his wife or cheated his winegrower (although the Iliad has already been banned in some places for excessive violence). Yet what art can offer at its best is a glimpse of human possibilities in all their facets, contradictions included. But without this glimpse, the desire for a society in which these possibilities are open to all cannot even arise. The fact that Nazi hordes invaded the world with Goethe’s Faust in their knapsacks does not disqualify Faust.
But even in German secondary schools today, entire plays are no longer even read, let alone seen (if Shakespeare can still be staged at all, because he requires far too many actors), and history is presented as something that has been definitively told, whose driving forces raise no questions – data that is stored, retrieved and forgotten in the short term, far removed from the great human drama. Yet human conversation, from the smallest between two people to politics to the centuries-spanning culture, has one fundamental prerequisite: recognising contradictions.
Coexistence at every level requires not simply tolerating others, but recognising that every development, even internal ones, is only possible through contradictions. Shakespeare is still a valuable conversation partner, and if one wanted to ‘decolonise’ him, one could have him staged by a troupe of Nigerian actors (I have been dreaming of seeing Macbeth in a Yoruba version for decades); but the reduction, the levelling of every historical figure robs the entire human conversation. Yet our survival as a species depends on this conversation.
