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"The tension between loving a work of art and understanding the harm the work of 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 birth.
The Tempest was partially inspired by an account of a wreck on the quote unquote discovery of Bermuda.
And the text explicitly codes as an indigenous person while also bestializing him as being part fish. His enslaver Prospero calls him a misshapen knave and a demidevil. 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.
“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 where they will not give a penny to relieve a lame beggar. They will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.”
England was making its first foray 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. Oh, brave new world that has such people in.
Reading The Tempest in Robben Island prison, Billy Nair might have also appreciated the part where Caliban says to Prospero, "You taught me language and my profit 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 off stage 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 1611. Jamestown was founded 4 years prior.
5 years later, Pocahontas was captured and exploited to make men's fortunes, just as Trinculo imagined he could do with Caliban.
In 1619, a mere eight 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 misshapen knaves and demidevils that they saw as Calibans?
The idea that Shakespeare, alone among writers, spoke universal human truths forces an ignorance in his readers to all the ways that he is not universal.
The basic line 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.
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 gone mad” when critics claim that Shakespeare has been used to promote white supremacy, they cry while doing exactly that, while using Shakespeare to promote white supremacy.
Dennis Prager is 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 anti-semitism, sexism, the subtle politics of gender identity and sexuality, and the history of imperial and colonial violence, how all forms of politics shape our lives is important and they are bigger than Shakespeare.
These are all 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's 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 when 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-Shakespearees who may be black or queer or feminine or even all three.
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:
"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 I was convinced that Shakespeare was a black girl in the South who had been molested once. 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."
I knew that, that was my grandmother he was talking about, that sweet love remembered, and that's how I felt about her.
(Maya Angelou, reciting Sonnet 29)
Maya Angelou was moved by Shakespeare. Would teaching the poetry of Angelou mean not teaching the poetry of Shakespeare?
Of course not!
It just means that we teach the truth. And the truth is we live in a world where everyone is capable of understanding beauty and capable of creating beauty.
And to those people, who think that culture begins and ends with a dead actor named Will, remember 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 US Naval Academy's library as part of the Trump administration's 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.
Notice how the voice of the artist and the past doesn't include Maya Angelou, whom he calls a “terrible poet.”
Angelou died in 2014.
Surely she's in the past, right? Does her voice get to be considered the voice of the artist?
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's all about the need for poetry in the lives of women who deeply feel feelings the language of the greater culture does not express.
It is a call for the necessity of poetry as 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.
Sturnis Vulgaris, the European starling, is a very common bird with its glossy black plumage seasonally speckled white.
Flocks of starlings are a regular sight 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 the Fourth Part One where the character Hotspur imagines training a starling to torment his enemies:
"He said he would not ransom Mortimer for bad my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he lies asleep and in his ear I'll holler 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 Genealological and Biographical Society as well as the New York Zoological Society and, above all, a Bardolater.
His fandom of Shakespeare was common in the state of 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, chaffes, 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 untill 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 as Sonora, Mexico, and as far north as Alaska and Quebec.
From an initial population of less than 100, starlings at their peak would number 200 million.
The starling would prove an invader, not only devouring crops of group 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 kildeer, the American robin, the eastern wood pewee, and the red tailed hawk, all while crowding out these same birds their habitat, the uncaged birds would sing other bird songs.
The starling would become as much a blight on the ecosystem of the Americas as its featherlesst European counterparts were.
In 2000, the International Union of the Conservation of Nature listed the world's 100 most invasive species.
The starling earned its spot on that list.
Here's the thought that haunts me. Shakespeare may have been the lark. Was he also not the starling? 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 supposed Shakespeareism didn't happen until 1948 in an article by Edwin Way Teal, whose own note suggested that 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 must understand the space it occupies, realize the harm it can do. But still, it's a pretty bird.
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.
What a dull hollow world would we live in. If the starling was the only bird singing.
In the essay 'Why I stopped hating Shakespeare', James Baldwin 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's 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 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."
The reason I stopped talking about Shakespeare is because I was afraid I'd become the kind of person who can only talk about Shakespeare.
The kind of person who treated Shakespeare as a synonym for good. The kind of person who wanted art and beauty and truth and humanity to start and end with this one guy 400 years dead.
Those kinds of people, the Dennis Pragers of the world, want a culture that is also 400 years dead, where nothing can be beautiful unless it's 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 an austere reverence 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."
(Kyle Kallgren - Brows Held High: PragerU's Terrible Shakespeare Opinions, or Why I Stopped Talking About Shakespeare)
