Preview Script: PRAGERU’S EXTREMELY BAD SHAKESPEARE TAKES or, WHY I STOPPED TALKING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE  (Patreon)

Hello Patrons, it's been a while.

It's been an eventful few months - got a day job or two, moved states, and I've been busy adjusting to new surroundings and most importantly, I've been writing.

What follows is a 21k word script about Shakespeare, which I was moved to write about again after watching several videos by the YouTube channel, content farm, and scourge against human life PragerU.

This will be the script I'll use to film - the video is still a long way away from being completed. I've never dropped the script before I made the video but with this project I feel like you, the patron, deserves to be let into the process more.

Well, off to make a video!

Cheers,

Kyle

PRAGERU’S EXTREMELY BAD SHAKESPEARE TAKES or, WHY I STOPPED TALKING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE 

PRAGERU’S EXTREMELY BAD SHAKESPEARE TAKES or, WHY I STOPPED TALKING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE 

KEY:

On Camera

Voiceover

Third Party Clip

Added

Cut

There are three ways I could start this video. One way is with a bird. This bird. Sturnus vulgaris, The European starling. The second way is with a prison. This prison: Robben Island Maximum Security Prison, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. The third way, and the way that is objectively best for the YouTube algorithm, would be to talk about another YouTube channel: PragerU. A Christian nationalist propaganda campaign created and leveraged to aid the rise of a uniquely American form of fascism whose only use value lies in debunking its many falsehoods and turning its ugly content into goofy shitposts

[clip: “I’m Pe/nis Prager at the F/art/side S/hat!”]

The common thread among all these things is the topic of this video: William Shakespeare. 

[clip: leo and Layla “Hi! Are you William Shakespeare?” “Guilty as charged!”]

My name is Kyle Kallgren and for a decade and a half I have been a video essayist since before there were video essayists - back when we still called ourselves Internet Reviewers. I came up in a generation of video makers who never cited sources and only crafted jokes because we have always been more Carnie than Academic, before we all had to set up isolated net communities to prevent the post-Gamergate wolf packs from rending our fragile psyches with targeted harassment campaigns. And I, the Pete Best of Breadtube, have been flailing before an audience of close friends, concerned relatives, and contemptible hate watchers who doxx my home address while calling me homophobic slurs and claiming that I hate myself because I’m white. I’m doing great, thank you for asking.

And also I talked a lot about Shakespeare. Shakespeare adaptations to film, in particular. I’ve talked about the hammy ego enabling repertory group that is the cinema of Kenneth Branagh, I’ve talked about the frenetic acid trip that is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, I’ve talked about everything from Jean-Luc Godard’s brilliantly layered shitpost that is his King Lear to a cheaply made 90’s pornographic film entitled A Midsummer Night’s Cream- although the latter probably had a bigger budget than the Godard movie to be perfectly honest.

I haven’t talked about Shakespeare in a while - not since I crashed out while discussing Gnomeo and Juliet. I’ve done plenty of Shakespeare since then - started doing Shakespeare over Zoom for charity during the pandemic with my online theatre company Worlds Elsewhere, and you can see me over on my friend Sara’s YT channel attempting some of the Shakespeare clown roles - you can see my Dogberry and you can see me Bottom I mean you can see me playing Bottom! And there’s been plenty of Shakespeare movies to talk about since then. 

There’s the visually stunning Joel Coen Macbeth with the legendary Denzel Washington as the thane, there’s the clever comedy Rosaline where Kaitlyn Dever plays the lover that Romeo jilts in favor of Juliet before the play even starts, there’s the charming documentary Grand Theft Hamlet about the staging of the tragedy of the Dane on the streets of Los Santos in GTA Online, and there’s the drama All Is True where Kenneth Branagh took his final pretentious form and cast himself as Shakespeare, and those are just the ones I’ve seen.

I could’ve talked about all of these and more, but I didn’t. I talked about Shakespeare so much I was at risk of becoming a channel that could only talk about Shakespeare. I don’t think all my videos on Shakespeare hold up well, sometimes for reasons out of my control. 

For example I somehow managed to talk about Shakespeare in Love without once mentioning the fact that its Oscar sweep was the result of it being produced by Harvey “holy shit we gave this ghoul so much damn power” Weinstein. All of those videos have aged poorly, and in such unique ways. Like: I made this criticism of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet

[clip: review of Romeo + Juliet “Hey, remember when Donald Trump’s staff got into street brawls with Warren Buffett’s guys? Man those Trump boys sure could bite a thumb!”]

(Beat) Remember when the idea of Donald Trump raising a violent mob of his supporters was a funny absurdity?

And as longtime viewers know one of my longest- running jokes was an editing gag where I would point out how William Shakespeare, the untouchable emblem of highbrow culture, is quoted by everyone

[clip: Sense and Sensibility “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments; love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove.]

Everyone

[clip: Hamilton “My dearest Angelica, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace from day to day]

Everyone

[clip SM:FFH - “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” - Stark said that you wouldn’t get that cause it’s not a Star Wars reference]

I was trying to make a point that Shakespeare is not high or low culture: that his works occupied a space in pop culture that is accessible to everyone. His works are the basis, the background noise of pop culture. Even when his words aren’t directly quoted his storytelling is everywhere. 

The climax of his Henry V has King Henry rally his soldiers before a battle against overwhelming odds by invoking the significance of the holiday they fight on:

[clip: Independence Day “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!]

A key scene in Hamlet has the prince stage a play recreating the murder of the previous king in front of the current king, the man who murdered him, in a bid to catch his conscience:

[clip: Euphoria “wait, is this fucking play about us?”]

And the finale of Titus Andronicus shows Titus’ revenge where he feeds his enemy a meal made of their own relatives:

[clip: South Park, ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ “Nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh! I made you eat your parents!]

From the ivory towers to the media illiterate shitposters, Shakespeare is, was, and always will be, mass culture. And the work is accessible to everyone.

[clip: The Band Wagon: “The world is a stage, the stage is a world of entertainment!]

Everyone.

[clip ST VI: TUC “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon - “taH pagh taHbe’!]

And yes, unfortunately, everyone.

[Dennis Prager on Newsmax saying that “So for the Left to start all of a sudden speaking about “truth” is like uh… is like illiterates talking to you about Shakespeare.]

Ahh, Prager University. Good ol’ P.U.

PragerU, long-running internet punchline, was founded in 2009 by its namesake, radio talk show host and YTP content farm Dennis Prager and cofounded by Allen Estrin, a screenwriter whose credits include, and this is not a joke, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, which is a direct-to-video Disney sequel about the latter part of the life of a child who was taken hostage by her genocidal groomers and paraded around a disease-ridden land to advertise tobacco, causing her premature death in a life story whose tragedy is only compounded by the fact that it has been romanticized to fit a colonialist narrative.

[clip: P2:JtaNW “Undertaker:We'll rue this day you wait and see William Shakespeare: What is "to be or not to be"? (Writes it down)]

Shakespeare had been dead for two months before Pocahontas was taken to Plymouth but that’s probably the least heinous historical inaccuracy in Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World.

PragerU is not a university, gives no degrees, and has no academic credibility - or at least it didn’t until 2023 when Florida became the first state to recognize PragerU as an official education vendor, in the words of a press release that they themselves put out. New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Montana, Arizona and Louisiana all followed suit. The company is dedicated to defending Western Civilization from The Left. In PragerU’s 2024 annual report they called themselves “the Antidote” to what it called “the Poison” of things like the ABC’s of Activism, the Sesame Street special about police brutality, and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 project, all of which grapple with America’s history of institutional racism. To PragerU these things are poison. 

[ad for PragerU kids: “did you know America is RACIST?!?” (Shock on the faces of parents)]

Dennis Prager really really does not want anyone to think that America is racist. He also wants people to think that there is something called The Left that wants to destroy something called Western Civilization - and this is its surest sign:

[clip: the English department at the university of Pennsylvania replaced the portrait of the greatest English-language writer who ever lived William Shakespeare, with a picture of a black lesbian poet. Why? Because he was a white European male. the animated professor knee drops the picture of Shakespeare

Caption: leftist professors have replaced the pursuit of excellence with the pursuit of diversity]

WOW that sure is a Great Theory PragerU has about a Replacement!

I think everyone who knows a bit about PragerU knows this video - it’s the same one where Dennis Prager says “urine and feces”.

[clip: yes! Urine and feces!]

A classic. PragerU is best known for its series of talking head videos where various right wing characters monologue over a dead blue screen and hastily assembled source-free graphics with titles like “Who Killed The Liberal Arts” with the answer always being “The Left, Whomst Is Bad”

[clip: Who Killed the Liberal Arts? Heather Mac Donald: “Here’s a tragedy, in its way, on the level of King Lear or Hamlet.]

We'll come back to this video. 

PragerU is a key player in the American right wing political ecosystem that gave rise to MAGA and the corresponding systematic eradication of everything alien to it. Every single contributor to PragerU is laser-focused on ensuring that Americans remain the cruelest, most ignorant bootlicking bullies on planet Earth.

So what does it mean that the works of William Shakespeare are taught at Prager University?

[clip: The Book Club: Hamlet by William Shakespeare with Andrew Klavan | The Book Club Dumb jazz intro

KN”The greatest play ever written: Hamlet by good old Billy Shakespeare” Kl: Billy Big Boy]

This video about Hamlet by Billy Big Boy is hosted by Michael Knowles: failed actor and YouTuber - but I repeat myself. 

Michael Knowles’ acting credits include a role in the joyless hate crime Lady Ballers, and his publishing credits include the self-published book “Reasons to Vote for Democrats”. Its 266 blank pages showcase Knowles’ talent for research and prose excellently. Knowles has hosted multiple PragerU videos as well as this book club series where he sits down with other PragerU contributors to talk about various books and how they can be applied to a conservative worldview. For Hamlet, he sat down with Andrew Klavan - a writer of thriller novels, one of which was turned into a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. He is also in Lady Ballers. These two adult human men who were both in Lady Ballers spend twenty two minutes discussing The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

[clip: KL“Pinnacle of human imagination: Newton’s laws, the founding of America, Plato, Aristotle, Hamlet, these are things that you look at and think like Wow this is what a human being can do”]

Andrew Klavan wants you to know that Hamlet is good. Here’s the reason why he thinks it’s good:

[clip: KL“The reason it’s a great play is because it’s written at the moment the Modern World appears…”]

Klavan isn’t wrong. Shakespeare was writing at the start of the modern era. But Klavan has an interesting idea of what the Modern World means.

[clip: KL“Shakespeare anticipates every single philosophical and emotional problem that is going to grow up out of the great division that causes modernity, which is the Reformation]

Klavan’s reading of Hamlet is theological, and he has some good points - the theology of Hamlet is definitely fertile ground for interpretation. Klavan talks about how Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg, one of the major centers of Protestant thought, and he is faced with the ghost of his father who appears to be in Purgatory, an idea explicitly rejected by Protestantism.

[clip: Klavan the fact that it starts with a ghost despite no purgatory in Protestantism “in spite of the fact that people saw ghosts, despite the fact that there’s a ghost in the Bible”]

Klavan just said ghosts must be real because there’s a ghost in the Bible. I’m gonna let the comment section fight that one out. 

Klavan’s primary point is that Hamlet represents the birth of the modern world. This is his idea of the modern world:

[clip: Kl: “the things that he says in his madness, which we aren’t sure if they’re madness or not, are things that are being said today all the time. When you think about the postmodernists, when you think about the idea that language does not convey meaning: and you say to Hamlet “what are you reading?” And in his madness he says I’m reading “words words words” they have no meaning anymore]

I’m fighting every instinct I have to not make my entire response an hour of me making the world’s largest jerkoff motion.

[clip: When you think about relativism: the idea that there is “nothing that is good or bad but thinking makes it so” that line comes from Hamlet - Shakespeare knows that once the moral certainty of Catholicism has shattered there is no way anymore to decide what the moral universe is made of it’s all relative.]

Okay… yes, but more importantly, no. 

Sure, Shakespeare was Christian and wrote for a hegemonically Christian audience - one couldn’t be openly anti-religion, what with Elizabeth and James after her being Supreme Governor of the Church of England. But it’s myopic to suggest that the play is about the end of “moral certainty” created by the Protestant reformation and the end of the centrality of the Catholic Church, especially when the monarchy was Protestant - they can and did imprison playwrights for sedition and heresy! But that tension between Catholic and Protestant was real! The audience of Hamlet definitely knew that tension, had lived through that tension, and probably would’ve found that tension dramatically interesting. The original audience might’ve shared Hamlet’s uncertainty and empathized with him. 

The interpretation by Klavan and Knowles is borne from very recent conservative politics: the enemy is always the people asking questions and creating “moral uncertainty”.

[clip: Klavan goes into What A Piece of Work is Man]

Klavan is quoting Hamlet’s talk with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - it’s also one of my favorite passages 

“I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory,”

It’s a beautiful, sad speech. And it can take a lot out of you to even say it. I’ll get real: I have struggled with depression for my entire life. Literally my entire life. I’ve had people who knew me back when I couldn’t have been more than six tell me they remembered me saying things about feeling tired all of the time, and not really enjoying anything, maybe my toys, but nothing else. No more than six. Depression has been constant and often impervious to outside forces. And Shakespeare, writing Hamlet, captured what that feels like in this speech. Depression means consciously understanding that there is good in the world, but being unable to feel it. Hamlet, in his depression, knows that the earth is a “goodly frame” but only seems “a sterile promontory.” 

“this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”

I know that the sky is blue and the stars shine, but I cannot feel that they are beautiful. And just as Hamlet knows the heavens are beautiful but cannot feel their beauty, he knows humanity is beautiful, but cannot feel its beauty.

“What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither”

To know that man is beautiful, that woman is beautiful, that all humanity is beautiful, but that conscious understanding means nothing because he can’t feel it. It’s a speech of profound empathy towards someone in the darkest throes of an overwhelming sadness.

I cannot fathom how broken my soul would have to be to hear that speech and think, “And THAT is why transgender people should be eradicated from public life!” Like Michael Knowles does!

[clip: Michael Knowles at CPAC calling for the eradication of trans quote ideology unquote]

Reducing a demographic of people to a belief system and calling for their quote eradication unquote - I don’t want to ignore the fact that Michael Knowles is a genocidal maniac. And yes, this is relevant: transphobia is a key part of Knowles and Klavan’s reading of Hamlet

Kl:” the very sense of ourselves, I mean the issues that we deal with today in politics, ‘can a man become a woman can a woman do things that a man can do is a person a real thing or can you change who you are can you say suddenly 

Klavan and Knowles teach Hamlet as a lesson in what goes wrong when traditional morals are abandoned. For them, the existence of transgender people and the fact that women are humans are signs that morality is being made meaningless.

[clip: all of that is contained in the play and all those questions are in the play because once that connection between being and seeming between internal world and external world once that breaks down even in imagination everything is broken down and you have no place to put your feet and that’s why that is why the big division in human life and certainly in Western life is Jesus saying “I am the truth” and Pilate saying “what is truth”]

The PragerU reading of Hamlet is that Hamlet needs Jesus.

KL: “And that’s the state we find ourselves in today: what is reality and how much of what reality is is within us? And you have theories now that say well everything we think is a fiction: human rights is a fiction, money it’s a fiction, and people like me say “no it’s not a fiction it’s a description of something that exists within the human soul, and Hamlet no longer knows whether things exist within his soul or whether he’s completely living in a delusion, and that’s the modern world.”

Again the theme of The Left is destroying everything by questioning everything. No surprise that it’s a deeply conservative reading of Hamlet where the problem is modernity.

[clip: KN: “and that IS the modern world!”

Kn: “it can be read as a rewrite of Psalm 8]

Psalm 8, 3-4:

3 

When I consider your heavens,

    the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

    which you have set in place,

4 

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

    human beings that you care for them?[c]

So, um, ehhh?

The connection between the Psalm and Hamlet’s speech is tenuous at best - and it suggests that Shakespeare was working entirely within a holistic religious system without question or subversion. But of course as Klavan and Knowles recognize, even Christianity wasn’t a holistic system at the time - sectarian wars between Catholic and Protestant raged constantly, and theater wasn’t considered something Christian, particularly by the Puritans.

The Puritans, England’s home-grown sect of religious fanatics who felt the creation of the Church of England didn’t go far enough, hated theater as a concept - they even banned it altogether once they gained enough political power! There were Puritan tirades against the institution of the theater published before, during, and after Shakespeare’s lifetime with titles like “The School of Abuse, Containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, &c. (Stephen Gosson, 1579) Plays Confuted in Five Actions (Gosson, 1582) Spiritus est vicarius Christi in terra. A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds with other idle pastimes [et]c. commonly vsed on the Sabboth day, are reproued by the authoritie of the word of God and auntient writers. Made dialoguewise by Iohn Northbrooke minister and preacher of the word of God (John Northbrooke 1579) A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters the one whereof was sounded by a reuerend byshop dead long since; the other by a worshipful and zealous gentleman now aliue: one showing the filthines of plaies in times past; the other the abhomination of theaters in the time present: both expresly prouing that that common-weale is nigh vnto the cursse of God, wherein either plaiers be made of, or theaters maintained. Set forth by Anglo-phile Eutheo. (1580s)

Even the TITLES are exhausting! This was all because the English theater at the time was widely popular among all classes, and therefore was considered by Puritans to be a satanic, anti-church force. Shakespeare was not writing religious sermons, he was writing popular entertainment! His plays have murder and sexual assault and torture and references to extramarital sex and oral sex and anal sex and sex work - even urine and feces!

[clip: Dennis Prager - Yes! Urine and feces!]

Shakespeare was not cozy with the Church, and any good critique of his work should acknowledge the tension he existed in as popular entertainment in an increasingly theocratic society. 

You can see it in Kenneth Branagh’s, “All Is True”. Branagh, as Shakespeare, has this exchange with his son-in-law John Hall who, historically, was a committed Puritan.

[clip: John Hall : I joy to see you dig, sir. At last, given up on your plays to distract the mob from our Lord.
William Shakespeare : Does the lark song distract you from your God, John?
John Hall : Of course not. It is evidence of God.
William Shakespeare : Ah. Well, then, perhaps for some, I was the lark.]

Shakespeare’s relationship with Christianity is, like all things, complicated. Morally uncertain, one might even say. But for Knowles and Klavan, Shakespeare’s faith is very certain.

[clip: KL: “again and again there are biblical references”

KL: “Hamlet has been thrown back to the moment when Jesus stands before Pilate and Jesus says “I am the truth, I speak the truth and all who love the truth listen to my voice” and Pilate says “what is truth”]

How they jump from Hamlet to the Gospel of John is fascinating. Fitting with their thesis that Hamlet is about the madness that comes when the moral center is gone, they turn Hamlet into Pontius Pilate, looking Jesus in the eye and saying to Jesus, who has declared himself to be the Truth, “Well, what is truth?”

[clip: and suddenly in the Catholic world in the world of Christendom, we believe “o Jesus is the truth” but once you remove that certainty you’re right back with Pontius Pilate saying “what is truth?” And that’s the question of the play “what is true? How do I know what reality is?”]

Comparing Hamlet to Pontius Pilate is something that most people would call “a stretch.” However, there are direct allusions to the Bible in Shakespeare! But they aren’t exactly reverent ones. 

Take this passage from First Corinthians 2:9, text taken from the 1599 Geneva Bible: St Paul writes of the glory of the kingdom of God:

“But as it is written, The things which eye hath not seen, neither ear hath heard, neither came into man’s heart, are, which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the character Bottom the weaver wakes up from a night of sleeping with the Queen of the Fairies while being a donkey from the neck up, and says:

“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream

was.”

It’s a joke. It’s a joke about a guy trying to quote scripture and getting it wrong. So Shakespeare definitely knew the Bible - and with a joke like this he definitely knew the Bible well enough to mess with it! In Stephen Greenblatt’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-Nominated Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, he writes of this joke: 

“This is the joke of a decisively secular dramatist, a writer who deftly turned the dream of the sacred into popular entertainment. … The joke reaches out a long way—to the solemnities of the pulpit, to the plays that the professional playing companies took to the provinces when Shakespeare was a boy, to the amateur actors who performed cruder versions of these plays, and perhaps to the young, awkward Shakespeare himself, filled with visions his tongue could not conceive and eager to play all the parts.”

I bring up Stephen Greenblatt for a reason here: Greenblatt is a critic whose work since the 1980s has been to take Shakespeare and all works of art away from ideas of “universal truths” and back into the distinct sociopolitical contexts in which they were created - a movement called New Historicism.

You know how there’s a certain kind of cultural critic who complains constantly about how modern media is enmeshed with current politics and beholden to modern trends which make them Bad, while older media is made up of classics that have stood the test of time because they speak to universal truths? The New Historicists simply say “what if those classics were also enmeshed with then-current politics and beholden to then-current trends and we have simply ignored and forgotten what those politics and trends were?” That’s New Historicism: reconsidering all works of art as unique products of their time and place; inviting us to study the uniqueness of the times and places in which they were made.

Greenblatt's approach was, and still is, controversial precisely because it goes against the reverence for Shakespeare - because it goes against the prevailing attitude that Shakespeare was not subject to historical forces but spoke to something eternal in the human soul. New Historicism didn’t treat Shakespeare like a religious text: it didn’t treat him like secular scripture. It didn’t treat him the same way that Knowles and Klavan treat him.

[clip: KL“If you don’t know Hamlet, if you haven’t been introduced to Hamlet, in some sense you don’t know yourself. If you don’t know The King James Bible and Hamlet and some of Shakespeare, you really don’t know where we come from and who we are.]

You heard the man: read Shakespeare and the Bible, nothing else.

[clip: Arrested Development “Maggie: It’s like the ten commandments saying, you know. “Be true to thine own self, and to thine own self..”

Michael: “… be true.” Yeah, number seven.]

You see, there’s always been a huge disconnect between the people who are most likely to praise Shakespeare and those who are most likely to recite Shakespeare. The people praising him are, like the PragerU posse, conservative killjoys who will sit in reverence of any poet as long as they’re several centuries dead - while the people who recite Shakespeare are emotionally unstable polyamorous disaster bisexuals, or, as they are more commonly known, “actors.”

That disconnect causes one of the biggest problems with Knowles and Klavan’s reading: not treating Hamlet as what it is, a play.

[clip KL: “Hamlet is frustrated by times when times when people are pretending that something is important but it’s not”]

A recurring theme of their reading is how morality is untethered because everything in the play is performative. Really think about that word in this context: “performative.”

[clip: KL: “this is one of Shakespeare’s obsessions: the divisions between being and seeming - what you see and what you really are - ]

You know, there are certain people in the world who work entirely within the division between being and seeming. It’s called “acting.”

[clip: KL:and he works it out even further in the question of race in Othello” !!! ]

Oh put a pin in that. Put a massive, pointy pin in that.

[clip: KL: “this question of something after death, right? This is why to be or not to be, the famous speech where he says the fear of something after death and conscience makes cowards of us all, that we’re operating now in this field of absolute unknowing. And when you have absolute unknowing when you have no thesis let alone faith but you have no theory of what is real you’re completely lost”]

They’re onto something, sure, but I disagree with their conclusion. Hamlet is definitely about the artificiality of the world and the complicated nature of performance and performativity, sure. But perhaps it’s because Hamlet is, itself, a performance of a play? And it centers around a performance of a play in the play itself! 

They acknowledge the play within a play, sure: Klavan brings up the players who stage Hecuba and Priam and he summarizes the O what a rogue and peasant slave am I soliloquy:

[clip: Knowles and Klavan talk about the scene where Hamlet speaks about how the actors he just watched have less to feel than him, and yet can express it so much more]

Right after Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is a man” speech his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern introduce him to a troupe of traveling players who perform a scene from Greek mythology for him - Hecuba, Queen of Troy mourning the death of King Priam - giving Hamlet the idea of staging his own father’s murder then watching Claudius’ reaction to judge his guilt. As he reaches the conclusion that The Play’s the Thing, Hamlet has a long monologue about the depths of his feelings and how the actors around him seems to express their feelings more genuinely than him, a person with a lot of genuine feelings that require action. 

[clip: any version of Hamlet: “Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his own conceit

That from her working all his visage wann'd,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!

For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

That he should weep for her? What would he do,

Had he the motive and the cue for passion

That I have?”]

[clip: KN: “this question of seeming and being of performance of reality is I think the central question of the play”]

Of course when Hamlet says this, he is saying it while also being a role played by an actor in a play. He is commenting on his own status as a fictional character who is being performed just as he’s about to stage a play within a play, performing for performers to uncover a murderer who is themselves performing. It is not a didactic statement about the lack of a moral center, it is metatheatre. 

Shakespeare didn’t come up with metatheatre: Hamlet itself was part of an already-popular genre of theatre called a revenge tragedy; and arguably the first true Elizabethan revenge tragedy - Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy - ends with a play-within-a-play where the targets of protagonist Hieronimo’s revenge are stabbed with real daggers! Which are, of course, fake daggers stabbing actors who will not really die but instead get up and bow at the end - but written the way it is must’ve been thrilling as an audience already familiar with the tropes and practices of the staged tragedy. The audience knew that they were watching a performance, and playwrights knew how to bend expectations of that performance.

[clip: Knowles says of To Be Or Not To Be “that isn’t a performance he doesn’t put that on to trick people he is working out to himself whether it is better to be alive or to be dead]

BUT, Hamlet is nonetheless performing! Not only for us - as he gives that speech he is being watched by Polonius and Claudius. There’s dramatic tension there - layers of performativity! Layers which they ignore to push the thesis that modernity corrupts.

You can see the same troublesome conclusion reached in Knowles’ book club video on King Lear, which I won’t spend as much time on. 

[clip: Knowles introduces Douglas Murray, “author of The Madness of Crowds, the Strange Death of Europe - these are books, Douglas, that paint, I’m sorry to say, a bleak political picture and I felt the only book that paints a bleaker political picture would be King Lear by William Shakespeare” DM: “It’s true: King Lear makes my work look like comedy.” Knowles laughs]

The full titles of those books are “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity” which is about why caring about the oppression of the LGBT community, racial minorities, and women is bad, and “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam” which is about how Muslim immigrants are destroying European identity by existing - thus making him another genocidal maniac. Their discussion on Lear explores similar territory to the Hamlet discussion, with Lear being taught as the story of a kingdom where morality is topsy turvy and fools are wiser than kings and good people are shunned while bad people thrive. They never really get into how Lear is unfit to lead and his vain demands for flattery, his unreasonable demands that Goneril host his army, his vicious curses against her when those demands aren’t met, his constant abuses of power leads to the undoing of the entire kingdom - it’s just yet another reading where the enemy is disruption of moral certainty. Another hierarchical interpretation.

However: Lear, like Hamlet, can also be seen as metatheatrical - the play begins with a political performance. Lear demands that his daughters declare their love for him and shuns the daughter who doesn’t flatter him, that is, he shuns the daughter who fails to perform her love correctly. In the play’s final lines Albany says “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Again, a play about performance - about performativity - which is being performed.

Forgive me for the bro-iest analogy I’ll ever write, but William Shakespeare wrote plays in the same way that Christopher Nolan directs movies. Nolan movies are constantly playing with time and memory and the fluidity and malleability of both. Time and memory are also essential to movies as a medium - captured time, replayable memory, these are the things that movies are made of. Just like how Shakespeare plays are done by performing, playing, pretending to be a character while being an actor: these are performances ABOUT the nature of performance!

[clip: Prager on Newsmax “…So for the Left to start all of a sudden speaking about “truth” is like uh… is like illiterates talking to you about Shakespeare.]

Prager says that The Left talking about Truth is like “an illiterate talking about Shakespeare” but, hey— hot take— this might be controversial, but one can be illiterate and enjoy Shakespeare! One can be unable to understand the alphabet and enjoy Shakespeare. You do not need to read to enjoy Shakespeare, because he wrote plays. Plays are performed live by actors, who speak the words for an audience. 

You think everyone in Shakespeare’s audience was able to read? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theseus says that he will “hear” a play - just as the audience is hearing it! The Elizabethan audience came to hear poetry, not read it! Hear some poetry at the Globe, then waste the rest of the night in South London guzzling small beer, giving sex workers a payday and watching tortured dogs fight a bear to the death! It was called bear-baiting and it was just as if not more popular than Shakespeare plays at their peak! 

These plays were done in the disreputable part of town in theaters and theater was, and very much still is, a disreputable institution. Ask me, a former “theatre kid” - a term which still has negative connotations.

[clip: Knowles points out that Shakespeare was an actor and cites Hamlet’s advice to actors

Kl: “and the advice is don’t seem to be something, be something”]

It’s telling that for neither of Knowles videos on Shakespeare, he didn’t ask an actor for their takes. Which is odd - Knowles trained as an actor at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. He must know actors, he must’ve worked with actors, but he chose to speak with writers.

Of course Knowles is an American and America has a unique relationship with Shakespeare. Because America was a series of settler colonies founded by capitalists and  - more relevantly - Puritans who hated theater as a concept, early Americans treated Shakespeare not as theater but as literature. Many, including these guys, still do. They treat Shakespeare not as theater to be staged and watched and be thrilled by in public spaces, but as something to be studied and interpreted to reach moral conclusions in private ones. Someone whose works shouldn’t be taught in a university Theatre department, but an English department.

[clip: Heather Mac Donald:“Here’s a tragedy, in its way, on the level of King Lear or Hamlet.]

This is one of PragerU’s classic talking- head -in- dull- blue- space videos. Shakespeare’s face, vandalized, is in the thumbnail, and it is entitled “Who Killed The Liberal Arts?”

[clip: To get a bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the most prestigious colleges in America, you must take courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability or Sexuality Studies; in Imperial Transnational or Post-Colonial Studies; and in Critical Theory. But you are not required to take a single course in Shakespeare.]

The host of this video is Heather Mac Donald, political commenter, fellow of the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and the author of books including The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe., The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture., and When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. This is the person PragerU asked to host a video about why English departments should require courses on Shakespeare.

[clip: In other words the UCLA English faculty is now officially indifferent as to whether an English major has ever read a word of the greatest writer of the English language, but is determined to expose students, according to the course catalogue, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”]

The primary source for this video is a 2007 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni or ACTA entitled “The Vanishing Shakespeare.” ACTA’s stated mission is to “support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.” In practice this means speaking out against universities that disinvite conservative speakers, fighting the removal of Reserve Officer’s Training Corps programs from campuses, and giving out the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education to people who’ve “made an extraordinary contribution to the advancement of liberal arts education, core curricula, and the teaching of Western civilization and American history.” 

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni was also one of eighty organizations on the advisory board for Project 2025. Because of course they were.

But most importantly ACTA acts-a as a watchdog for universities who fail to meet their standards for academic integrity. “The Vanishing Shakespeare” is an example. The report surveyed 70 top universities and colleges and found that only 15 of them required a course in the literature of William Shakespeare in order to graduate with a degree in English. The report complained of “the advance of the not-so-great” as it reduced all 70 universities the a Boolean value of a bold sentence where either Shakespeare is required or Shakespeare is not required. The author of the report writes, 

“As this report makes clear, English majors across the country can graduate today without reading Shakespeare in depth. Employers - especially newspapers, publishers, schools, and others who hire English majors - should be deeply concerned. So should parents, alumni, trustees, and interested citizens.

If reading Shakespeare is not central to a liberal education, what is? But for English majors to miss out is far worse. As we said before: a degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud.”

Okay, surely an English major should be able to recognize hyperbole and deconstruct a bad analogy. Shakespeare is to English is not as Anatomy is to Medicine. The anatomy of English is its grammar, its vocabulary, the ways that words are arranged to communicate through it. If English is medicine, William Shakespeare is not anatomy: William Shakespeare was a patient. Just like Geoffrey Chaucer before him was a patient. Just like Jane Austen after him was a patient. Just as I am a patient. And if you understand the language that I am speaking, that is, if you speak English, then you are also a patient. ACTA is wrong. If they taught Medicine the same way they want to teach English, every doctor would only know how to treat one patient. 

[clip: Mac Donald says not teaching Shakespeare is narcissism]

PragerU videos keep coming back to the idea of “narcissism”. It’s one of Dennis Prager’s favorite insults. He thinks narcissism is something that everyone is born as, and must be trained to be overcome. Famously, Dennis Prager considers babies to be narcissists:

[clip: I want mommy, I want milk… that’s not goodness, that’s narcissism]

Dennis Prager thinks it’s narcissistic to feel lonely and hungry. Do not trust a PragerU video that uses the word “narcissism”.

[clip: Heather Mac Donald: “Lost in this political posturing is the only true justification for the humanities — to provide knowledge… knowledge leading, one hopes, to the most important acquisition of all: wisdom. ]

Here she implies that wisdom cannot be found by studying gender, race, disability, sexuality, empire or the theory of criticism.

[clip: The American founders drew on an astonishingly wide range of historical and philosophical sources and on a healthy skepticism about human nature to craft the most stable and free republic in world history.]

Implying that none of the sources floating behind the founders pictures have anything to do with gender, race, disability, sexuality, empire or the theory of criticism.

[clip: Ignorance of those sources, which led to the West’s rule of law and its unparalleled prosperity, puts these unique and monumental achievements at risk. But humanistic learning is above all and end in itself.]

Here she argues that great works of art like the ones made by Shakespeare “led to the West’s rule of law and unparalleled prosperity.” Ay, there’s the rub. They tell us we must venerate Shakespeare because he is of The West. 

[clip: It is simply better to escape one’s narrow, self-centered mind and to live inside the prose of George Eliot, the music of Bach, or the art of van Dyck than never to have done so.]

Again, accusations of narcissism. It is not “narcissistic” to have courses in gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, imperialism, colonialism, critical theory. These are things that everyone knows, aspects of humanity that everyone moves through. Everyone including Eliot, Bach, and Van Dyck. They are aspects of Shakespeare’s works as well. Narcissism, named for the character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who was cursed to fall in love with his own reflection and waste away on a love unrequited, is the love of oneself to the point of ignorance of all else. It is the opposite of narcissism to ask students to question the subjective experience of art. It is asking Narcissus to realize he is staring at his own reflection and splash the water a little bit. What PragerU does with its accusations of narcissism is to put critics on the back foot by suggesting that close, individual readings which contextualize the self - that is You, The Reader - relationship to the artwork are morally wrong. In simpler terms, Prager is saying “Fuck you. Yes, fuck You, specifically.”

[clip: Ultimately, it is the loving duty we owe those writers, artists, and thinkers whose works made our world possible. The academic narcissist, oblivious to beauty and nobility, knows none of this. That’s bad enough, but to deny such glorious knowledge to students? That’s a tragedy on a Shakespearean scale.”]

What a sentence to write. “DENY” - what a verb to use! But Shakespeare isn’t being denied. Access to courses on Shakespeare is NOT denied. All that bluster about the importance of the deep connection The Founding Fathers had to Western Civilization and how important it is to read Eliot, hear Bach, see van Dyck, and it all springs from this obvious lie that Shakespeare is “denied” to students. But Shakespeare Is Not Denied To Students at UCLA! A brief glimpse at UCLA’s 2024-2025 course catalog shows eight (8) courses just in Shakespeare, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in both the English and Theater departments, and with variations in focus on early plays, later plays, and special topics all being offered to students. For those of you who haven’t majored in English, the word “offered” is the opposite of the word “denied.”

[clip: The academic narcissist, oblivious to beauty and nobility, knows none of this.]

As if beauty and nobility could only be found in a certain subset of art by a certain subset of people. People to whom we “owe” a “loving duty” whose “works made our world possible” while spurning those people who might question the world made by these works. But no: it is a “loving duty that we owe” to Shakespeare and the other three European white people she named.

The exact same whine in this animation of a portrait of Shakespeare being tossed aside and replaced with some filthy undeserving nonShakespeare.

There’s a pattern that needs to be called out whenever Prager types cry censorship. They’re clearly fine with calling for the quote eradication unquote of anything containing queerness or non whiteness but when they do cry censorship, the thing supposedly being censored isn’t censored, it’s only being decentralized. ACTA and the PragerU video citing it aren’t complaining that Shakespeare isn’t being taught: they are complaining that Shakespeare is not required to be taught. 

PragerU’s take on Shakespeare is not new. It is extremely orthodox. For them Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard - a singular fountain of insight into the human experience who stands unequaled in the history of English as a written language. To the point where the idea of Shakespeare is synonymous with the idea of “good art”. 

This is not a new idea, of course. The reason Shakespeare is quoted by Everyone 

[clip: The Magic Christian “To be…” “I’ve seen it.” “…or not to be.” “Shakespeare, right?”]

Everyone

[clip: MST3K on Hamlet “To be or not to be”: the verbal equivalent of “Da-Da-Da-DUM!]

Everyone

[clip: The Royal Shakespeare Company: supercut of Paapa Essiedu, Tim Minchin, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Rory Kinnear, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench in that one sketch quoting it over and over again, ending with the literal goddamn King of England saying it]

is because quoting him creates an intextual link that begs comparison - asking the audience to consider this text in the context of a universally recognized shorthand for “good writing.” 

[clip: Me From Over A Decade Ago - “We have made the words of Shakespeare secular scripture]

And yes, I have been guilty of this. I’ve ended a video with a long speech about how important Shakespeare is because of how influential he is. I haven’t done the hard work of undoing the lazy platitudes that have been drilled into me from birth about the cult of The Bard. Or, as it’s known, “Bardolatry.”

Bardolatry has a long history. From David Garrick’s bicentennial celebration where he gave him the name The Bard of All Bards, through Samuel Johnson whose critical annotations on Shakespeare led him to be the most cited author in Samuel Johnson’s other most famous work: the first English Dictionary, through Thomas Carlyle whose Great Man Theory of history placed Shakespeare in the same canon as Napoleon, Cromwell, Martin Luther, the Prophet Mohammed and the Norse god Odin! The most influential Bardolater of the 21st century might be the late Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University Harold Bloom, whose 1998 work of literary criticism, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, argued for the veneration of Shakespeare as the creator of the modern world. He begins it: “The answer to the question ‘Why Shakespeare?’ Must be, ‘Who else is there?’”

Well, lots of other people. Some would say billions. 

Bloom wrote The Invention of the Human after the rise of New Historicism, and in response to it. Throughout his career he blasted the New Historicists - along with other schools of criticism including marxists, feminists, African-American studies, and post-structuralists like Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault - for supposedly denigrating aesthetic value for a political agenda, acting as, in his words, a “School of Resentment.” Dennis Prager agrees:

[clip: leftist professors have replaced the pursuit of excellence with the pursuit of diversity]

For the Bardolater, Shakespeare simply IS excellent, and to say otherwise is merely “resent.” Even the Shakespeare fandom has toxic fans.

And it should be noted that the writer who coined the term “Bardolatry” didn’t do so out of resentment, but out of disdain. George Bernard Shaw was being an absolutely genuine hater when he wrote the long and deeply researched preface to “Three Plays for Puritans”. His points of contention lay in the way Shakespeare had been staged with cut scenes and changed lines. 

“It is a significant fact that the mutilators of Shakespeare, who never could be persuaded that Shakespeare knew his business better than they, have ever been the most fanatical of his worshippers.”

In modern terms, Shaw was complaining that Canon Shakespeare had been overtaken by Fanon Shakespeare.

“It was the age of gross ignorance and incapacity of his works that produced the indiscriminate eulogies the which we are familiar. It was the revival of genuine criticism of those works that coincided with the movement for giving genuine instead of spurious and silly representations of his plays. So much for Bardolatry!” 

And like Shaw, we should be deeply critical of people who would use Shakespeare’s name to reshape society while simultaneously reshaping Shakespeare.

Shaw isn’t a perfect writer either; he had plenty of horrible views. Still, he was right to question the cult of the Bard - and right to question how far veneration of Shakespeare had outgrown the works themselves to the point of existing not as works of poetry and prose, but as tools of cultural policing and signifiers of class. Fitting, then, that George Bernard Shaw’s most famous characters are a working class English girl and the supercilious imperialist who mercilessly manipulates her into a narrow idea of what an English speaker should be.

[clip: My Fair Lady “A woman who utters such disgusting, depressing noises has no right to be anywhere, no right to live. … Your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible. Don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.]

The proper response to this kind of attitude is, of course, NYAAAAOW!

[clip: Eliza: “NYAAAAOW!]

The Bardolatrous answer to everything is singular and repetitious: He’s Just That Good. The cry called out over centuries: He Is Just That Good. And yeah, he’s good. And we should keep questioning just how good. The anti-Bardolaters have a point - we should be critical of Shakespeare, as we should be critical of all writers. Otherwise we just make ourselves eternal children expected to fawn over authors rather than actually understand them.

[clip: Leo and Layla “what’s your secret Mr Shakespeare? How come your work doesn’t age?]

Which brings us to PragerU’s kid-focused content. 

This is Leo and Layla: a series of attempted animations where two personality-free children use a time machine to meet historical figures. In this episode they grumble about having to attend a Shakespeare festival and thus use their wristDelorean to travel back to meet the man himself: William Shakespeare, stuck to one spot and always facing the same direction.

[what light through yonder time portal breaks?]

Shakespeare is totally chill about meeting time travelers because he’s done it before.

[clip: Doctor Who: “The Shakespeare Code” SHAKESPEARE: You mean travel on through time and space. THE DOCTOR: You what? SHAKESPEARE: You're from another world, like the Carrionites, and Martha's from the future. Not hard to work out. THE DOCTOR: That is incredible. You are incredible!]

Leo and Layla throw some basic questions at him and he responds in that cartoonish fashion that he’s usually written in - as constantly swooning over the concept of art and beauty. He responds to their questions with some very banal answers to why he’s considered a great writer.

[Clip: “oh how I love to PLAY with the English language!” … “Most people simply use language as a basic tool of communication but oh what a waste - for me language is a paintbrush to the canvas of life! I like to choose my words carefully and order them strategically to amplify humor, suspense, beauty, et cetera et cetera!”]

After Effects Shakespeare is describing what most people would call “writing.”

[clip: and I also love introducing new phrases or groups of words that cleverly describe a situation - “the world is your oyster” / “vanish into thin air” / “fight fire with fire”]

This claim is common. The claim that Shakespeare is the origin of so many household words is common. Even the phrase “household words” gets attributed to him (Henry V, Act IV, Scene 3, the Crispin’s Day speech). 

[clip: Henry V “then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words”]

I’ve made a running gag out of how many times his phrases show up randomly in popular culture. BUT the solid truth is that most of the time Shakespeare is simply the earliest citation most people use for these phrases. The first time these words or phrases were used probably happened orally in everyday conversation before being fit with other phrases into the verses written down. Most language is spoken, not written. Assuming this is untrue feeds into the idea that Shakespeare’s genius was singular and detached from the world in which he lived. I’m going to focus on this because venerating Shakespeare as the origin for certain phrases is a key part of PragerU’s lesson plan. 

And yes, there is a lesson plan.This video is designed to be watched in a class and PragerU helpfully provides a lesson plan, which starts as follows:

“THE PRAGERU WORKSHEET

Lesson Plan (45 minutes)

Warm-Up: (10 minutes)

1. Begin by explaining to the class that you will read several phrases aloud. Instruct students to raise their hands if they have ever heard them before:

•  The world is your oyster.

• ○ Vanish into thin air.

• ○ Fight fire with fire.

• ○ Love is blind.

• ○ Going on a wild goose chase.

• ○ All that glitters is not gold.

• ○ Break the ice.

2. Ask students if they know where the phrases originated.

3. Explain that all the above phrases, and many more, can be attributed to a famous poet and playwright named William Shakespeare. 

Ya know I’m starting to realize why there are so many videos on YouTube debunking PragerU videos? Because debunking them is so, so damn easy! Let’s go through the list here!

[clip: “The world is your oyster” it means you have the opportunity and ability to achieve anything]

This does indeed come from Shakespeare. The Merry Wives of Windsor Act II, Scene 2 opens Falstaff and his swaggering yet cowardly crony Pistol in the middle of an argument:

[clip: Falstaff. I will not lend thee a penny.

Pistol. Why, then the world's mine oyster.
Which I with sword will open.]

Pistol has asked Falstaff for money and when Falstaff refuses he blusters and basically says that he can get money wherever he wants. The usual usage of the phrase is that one has the opportunity to achieve anything. Put it back in its original context and it’s a pathetic guy violently posturing, threatening to cut the world open and shuck it like an oyster. Next phrase:

[clip: “Vanish into thin air” “ooh we say that all the time!]

From The Tempest: Act IV, Scene 1. There’s just been a song and dance performed by spirits conjured by Prospero’s magic. Prospero disperses them and says:

[clip: Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:]

Melted into thin air! Not vanish, melted. Clearly the phrase “into thin air” caught on while “melted” didn’t. The phrase changed over time - attributing the full phrase to Shakespeare is only partially accurate.

[clip: “Fight fire with fire” you came up with that? I did!]

No. Shakespeare did not ever write “fight fire with fire.” Though he came close in King John. Nobody’s favorite play, King John. 

In Act V Scene 1, John is surrounded by enemies and his illegitimate nephew Phillip tells him:

[clip: Phillip the Bastard: Let not the world see fear and sad distrust

Govern the motion of a kingly eye:

Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;

Threaten the threatener and outface the brow

Of bragging horror:]

“Be fire with fire” as you might have noticed, is different from “fight fire with fire.” Again, the structure of the modern phrase is there, but the wording is different in the original. The phrase, like everything else in the world, changed over the intervening 400 years.

The worksheet for Leo and Layla’s meeting with Shakespeare lists more phrases. Next is:

“Love is blind”

[clip: The Room “You know what they say, love is blind.”]

In The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 6, Jessica starts to dress as a man for plot reasons, and says this:

[clip: Jessica.

I am glad 'tis night, you do not look on me,

For I am much ashamed of my exchange:

But love is blind and lovers cannot see

The pretty follies that themselves commit;

For if they could, Cupid himself would blush

To see me thus transformed to a boy.]

So yes Shakespeare wrote “love is blind” but it’s in the context of a woman feeling embarrassed adopting a gender expression that makes her uncomfortable. Moreover, Shakespeare didn’t come up with the idea of love being blind! Listen to this line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

[clip: Helena: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;

And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind]

Shakespeare is alluding to the artistic practice of painting Cupid wearing a blindfold, which had been a motif in Italian Renaissance art for over a century when Shakespeare wrote Merchant and Midsummer in the mid 1590s. Shakespeare did not create the concept of love being blind. He definitely used that idea and commented on it, but it’s an oversimplification to call it a Shakespearean phrase.

“Going on a wild goose chase” 

A common phrase meaning “to go on a futile errand.” You’ve all heard it.

[Clip: Dr. McCoy: You're gonna leave here without them and run off on some wild goose chase halfway across the galaxy, just because you found a discrepancy in a hydrogen cloud? Spock: Doctor, I am chasing the captain, Lieutenant Uhura, and Ensign Chekov, not some wild aquatic fowl]

Shakespeare wrote the phrase “wild goose chase” - it shows up in Romeo and Juliet - BUT Shakespeare did not come up with the phrase “wild goose chase.” It was originally a horse riding phrase - a kind of race where riders follow the erratic movements of a lead horse, like a pack of wild geese! You can even hear the jockeying origin in context when Shakespeare references the wild goose chase in Romeo and Juliet!

[clip: Mercutio: Come between us, good Benvolio; my wits faint.

Romeo: Switch and spurs, switch and spurs; or I'll cry a match.]

Romeo says “switch and spurs” which are the things a rider uses to make their horse go faster. Mercutio is fading and Romeo is pushing him to say more. And that leads into Mercutio’s line:

[clip: Mercutio: Nay, if thy wits run the wild-goose chase, I have
done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in one of
thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five: ]

In context here, the wild-goose chase takes place in their minds - here it means driving yourself a bit wild trying to make sense of something. The idea of “going on a wild goose chase” existed before Shakespeare used it, and even when Shakespeare used it it’s not the same context as it’s used now. The phrase existed before Shakespeare and after Shakespeare and when Shakespeare used it its context was unique to the scene he wrote. Language is constantly evolving, has been evolving, and will evolve. Trying to attach a definitive authorship onto small phrases would require combing through centuries of writing, most of which has been lost, to properly attribute the first usage. And that would just be like trying to pursue something that is very difficult to pursue, like, some kind of feral animal that is difficult to catch or something. Probably a better way to phrase that.

“All that glitters is not gold”

Common phrase, plenty of variations, a classic cliche recognizable even when inverted.

[clip: Smash Mouth, All Star “all that glitters is gold”]

But like “wild goose chase” the phrase “all that glitters is not gold” existed before Shakespeare used it! 

In the Merchant of Venice Portia has multiple suitors and her father’s will sets up a game where the suitors must correctly choose the right casket in order to win her hand. One of the suitors chooses the gold casket, which is empty except for a note. He reads aloud from the note:

[clip: All that glitters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:]

OFTEN HAVE YOU HEARD THAT TOLD! Shakespeare HIMSELF in the text says that the phrase “all that glitters is not gold” is a common saying! 

And a survey of English literature pre-Shakespeare confirms it! A phrase similar to this can be seen in Chaucer, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale:

But al thing which that shyneth as the gold

Nis nat gold, as that I have herd it told;

It was a common saying even when CHAUCER wrote it! It goes back to a Latin proverb: non omne quod nitet aurum est. 

The level of Bardolatry it takes to claim that Shakespeare came up with “all that glitters is not gold” is absurd! We’re close to claiming Shakespeare alone decided the meaning of the individual words “to”, “be”, “or”, and “not!”

And finally: the last phrase on PragerU’s list is: “Break the ice”

Meaning “to introduce conversation” - getting to know someone.

[clip: Batman & Robin “Allow me to break the ice.”]

But it has a much more specific meaning when Shakespeare used it in The Taming of the Shrew, when Tranio tells Petruchio:

[clip: Tranio: If it be so, sir, that you are the man

Must stead us all, and me amongst the rest;

And if you break the ice, and do this feat,

Achieve the elder, set the younger free

For our access]

Here “break the ice” means to accomplish a complicated task: in this case marrying Katherine thus persuading her father to allow her sister Bianca to marry. Katherine is the ice in this case. Again, a different meaning than it’s used today. And again, the phrase has an earlier citation than Shakespeare. 

In 1580, Sir Thomas North published his translation of the 2nd century Greek writer Plutarch’s Parallel Lives - a series of dual biographies comparing and contrasting Greek with Roman historical figures. And in the biography of the 4th century BC Theban statesman Pelopidas, North used this phrase: “Now the confederates appointed a day certain, to break the ice of their pretended enterprise.” North’s translation was first published in 1580 - The earliest known performance on The Taming of the Shrew was in 1594.

And we KNOW that Shakespeare read North’s translation of Plutarch, because North was clearly used as a source for all of Shakespeare’s Roman plays: Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. 

Here’s a passage from North’s translation of Plutarch’s biography of Coriolanus. His mother, Volumnia, has come to convince him to abandon his mutiny against Rome and she says:

[Volumnia:] 

If we … [were] not to speak, the state of our poor bodies, and … our raiment would easily bewray to thee what life we have led at home, since thy exile … (T)hinknow with thyself howmuch more unfortunately than all the women living we are come hither …    

If I cannot persuade thee 

rather to do good unto both parties

than to overthrow and destroy the one… trust unto it—thou shalt no sooner march forward to assault thy country, but thy foot shall tread upon thy mothers womb that brought thee first into this world. (256)

[Clip: Coriolanus 2011: Volumnia: 

Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment

And state of bodies would bewray what life

We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself

How more unfortunate than all living women

Are we come hither …      

If I cannot persuade thee

Rather to show a noble grace to both parts

Than seek the end of one, thou shalt no sooner

March to assault thy country than to tread—

Trust to ’t, thou shalt not—on thy mother’s womb

That brought thee to this world.]

So does this make Shakespeare unoriginal? A plagiarist? No. No more than it makes Lin Manuel Miranda a plagiarist for quoting Washington’s Farewell Address in Hamilton. 

[clip: Hamilton “And that After forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal”]

Nor is Miranda a plagiarist for using the same technique of singing along to a speech being spoken at the same time that will.i.am used in his song Yes We Can. That’s a direct allusion. 

Here’s the thing about art - all art is a series of arrows pointing to all the art that influenced it. Because art is made by people, and people speak using words whose meaning was decided by billions of other people long before they leave someone’s mouth. And every word is a reference to another, reinforced by collective understanding of the culture in which we live. 

Continuing the example: Hamilton quotes the founding fathers

[life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness]

the Bible 

[everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree] 

and yes, Shakespeare 

[tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow] 

but to make full sense of it you can’t ignore the allusions to will.i.am, or to Mobb Deep 

[only 19 but my mind is older] 

or to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five 

[it’s just a jungle sometimes…] 

or to Biggie Smalls.

[the Ten Duel Commandments]. 

And all of these references make up the text that is Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Shakespeare’s works, likewise, are intertextual hyperlinks to North’s translations of Plutarch, AND Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland from which he got the plots for all of his Henry plays as well as Macbeth and King Lear and parts of Cymbeline, AND Matteo Bandello whose novellas provided plots for Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, and even more parts of Cymbeline, AND to Ovid for which provided the Pyramus and Thisbe play within a play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and for Troilus and Cressida he riffed on Chaucer who himself riffed on Homer. Understanding Shakespeare means knowing the Latin comedies of Terrence and Plautus which he would have used as frameworks for his own comedies, and knowing the tragedies of Kyd and Marlowe who established the genre conventions that Shakespeare bent! Knowing Shakespeare means knowing the theatrical culture that he lived in which produced so many plays whose authors are now lost - even the plays themselves lost, reduced to only their titles - including a now lost play based on a Scandinavian legend known as “Hamlet!”

But no: for PragerU the most important connection in Hamlet is to The Bible.

[clip: Knowles and Klavan: Hamlet rewords Psalm 8]

The way PragerU teaches Shakespeare would be like if they taught Hamilton and ONLY pointed out the one reference to Shakespeare- when the reality is that the reference to Biggie is far more elaborate AND more central to the themes of the piece. The Methodologies of PragerU are clear: You Must Know Shakespeare, the Bible, America. All else is woke nonsense that must be purged from your knowledge. 

So why am I focusing on PragerU’s Shakespeare videos? There are a lot of claims made in PragerU’s output that would make anyone with an even basic understanding of world history al dente from how fast their blood boils. From Martin Luther King Jr. saying that one must always protest injustice but never violently.

[clip: Leo and Layla meet MLK “through it all our protests remained peaceful. I believe with all my heart in non-violence. Two wrongs can never make a right and you can never defeat hate with hate.]

To Frederick Douglass saying that yes, slavery is bad but you shouldn’t protest slavery that much.

[clip: Leo and Layla meet Frederick Douglass “no place is perfect so it’s good to listen to activists who want to improve things, but they have to be willing to work inside the system, and they have to understand that change usually requires patience and compromise.”]

To Christopher Columbus saying ‘yeah but slavery’s not that bad ya know?’

[clip: Columbus saying it’s better to be enslaved than killed, no?]

These are some hideous damn lies. Leo and Layla meet Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 and he still preaches nonviolence, when in reality by that time King had called riots “the language of the unheard.” 

Full quote:

“…it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

Prager’s Frederick Douglass teaches working inside the system to create change - the real Frederick Douglass was friends with John Brown! 

Brown invited Douglass to his raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry! Douglass declined because he thought it wouldn’t succeed, and it didn’t - eighteen people died during the fighting, ten of whom were Brown’s men, seven were captured and executed, including Brown himself. But a year to the day after his execution, in 1860, before the Civil War began, Frederick Douglass gave this speech to Joy Street Baptist Church in Boston:

“we must, as John Brown Jr., has taught us this evening, reach the slaveholder’s conscience through his fear of personal danger.  We must make him feel that there is death in the air about him, that there is death in the pot before him, that there is death all around him. We must do this in some way.”

And he kept this attitude even after the Civil War, in 1881 he said of John Brown:

“His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine - it was as the burning sun to my taper light - mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

And as for Christopher Columbus, ho boy!

[clip: Badly Animated Columbus: “it’s better to be taken as a slave than to be killed, no?”]

“These Islanders of Cuba, being reduc'd to the same Vasselage and Misery as the Inhabitants of Hispaniola, seeing themselves perish and die without any redress, fled to the Mountains for shelter, but other Desperado's, put a period to their days with a Halter, and the Husband,

together with his Wife and Children, hanging himself, put an end to those Calamities.

By the ferocity of one Spanish Tyrant (whom I knew) above Two Hundred Indians hang'd themselves of their own accord; and a multitude of People perished by this kind of Death.”

Bartolomé de las Casas, "A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies" 1542, describing the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean committing suicide en masse rather than suffer slavery under Spanish rule. Shut your five-frame pie-hole you ignorant Clutch-Cargo-Ass After Effects Tutorial.

PragerU habitually sells disgusting lies designed to sanitize atrocities committed in the name of Western Civilization. So with videos whitewashing the radicality of the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement after it, and the inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade, and the apocalyptic brutality of the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, a video or two from PragerU saying “Shakespeare is great” doesn’t seem that bad in comparison. And yet, we should question why these people make these claims at the same time. These people who make videos that support these white supremacist myths ALSO make videos about how Shakespeare Is The Greatest Writer. And we need to acknowledge that uncomfortable truth. We need to acknowledge that Some of those that quote verses, are the same that burn crosses.

[clip: guitar riff from Killing in the Name]

Disclaimer: I am not saying that PragerU engages in the exact same terrorist practices that the Ku Klux Klan engages in - I am saying that they support white supremacist ideology in a way unique to themselves.

Again: these are the same people who waste our time by putting words in the mouths of anti-racist activists saying that people shouldn’t protest racism that much, and yet they also waste our time with an episode about why you should care about Shakespeare. Clearly, Shakespeare is important to the cultural project that PragerU is pushing. If he wasn’t, they would’ve just ignored him - just like literally every other playwright in history. 

The deadeyed cartoon children never meet Sophocles or Aristophanes or Plautus or Bhasa or Moliere or Chikamatsu Monzaemon or Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw or Anton Chekhov or Bertholt Brecht or Athol Fugard or even all-American playwrights like Thornton Wilder, Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill, Lynn Nottage, August Wilson or Tony Kushner because of course the PragerU people don’t want anyone watching Angels in America

[clip: Angels in America: “the cracker who wrote the national anthem put the word “free” on a note so high no one could reach it. … I live in America, Louis, I don’t have to love it”]

Putting my theater major to work in this video! 

Leo and Layla meet writers, sure. They meet prolific writer of non-fiction Frederick Douglass whose work they ignore. They meet C.S. Lewis, who is important to their lessons solely because of his Christianity and how he “stood up for his beliefs!” They meet Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. NOT Mark Twain, the real person, but the fictional characters he created, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn! They might as well meet Captain Nemo and Mister Hyde while helping them fight off Martian Tripods! But they also meet characters from the Bible so okay maybe they can travel into fiction ANYWAY! But oops, correction! after further research I realized that they actually do meet a second playwright: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who did indeed write a play once: The Love-Girl and the Innocent, which premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota in 1970. But of course Solzhenitsyn isn’t important to know because he wrote a play, or even because he was a writer: he’s important to know because he wrote against communism.

Shakespeare is the only artist Leo and Layla meet who’s treated like a Great Artist - the only one whose art is treated as intrinsically great. 

They repeat this phrase:

“He is not of an age, but for all time!”

This is quoted in the lesson plan: it’s the first question on the official worksheet! They say it to Shakespeare’s face!

[“he was not of an age but for all time” “what a wonderful compliment yes! It means that my plays are as relevant in your time as they are in mine!]

And nowhere in the video or the lesson plan does it attribute that sentence to its author: Ben Jonson. 

Ben Jonson was a playwright who in his time was famous and beloved by theatergoers and fellow playwrights. He was arrested for sedition in 1597 after the premiere of The Isle of Dogs, which he cowrote with Thomas Nashe, satirized Elizabeth I. He bounced back after his legal trouble and wrote satirical comedies of humors like The Alchemist, Volpone or The Fox, Every Man in His Humour, and Bartolomew Fair. William Shakespeare acted in plays Jonson wrote! In 1616 King James I granted him a pension, and because of that he’s been called England’s first poet laureate - getting royal backing over fifty years before the position of Poet Laureate even existed! The poem that PragerU failed to attribute was Jonson’s To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us. He wrote it in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and it prefaced the First Folio edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. What became the cult of Bardolatry began as a poet mourning his colleague and friend: 

  Leave thee alone, for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

 Sent forth; or since did from their ashes come.

Triumph, my Britain! Thou hast one to show

 To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time!

Imagine being Ben Jonson: being lauded in your day as one of the best writers in your field, respected by colleagues and audiences alike only to have your most famous piece of writing be the nice compliment you wrote to your dead coworker.

And that’s how Ben Jonson is known today: as a footnote in the story of Shakespeare. Ben Jonson was also the lone voice of reason in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, which dramatized the Shakespeare Authorship Question. It was the most offensive piece of pseudo history Emmerich directed up until he made a movie about the Stonewall Uprising where he turned Marsha P. Johnson into the wacky comic relief. Anonymous also has a number of early modern playwrights as supporting characters who only exist as a School of Resentment to Shakespeare’s genius. I’ll recycle my old video essay  on Anonymous here:

[Anonymous: I could write a play in ambic, iambic, iambic pentameter if I tried it’s not that hard!]

[clip from my Anonymous review: Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg and the RZA walk into a bar. Jay-Z says “you hear about this new kid, Kanye West? Have you heard that he raps rhyming verse to a beat?!?”]

Wow. I really compared Kanye West to Shakespeare, huh?

Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous and PragerU make the same assumption. No, Knowles and Klavan don’t think that Shakespeare was written by someone else.

[clip: they make fun of anti-Stratfordianism]

But they do elevate Shakespeare beyond who he was: 

[clip: it’s hard to believe any one man wrote this]

The central assumption in both the cult of Bardolatry and the anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theory is that Shakespeare as an author is too great a figure to be considered simply another artist. He must be something called a Genius - and it doesn’t matter what society he came from, doesn’t matter what material realities he worked in, doesn’t matter if he collaborated with other creative workers, all that matters is the Genius, and we must all sit in grumbling admiration of the Great Artist.

Shakespeare is important to PragerU, as PragerU explains in its lesson plan because of Shakespeare's contribution to Western Civilization; Capital W Western, Capital C Civilization. The same message taught to children as the one taught to adults.

[clip: Mac Donald on The West]

I wonder if other languages have cults around their authors as big as Shakespeare’s? Genuine Question for the audience: if your native language is Chinese, for example, do Chinese speakers quote Journey To The West as often as English speakers quote Hamlet? Does Wu Cheng’en have a cult of authorship around him as big as Shakespeare’s? If you speak Russian, have phrases from Tolstoy worked their way into everyday language? Do everyday Germans quote Goethe? Or if you speak Spanish, to sound educated are you obliged to quote Cervantes? All of those authors are world famous, and they’ve all crafted stories beloved globally. And I can’t help but wonder why none of them are considered The Greatest Writer Ever, and why the cult of Shakespeare seems to have the best publicity. And the thought that has crept into my mind is, “Is it just because Shakespeare wrote in English?”

[clip: Akala’s observation that if Shakespeare wrote in Lithuanian he wouldn’t have traveled as far]

Akala, founder of The Hip-Hop Shakespeare and every inch a Shakespearean, is right. It’s a very basic fact that Shakespeare wrote in English, and the spread of Shakespeare is bound to the spread of English and the spread of English was anything but peaceful.

When I was writing the Shakespeare series of videos I thought it might be amusing to showcase Shakespeare adaptations from around the world. And Shakespeare is indeed global - from the animations of Jiri Trnka in what is now the Czech Republic to the fantastical war epics of Kurosawa in Japan to the musical melodramas of Vishal Bhardwaj in India to the world-famous in their own right adaptions that came out of Broadway in America, Shakespeare is global. But consider for a second how he became global. During his lifetime touring troupes of actors performed plays in mainland Europe. After his death his plays were popular across the continent, translated into French, German and yes, into Czech - the 1786 performance of the play Makbet od Šakespeara in what is now Wenceslas Square in Prague set the stage for Jiri Trnka two centuries later. But Shakespeare would not be translated into Powhatan - his plays came to America through English-speaking settler colonies who spread their language through the barrel of a gun. In Asia, Shakespeare wouldn’t be translated into Japanese until the Meiji Era - until isolationist Japan would be cracked open by American gunboat diplomacy when Matthew Perry sailed to Uraga. And in India, Shakespeare came first as entertainment for expatriates, and then through official British policy. The English Education Act of 1835 reallocated funds in Indian higher education from traditional practices towards instruction in English. The English politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, serving on the Viceroy’s Executive Council, said words which became infamous:

“I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.”

Shakespeare in Europe. Shakespeare in America. Shakespeare in Asia.

Here’s a story about Shakespeare in Africa.

During the height of apartheid the South African government held some of the most ardent activists here, at Robben Island Maximum Security Prison. One of the activists held there was Sonny Venkatrathnam. While there he successfully smuggled a book, which was passed around from prisoner to prisoner from 1975 to 1978.  This item became known as The Robben Island Bible. Though it wasn’t a Bible. And despite the outward appearance it was not a Hindu religious text. Venkatrathnam had smuggled a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare into prison, which he was able to keep by pasting Diwali greeting cards on the outside and convincing his ignorant guards that it was his “Bible.” Which, in a way, it was. Venkatrathnam passed it around and asked his fellow prisoners to sign their name next to their favorite passages. The names listed became a Who’s Who of the anti-Apartheid movement. Billy Nair, who would later serve two terms in the National Assembly after the first post-apartheid elections in 1994, picked a suitably anti-colonial line from The Tempest: “this island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou takest from me.” - Caliban’s declaration to Prospero the exiled duke and sorcerer who conquered the island and enslaved him. Resonant words for a man imprisoned on a colonized island. Govan Mbeki, future deputy president and one of the more militant figures there, chose the pastoral opening lines of Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it”. And signed on the 16th of December, 1977, were the words of Julius Caesar: 

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

These words were signed: “N.R.D. Mandela.”

There are different ways one can interpret this artifact, the Robben Island Shakespeare. One way is to wax poetic about the immortal bard and reaffirm the bardolatrous belief in the transcendent universality of his writing. Doing so reduces the prisoners of the island into yet more acolytes to the cult. Another is to see the prisoners themselves as subjects of their time and place and circumstance becoming active readers, interpretive agents to a text brought to them by unique circumstance. Venkatrathnam, Nair, Mbeki, Mandela - they all had to travel less of a distance to Robben Island than Shakespeare did. 

The Robben Island Shakespeare is an unsettling artifact. A fascinating one to be sure, but the many historical forces that had to happen in order for it to exist have very unsettling implications. Forces as unsettling as the ones that cause me, a man with a Swedish last name, to write this script on land traditionally maintained by the Sissipahaw, Saponi, Shakoni, Eno, and Cheraw nations, in a language first developed on the other side of an ocean - in English, the language of Shakespeare.

A troubling pattern occurs by tracking the history of the performance of Shakespeare. Shakespeare went wherever the English language went, and wherever the English language went, Empire went with it.

Now would be the part where I could play a clip of some common cry of cur whining about how tHE wOKe LeFt Wokists are trying to CaNCeL Shakespeare, as a lot of dirtbags did this last March when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the charity that maintains Shakespeare’s birthplace as a national memorial, vowed to decolonize their language around the playwright they’ve pledged to celebrate. And of course Fox News was mad about it.

Fox News wrote: “The process of decolonizing Shakespeare’s work reportedly includes researching "the continued impact of colonialism" on world history and the ways in which "Shakespeare's work has played a part in this." The effort, which roughly means distancing work from western perspectives, reportedly began after concerns were raised that celebration of Shakespeare enables "White supremacy."

Putting “white supremacy” in quotes is definitely a choice - any English majors in the comments wanna guess why they did that?

Fox News continues: “Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust reportedly worked on a research project with the University of Birmingham's Dr. Helen Hopkins, and concluded that praise of Shakespeare as a "universal" genius "benefits the ideology of White European supremacy." Their research concluded further that "colonial inculcation" spread European ideas about art and used Shakespeare as a symbol of "British cultural superiority" and "Anglo-cultural supremacy."”

Hey! Let’s replay that clip of the literal King of England being treated as the final authority on how to recite Shakespeare!

[clip: King Charles III saying To Be Or Not To Be]

Fox News continues: “Celebrating Shakespeare’s work, the research argued, was part of a "White Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly ‘West-centric’ worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today.”

Yes.

Yes it is.

Of course it is.

The Right-Wing-O-Sphere may wring their hands and shrug their shoulders at the idea that Shakespeare has been used to prop up White Supremacy but … like… this may make me sound a little old, a little Gen-X but like… DUH?!? Of course he has?!? We’ve all seen it happen in our lifetimes?!?

[music: Heinz Keissling’s “Temptation Sensation” title card: The Gang Uses William Shakespeare’s Othello To Justify Blackface]

[clip: It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia: Mac and Dennis argue about Mac’s decision to play Roger Murtaugh in Blackface, Mac defends himself by saying classy actors have done it, with Frank citing Laurence Olivier as Othello]

[Clip: Laurence Olivier in blackface as Othello: “Haply, for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have,”]

What you just saw was a white man wearing makeup to pretend to be a black man saying he doesn’t have “soft parts of conversation” because he is black. Which Laurence Olivier isn’t.

[clip: KL: “this is one of Shakespeare’s obsessions: the divisions between being and seeming - what you see and what you really are - and he works it out even further in the question of race in Othello” !!!]

Klavan has a video claiming that Shakespeare understands racism better than “the democrats” which I won’t comment on for everyone’s mental health. But considering that Klavan reads Shakespeare as a source of moral instruction and ignores the performative aspects, how much can we trust his understanding of “the division between being and seeming” with a play that has, for centuries, starred white actors playing the lead in blackface?

The subject of race in Othello is complicated - yes there are many references to blackness as disgusting, evil, worthy of expulsion from society, but also the plot is about racism - about a man driven mad by the lies his white colleagues spread about him until he commits a monstrous act. Othello is a role that has been played with grace and empathy by black actors in the past but like all things, it’s complex. The role that race plays in the works of William Shakespeare is complex, because the role that race plays in all aspects of life is complex. Last year Oxford University Press released a hefty seven hundred page book titled The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race detailing how complex it is. 

Beyond Shakespeare, race and racism are complex topics that deserve study on their own - but the idea that they deserve study is offensive to the right. Look at this sentence from The Vanishing Shakespeare:

“And at the University of Virginia, students can avoid reading Othello in favor of studying “Critical Race Theory,” which explores why race “continue[s] to have vital significance in politics, economics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities”” 

Think about that logically. Be perfectly logical about the meaning of that sentence and restate it in the inverse to reveal their desired goal: “students can avoid exploring why race continues to have vital significance in politics, economics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities in favor of reading Othello.” As if Othello was the final word on race as a concept. And as if there weren’t aspects of racism in Shakespeare’s other plays! 

Consider Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus - an unapologetically evil character whose evilness is tied to his blackness. In one scene a character kills a fly, and Titus scolds him for it. But then:

[Clip: Titus “MARCUS ANDRONICUS

Pardon me, sir; it was a black ill-favor'd fly,

Like to the empress' Moor; therefore I kill'd him.

TITUS ANDRONICUS

O, O, O,

Then pardon me for reprehending thee,

For thou hast done a charitable deed.

Give me thy knife, I will insult on him;

Flattering myself, as if it were the Moor”]

It’s a pattern. Blackness is something to be scorned in Shakespeare, even in the masterpieces. 

After killing Polonius, Hamlet turns on his mother, shows her a picture of Claudius and says:

[Clip, Hamlet: Here is your husband; like a mildew'd ear,

Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,

And batten on this moor?]

No one really talks about that moment in Hamlet because that’s one of the scenes that’s often cut. Still, the line is there: Hamlet calls Claudius a “moor” as an insult! Hamlet said “moor” with a hard R!

There are so many moments in Shakespeare that frame whiteness as a universal good and blackness as an undesirable bane. In a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Demetrius, who through magic fairy dust has fallen madly in love with Helena, praises her beauty like this:

DEMETRIUS

[Awaking] O Helena, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!

To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?

Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show

Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!

That pure congealed white, high Taurus snow,

Fann'd with the eastern wind, turns to a crow

When thou hold'st up thy hand: O, let me kiss

This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!

“Oh Helena you are so white which is beautiful which is beautiful because its white you are so white you whitey white white!”

I directed a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had completely forgotten that passage, and when we got to that point in the initial read through I shuddered, having cast a black actress as Helena! (By the way if you’re reading/watching this, Regina I am very, very sorry)

Anyway we cut that whole sequence. No big deal. Because lines getting cut from Shakespeare plays is a very common practice. 

Branagh left that one moment in Hamlet because he wanted to adapt the entire play, including the commonly cut bits. Often people will notice when you leave certain lines in. Or at least they should notice! 

Just listen, REALLY listen to this line that was left, unaltered, in one of the most popular Shakespeare adaptations of the last half century:

[clip: Baz Luhrmann’s R+J BENVOLIO

At this same ancient feast of Capulet's

Sups the fair Rosaline; whom thou so loves,

With all the admired beauties of Verona.

Go thither, and with unattained eye

Compare her face with some that I shall show,

And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.]

Benvolio is using the simile that beautiful people are like swans and ugly people are like crows. Fun fact: swans have white feathers and crows… okay you get it moving on.

But even beyond bird metaphors: in Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio is set up for an arranged marriage (secretly to the woman he was already set to marry before she was slandered by the play’s villain) and Leonato asks him if he’s ready. This is his answer:

[clip: Whedon’s Much Ado: “I’ll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope]

Translation: “I would go through with this arranged marriage even if I had to marry a black woman.” 

This line is often cut. It doesn’t appear in the Kenneth Branagh version, for example. When I did Much Ado with Sara’s group, we changed it to this:

[clip: Swolesome “I’ll hold my mind were she a healthcare CEO”]

Formerly respected writer director Joss Whedon kept that line in and turned it into a joke - where we are supposed to laugh at Claudio’s insensitivity by strategically placing a nameless black extra who catches his stray racist remark. I’ll point out that Whedon kept this line, while deliberately changing another line:

[clip: Whedons Much ado: “If I do not take pity of her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a fool.”]

This is the original line:

[BENEDICK: If I do not take pity of her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew.

[clip: LadyKnight the Brave’s Much Ado video: wait… what? No wait this was supposed to be the fun video!]

Perhaps YouTube’s best writer on the subject of antisemitism is LadyKnighttheBrave, and her writing on Shakespeare and his antisemitism is essential viewing. 

[clip: LadyKnightTheBrave “According to the Arden Shakespeare the definition for “Jew” as an epithet means, “Ungenerous person (from the Elizabethan caricature of Jews as rapacious userers, void of Christian charity); a person of no faith (from a Christian perspective)” The epithet or a variant of it appears in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV Part 1, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth, Richard II, and twice in Two Gentlemen of Verona. I had naively assumed all the antisemitism was contained in Merchant of Venice but it isn’t.]

So Shakespeare was undoubtedly antisemitic: So honestly my comparison to Kanye West might be accurate.

But LadyKnightTheBrave writes about Shakespeare as someone who enjoys his plays and struggles with her love of it while being part of a community harmed by the ideas in it. Harold Bloom was a bardolater, perhaps THE bardolater of the contemporary era, and even he could acknowledge how much harm Shakespeare’s antisemitism has caused, writing of The Merchant of Venice “it would have been better for the last four centuries of the Jewish people had Shakespeare never written this play. So shadowed and equivocal is The Merchant of Venice, though, that I cannot be certain that there is any way to perform it now and recover Shakespeare’s own art of representing Shylock.” Bloom, a Jewish man, could acknowledge the harm that the Merchant of Venice caused, but as a man he couldn’t acknowledge the harm that The Taming of the Shrew would cause. 

[clip: The Taming of the Shrew “KATHARINA

Husband, let's follow, to see the end of this ado.

PETRUCHIO

First kiss me, Kate, and we will.

KATHARINA

What, in the midst of the street?

PETRUCHIO

What, art thou ashamed of me?

KATHARINA

No, sir, God forbid; but ashamed to kiss.

PETRUCHIO

Why, then let's home again. Come, sirrah, let's away.

KATHARINA

Nay, I will give thee a kiss:”]

Bloom writes of this scene “One would have to be tone deaf (or ideologically crazed) not to hear in this a subtly exquisite music of marriage at its happiest.” 

Yeah, a guy pressuring the spouse he spent an entire honeymoon abusing into a public display of affection is marriage at its happiest. Yes I’m aware that I just pivoted from antisemitism to sexism but my point is that these power dynamics are intersectional and a person can acknowledge one power dynamic while ignoring another. See, this is where an education in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability or Sexuality Studies; in Imperial Transnational or Post-Colonial Studies; and in Critical Theory would actually be helpful - it would stop you from saying shit like this.

[clip: LadyKnightTheBrave “While I do love Shakespeare and I love modern Shakespeare’s determination to reimagine his texts in every way under the sun, literary education must expand beyond Shakespeare and his ilk … Now this isn’t a call to cancel Shakespeare or stop teaching his beautiful words, but it’s a call to expand on Shakespeare, to expand on literary canon]

Again: essential viewing.

But calling attention to the harmful politics in Shakespeare’s plays is the exact thing that draws the ire of those culture warriors who would elevate Shakespeare not in spite of, but because of these harmful politics. This tension between the quality of Shakespeare’s works and the political project that has used Shakespeare has existed for centuries. The great James Baldwin wrote this on Shakespeare: 

“Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achievement with a kind of sick envy. In my most anti-English days I condemned him as a chauvinist (“this England” indeed!) and because I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all – should be forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak – I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.” 

Baldwin isn’t alone. Bloom whined about a “School of Resentment” and in doing so brushed off billions of people around the world with more than enough reason to resent the English language and the empires that spread it. From Africa, to America, to India, the Anglophonic world has a lot to resent.

Baldwin’s essay is entitled, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” and it’s about the long process of seeing the quality of the work through the political realities one lives in. It took a scene from Julius Caesar for Baldwin to see the human beneath the poet - where a poet named Cinna is stabbed in the street for having the same name as one of Caesar’s assassins:

““I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet … I am not Cinna the conspirator”—that cry rings in my ears. And the mob’s response: “Tear him for his bad verses!” And yet—though one howled with Cinna and felt his terrible rise, at the hands of his countrymen, to death, it was impossible to hate the mob. Or, worse than impossible, useless; for here we were, at once howling and being torn to pieces, the only receptacles of evil and the only receptacles of nobility to be found in all the universe. But the play does not even suggest that we have the perception to know evil from good or that such a distinction can ever be clear: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones …”

[clip: Felicity Kendall’s Shakespeare Quest: “you love Shakespeare but you hate him also]

That tension between loving a work of art and understanding the harm that art has caused is universal, and worthy of respect. 

Imprisoned in apartheid South Africa, Billy Nair loved the moment in The Tempest when Caliban stood up to Prospero and reminded his enslaver that the island was his by right of his birth. The Tempest was partially inspired by an account of a wreck on the quote-unquote discovery of Bermuda, and the text explicitly codes Caliban as an indigenous person, while also bestializing him as being part-fish. His enslaver, Prospero, calls him a “misshapen knave” and a “demi-devil.” The character Trinculo, a villainous drunkard, stumbles upon Caliban’s sleeping body and says aloud how much money he could make displaying his corpse as a curiosity. Content warning: Russell Brand

[clip: The Tempest 

“A strange fish! Were I in England now,

as once I was, and had but this fish painted,

not a holiday fool there but would give a piece

of silver: there would this monster make a

man; any strange beast there makes a man:

when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame

beggar, they will lazy out ten to see a dead

Indian.]

England was making its first forays into colonialism, and Caliban was Shakespeare’s imagining of the inhabitants of this brave new world. The Tempest is also where the phrase “Brave New World” comes from:

[clip: any version of The Tempest, Miranda: “O brave new world, that has such people in it!]

Reading The Tempest in Robben Island Prison, Billy Nair might have also appreciated the part where Caliban says to Prospero,

[clip: The Tempest “You taught me language; and my profit on't

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!”]

The colonized man, using the language of the colonizer to curse their acts of colonization. But of course, Caliban remains the antagonist of the story, and Prospero gets everything he wants, including Caliban’s obedience - Caliban’s last act in the play is to be sent offstage to clean Prospero’s chambers to earn a pardon for his rebellion. His ending is in servitude as punishment. If we were to leave this ending unquestioned, if we ignore the history this story mirrors, if we were to focus on the brilliance of the Author, we give implicit consent to the actions of the audience. The Tempest was first performed in 1610. Jamestown was founded three years prior. Six years later, Pocahontas was captured and exploited to make men’s fortunes, just as Trinculo imagined that he could with Caliban. In 1619, a mere nine years after the premiere of The Tempest, the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown. In the years since, how many millions of English-speaking men went out across the globe seeing themselves as all-powerful, magical Prosperos in a world of “mis-shapen knaves” and “demi-devils” that they saw as Calibans? 

The idea that Shakespeare, alone among writers, spoke to universal human truths forces an ignorance in his readers to all the ways that he is not universal. The basic whine from these culture warriors is that supposedly, Shakespeare couldn’t uphold “whiteness” or “heteronormativity” or “patriarchy” - he upholds the “universal truth of humanity”. Of course, to a racist, “white” is “normal.” It is “default.” It is “universal.” Everyone else is just “another race”. The sociologists call it “racialization” - the creation of a stereotypical “other” built of arbitrary signifiers whose only underlying similarity is that they are not like the “normal” group. Not like the non-racialized group. Just like how “heteronormativity” is just “normal” while everything outside of it is “queer.” Just like how “patriarchy” is “normal” to a patriarch.  And through these assumptions that we have, that Shakespeare wrote of Universal Truths, it follows then that these truths cannot be imposed, cannot be enforced, cannot be used to subjugate: they can only be gifted. Gifted to those who lack The Culture. The very specific Culture that grew out of one little country in Europe on the verge of conquering the world.

[clip: P2:JtaNW “Undertaker:We'll rue this day you wait and see William Shakespeare:What is "to be or not to be"? (Writes it down)]

It doesn’t matter what horrors young Pocahontas went through, because at least she got to breathe the same air as Shakespeare, says the co-founder of PragerU.

When the Fox News and PragerU types cry “woke was gone mad” when critics claim that Shakespeare had been used to promote White European supremacy, they cry while doing exactly that - as they use Shakespeare to promote white supremacy!

[clip: Newsmax host: “it’s really crazy and I think if you actually break it down because what The Left always tries to do is pivot and then say that “parents don’t want children being taught the truth about American history” and I will always say “parents have no problem being told that in the history of America things have happened to people that never should have happened. What parents don’t want to have happen is to have their children come home feeling as if they are personally responsible for fixing all of the racial ills of a society that has been 200 and 300 years in the making. That is not a recipe for success that is the blueprint for us actually returning to the vestiges of racism that we never want to ever see again in society. Correct me if I’m wrong but that’s how I look at it, I’m sure you have a similar view.”

Dennis Prager “Well this line, ‘we don’t want the truth told’ is a projection. As I have said all of my life and I have studied the Left since - my field was communism at Columbia - “truth” is not a left-wing value. So for the Left to start all of a sudden speaking about “truth” is like uh… is like illiterates talking to you about Shakespeare.]

Prager made that statement in a NewsMax segment while complaining about universities that teach Critical Race Theory, an academic field which examines the social constructs of race and ethnicity and the ways that they are upheld through law and word and deed. Dennis Prager is straight up invoking the name of Shakespeare to uphold white supremacy.

Let me emphasize that the issues I’m touching on are complicated and important. Examining the harm that works of art reinforce is important. Understanding the complex ways that racism, along with antisemitism, sexism, the subtle politics of gender identity and sexuality, the history of imperial and colonial violence - how all forms of politics shape our lives, is important! - these things are all Bigger Than Shakespeare. They are massive topics that permeate all human interaction and are worthy of study and discussion and respect, and they are bigger than Shakespeare. Shakespeare is merely one man, read by an audience of billions. Billions of political animals. Humans are political animals, after all. Politics are the myriad ways that we exist in relation to one another. Shakespeare is, simply, the Author. The Pragers of the world dismiss all politics and instead demand fealty to The Author, just like the Authoritarians that they are.

This is why it is important to decolonize the study of Shakespeare: because Shakespeare, not the dead guy in Stratford, but the idea that is Shakespeare The Bard, Shakespeare The Inventor of The Human, Shakespeare The Greatest Author, is an Authoritarian idea. A Colonial Idea. An Imperial idea. It is the idea that demands submission to the Authority of the Author, us mere readers be damned. The proof is in their protestations: they don’t whine when a thousand small-a authors are pulled from shelves - they only whine whenever the Capital-A Author isn’t at the center! Because how dare the Woke Left not give Authority to THE Author?!

William Shakespeare, the glover’s son who died a little over 400 years ago, had little to do with this, of course. The dude is dead. The people propping up his corpse, however, need him to be Immortal - to distract from the countless millions of anonymous non-Shakespeares that the empires of Britain and America after them would ensure were very, very mortal. All those non-Shakespeares who may be black or queer or feminine or even all three.

[clip: Prager whines about Replacing William Shakespeare with A Black Lesbian Poet]

Notice how William Shakespeare gets a full name but A Black Lesbian Poet doesn’t. I shouldn’t have to explain this, but this statement is racist, homophobic, and sexist. Like, the sentence structure itself makes the statement racist, homophobic, and sexist. The sentence is a joke and “A Black Lesbian Poet” is the punchline - the implication being that the picture of Shakespeare being replaced with someone who is black and queer and femme is absurd - based solely on the replacement’s blackness and queerness and femininity. If that wasn’t the case, Dennis Prager wouldn’t have said “A Black Lesbian Poet”, he would have said her damn name: Audre Lorde. The name that Dennis Prager did not say was Audre Lorde. The portrait that was placed in Fisher-Bennett Hall at the University of Pennsylvania in December of 2016 was of New York-born poet Audre Lorde, whose name Dennis Prager deliberately did not say. Because if he said her name, people would actually be able to look her up.

And before the unwiped assholes in my comments parrot Prager’s claim that Shakespeare’s picture was removed just because he was A Dead White Male Poet. No. Shakespeare’s picture was removed because removing One (1) picture of Shakespeare from One (1) hallway does absolutely nothing to diminish his place in the greater culture. He is quoted by everyone. He has thousands of IMDb credits. The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet developed by NATO which standardizes communication across global radio channels gives code words for 26 letters and ten numbers allowing for ease cross channel communication - the code words for the letters J and R are “Juliet” and “Romeo!” Characters from Shakespeare’s plays had their names given to goddamn MOONS. Shakespeare can handle not being the center of attention in one hallway. 

Shakespeare is not just a dead white male poet, true. But he’s also not The Only Poet! The way the Pragers of the world talk about him one would think that poetry belonged to one man, theater as a medium died when Shakespeare did in 1616, and that all writing that isn’t his is worthless! Which is of course what the Pragers want you to think! It is that central cult of personality around Shakespeare which MUST be decolonized!

In fact, it might be good for students of English language literature to read a play that was written in the last hundred years. Because if they did, they might realize that today’s villains usually don’t always sound like Richard III - today they often sound like Karl Lindner from the great 1959 American play A Raisin In The Sun:

[Clip from the film A Raisin In The Sun: “I want you to believe me when I tell you that race prejudice simply doesn’t enter into it. It is the matter of the people of Clybourne Park believing, rightly or wrongly as I say, that for the happiness of all concerned that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities.]

And to answer two questions you undoubtedly have, YES this actor is indeed John Fiedler, who for decades was the voice of Piglet in Disney’s many versions of Winnie the Pooh. And more importantly, YES this white man is telling Sidney Poitier that racism has absolutely nothing to do with his goal of ensuring that a black family will not move into a predominantly white neighborhood. There are definitely people who will lie that boldly - enforcing policies that hurt racialized people for not being white enough while speaking the sentence that race doesn’t matter - the same people who will insist that there is no racism in America while mocking the very idea of celebrating black artistry - the same people who will insist that Shakespeare hasn’t been used to support racist ideals while using him to support racist ideals. 

But of course it would be ridiculous to assume this play was relevant to anything since it was written by Lorraine Hansberry, A Black Lesbian Poet wow I hope my sarcasm is coming through!

The truly heinous lie behind Prager’s fearmongering with their literary Great Replacement is the idea that teaching anyone alongside Shakespeare means not teaching Shakespeare at all. Which is decidedly untrue. Consider the reading given by this author: an author championed by James Baldwin who himself once resented, then loved, Shakespeare.

[clip: Maya Angelou at the Texas Union at U of Texas in 2008: “You need to know, you need to have all of it, you need to be conversant with Shakespeare. You need it! At one point when I was about 11 I guess, I was convinced that Shakespeare was a black girl in the South who had been molested (laughter) How could he know what I knew?”

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

    For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

    That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

(Sonnet 29)

“I knew that was my grandmother he was talking about. ‘That sweet love remembered’ and that’s how I felt about her.’]

Maya Angelou was moved by Shakespeare. Would teaching the poetry of Angelou mean NOT teaching the poetry of Shakespeare? No, of course not. It just means that we teach the truth. And that truth is that we live in a world where everyone is capable of understanding beauty AND where everyone is capable of creating beauty. To those people who think culture begins and ends with a single dead actor named Will, know that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of in your philosophy - and you can write them down in history with your bitter, twisted lies, you can trod them in the very dirt! But still, like dust, they’ll rise. That was a Shakespeare quote followed by a Maya Angelou quote.

Angelou’s autobiography “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” has often found itself on lists of banned books. In April of this past year it was removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library as part of the Trump administrations’ anti-DEI campaign. This, unlike PragerU’s whine about a lack of mandatory Shakespeare courses in universities, is an actual instance of denying people access to great works of art.

Maya Angelou, it must be noted, is not considered An Author by PragerU’s resident Shakespeare expert.

[clip: Klavan in the video “Who Killed the Liberal Arts” where he says that Angelou is a “bad poet” that people only care about “because she’s black” clip from that same video where he says “I am a racist! I admit it! I am a racist!”]

Klavan’s assertion is that it is because Shakespeare is something called a “Genius” that only certain writers can achieve. He also babbles about how people supposedly whine about how the writers of India were indoctrinated with British writing and how their millennia of literary traditions were overwritten with Dickens.

[Klavan: well I’ve read those authors and sorry but they’re just better! British writers were just better! I guess I’m just a racist!]

Yes he is. Klavan is easily parroting the same western chauvinism espoused by Babington Macaulay when he declared European writing inherently superior to any non-European writing. And in Klavan, in PragerU, again we see the cult of The West, the cult of the Great Man, again, demanding Authority for The Author, with a clear demarcation of who is and is not worthy of Authorship and therefore Authority. Shakespeare is, Angelou clearly isn’t. 

This is the message that the Klavans and the Knowles and the Mac Donalds and the Pragers and all of the Imperialists of the world want to send: listen to these voices, not these voices. Enlighten yourself, but only with the light that we will not snuff out. That light is artificial: the culture warriors determine what light is shone and what is extinguished.

“THE QUALITY OF LIGHT by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

And I didn’t say that, that is from an essay entitled Poetry is not a Luxury, and it is all about the need for poetry in the lives of women who deeply feel feelings that the language of the greater culture does not express. It is a call for the necessity of poetry as a living art which helps us understand the meaning of being alive in our time. And it was written by Audre Lorde: THE A Black Lesbian Poet.

If you pay attention, you can understand a lot about the society that keeps some birds caged, and releases others into the wild. Like this bird to which we finally return: the starling.

Sturnus vulgaris, the European starling, is a very common bird. With its glossy black plumage seasonally speckled white, flocks of starlings are regular sights in its native range of Eurasia. It also has a gifted voice - able to mimic the calls of other birds. Shakespeare wrote about this gift of mimicry in Henry IV part 1, where the character Hotspur imagines training a starling to torment his enemies:

[clip: He said he would not ransom Mortimer,
Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer.
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll hollo “Mortimer.”
Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.]

It has been said that this passage from Shakespeare nearly destroyed an ecosystem. 

The story goes like this: a man named Eugene Schieffelin was a member of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society as well as the New York Zoological Society and above all, a Bardolater. His fandom of Shakespeare was common in his native New York City - Shakespeare plays were popular on Broadway and Central Park was the site of a bronze statue of the bard. But Schieffelin wanted a living memorial. He was also a member of the American Acclimatization Society - a group dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna to the Americas. The group introduced blackbirds, chaffinches and sparrows to America. The romantic poet William Cullen Bryant composed an ode to this movement in 1869, writing:

“We hear the note of a stranger bird

That ne'er till now in our land was heard.

A winged settler has taken his place

With Teutons and men of Celtic race;

He has followed their path to our hemisphere

The Old-World Sparrow at last is here.”

Schieffelin had a goal: the introduction of every bird mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare - including the starling. In 1890, Schieffelin set a small population of starlings free to roost in Central Park. Within a century, the starling population exploded, making their homes across the continent as far west as California, as far south Sonora, Mexico and as far north as Alaska and Quebec. From an initial population of less than a hundred, starlings at their peak would number 200 million. The starling would prove an invader - not only devouring crops of fruit planted by humans but also by laying eggs in the nests of native birds, crowding out hundreds of species indigenous to the continent to spread more of itself. The starling would learn to mimic species their ancestors never knew: the killdeer, the American robin, the eastern wood pewee, and the red-tailed hawk - all while crowding out these same birds for their habitat, the uncaged birds would sing other birdsongs. The starling would become as much a blight on the ecosystem of the Americas as its featherless European counterparts were. In 2000 the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the world’s one hundred most invasive species. The starling earned its spot on that list.

[clip: All is True “John Hall : I joy to see you dig, sir. At last, given up on your plays to distract the mob from our Lord.
William Shakespeare : Does the lark song distract you from your God, John?
John Hall : Of course not. It is evidence of God.
William Shakespeare : Ah. Well, then, perhaps for some, I was the lark.”]

Here’s thought that haunts me: Shakespeare may have been the lark: was he also, not, the starling? A mimic, an invader, a pest, and a danger to all that is not itself.

But there’s more to the starling, the story about Eugene Schieffelin is itself more myth than fact. 

He did indeed release starlings into Central Park, but the birds had been present in North America for decades before his stunt in 1890. And there’s no evidence that Schieffelin introduced them because of Shakespeare, the first printed mention of Schieffelin’s supposed Shakespeareanism didn’t happen until 1948 in an article by Edwin Way Teale, whose own notes suggested it was speculation. and according to Jason Bittel’s 2022 New York Times article “The Shakespearean Tall Tale That Shaped How We See Starlings” their invasive nature has been overstated - their presence is multifaceted and complex and while they may eat grains of farmers they also eat pests. They are omnivorous, and their presence can do as much good as harm.

The starling, like all things, is complex - and we must honor complexity. We should understand the space it occupies, realize the harm it can do, but still – it’s a pretty bird.

James Baldwin’s essay Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare shows his journey towards seeing the poet through the political project. He ends with this:

“The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it - no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected, but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.”

What struck me most about this essay when reading it was that for Baldwin to appreciate Shakespeare he first had to defamiliarize himself with the cult around him. By connecting with him not as The Greatest Writer Of All Time, but through their mutual humanity.

Perhaps Shakespeare is a starling - ubiquitous, yes. Invasive, perhaps. Beautiful, absolutely. But just a bird, whose song can be heard in the wild among the songs of many other birds. And what a dull, hollow world we’d have if the starling was the only bird singing. 

The reason I stopped talking about Shakespeare is because I was afraid I would become the kind of person who could only talk about Shakespeare. The kind of person who treated Shakespeare as a synonym for “good.” As the kind of person who wanted Art and Beauty and Truth and Humanity to start and end with this one guy four hundred years dead. Those kinds of people, the Dennis Pragers of the world, want a culture that is also four hundred years dead - where nothing can be beautiful unless it is exhumed from the corpse of a working class actor who never lived to see his name justify empires. I instead prefer a world where beautiful art is created constantly by the living; not in austere reverence of the art of the past but in dialogue with it! Where everyone can tell beautiful truths and make beautiful art in a living, breathing, eternally new culture. I stopped talking about Shakespeare because too many people want to only talk about Shakespeare.

And I stopped talking about Shakespeare because I don’t want these corpsefucking fashclowns thinking I’m on their side for even a fucking second. Fuck PragerU. Death to fascism.

And I’m done. The rest is silence.

A big thank you to those who read for quality and sensitivity:

Sara the Fat Culture Critic

Zylla

Ali Nahdee

Regina Russell

Donald Kallgren