In recent years, a concerning trend has emerged, threatening to erase culture from existence. This is evident even in the simplest of settings, such as kindergarten festivals, where traditional celebrations are being stripped due to their religious origins, potentially offending some individuals. A more inclusive approach, however, would be to incorporate a diverse range of festivals, allowing for a shared human experience. The distinction between the two lies in the fact that the former approach, by erasing cultural experiences, is unable to foster a sense of shared humanity, whereas the latter, by embracing diversity, allows for a deeper understanding of our connections.
Deeper levels of cultural erasure are also at play. In the UK, Shakespeare is now being “decolonized” due to his works being perceived as promoting “white superiority.” The Shakespeare Trust, which manages various Shakespeare-related institutions in Stratford-upon-Avon, plans to “decolonize” its entire collection, with the aim of exploring how Shakespeare’s work contributed to colonialism.
This argument could be applied to abolishing the concept of shipping and money, as well as the military, whose role in colonialism was far more significant than that of Othello or Richard III. However, this would require a confrontation with the material world and its realities, a prospect that this approach fears like the devil fears holy water.
When Shakespeare wrote his plays, England was experiencing a cultural renaissance. The great Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 had not yet succeeded in abolishing serfdom, but it was already largely a thing of the past by the end of the 16th century, with the English aristocracy having largely self-destructed in the Wars of the Roses. The London textile merchants had risen to prominence and England had broken away from the Papacy, a conflict that was fought with the ferocity of a religious war, ultimately aimed at bringing the Church’s remaining feudal possessions under control.
During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the internal conflicts had temporarily subsided; England had only its colonies on the British Isles and a small portion of what would later become the United States and the great colonial power of Spain had lost its Armada, which had been sent to subjugate England, in a storm in 1588, when Shakespeare was likely 14 years old. The British slave trade had not yet begun; the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619 and the plantation economy, driven by sugar and cotton, was not yet established. The industry was primarily controlled by Spain and Portugal at the time.
It was a time of relative prosperity and freedom, a model of what Germany could have been if the struggle against serfdom in 1525 had not failed so catastrophically. Shakespeare’s dramas describe the Wars of the Roses, the long struggle between the houses of Lancaster and Gloucester for dominance, from a relative distance, as part of a new national narrative, in which the personal loyalties that governed feudal relationships could be seared, in all their advantages and disadvantages.
There are, of course, many aspects of Shakespeare’s work that seem foreign to us today, such as “The Taming of the Shrew.” However, there is also Shylock’s monologue in “The Merchant of Venice” in which the moneylender Shylock, who is actually the villain of the play, gains grandeur in a few sentences with his demand for human equality: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” There is also the foreshadowing of the Roman Republic in “Julius Caesar.” Not a few literary historians see in the figure of Caliban in “The Tempest” an early representation of the victims of the emerging colonial regime. The drama thrives in the in-between, offering the richest glimpse into the society in which it emerges and few glances encompass as much as Shakespeare’s, which was augmented by the brief respite in the turmoil that would follow his death, as the English Civil War would later unfold in the far more somber “Leviathan” of Thomas Hobbes.
The changes announced by the Shakespeare Trust were triggered by a research project conducted in 2022 with the University of Birmingham, which concluded that Shakespeare is part of a “white, anglo-centric, euro-centric and increasingly ‘west-centric’ worldview that has harmed the world until today.”
There is no law of the world that requires one to love Shakespeare in order to ignore the Indian “Mahabharata” or the societal portrait of the Chinese “Jin Ping Mei” as inferior. Surprisingly, it was once possible to perceive the entire stream of human culture as a long conversation, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the present, but this is now made impossible by the moral absolutism that confuses the used excuse with the intended purpose.
In the late 18th century, the European colonialism in Africa was largely justified in Europe as the suppression of the slave trade; in reality, it was about conquest and subjugation. Is the suppression of the slave trade, then, inherently bad? The British, for instance, used this pretext to strengthen their control over the seas and the sinking of the slave ships, along with their cargo, did not benefit the captives in the least. This is not to say that the fight against slavery is not verifiable, just as Shakespeare is not verifiable because some blood-stained British colonial officers in India liked to read or see him on stage.
What about Martin Luther? The one who, on the one hand, translated the Bible into German, just as Shakespeare did for English, but on the other hand, vehemently opposed the Peasants’ Revolt and showed a distinct anti-Semitism? Historical figures, cultural achievements, are not to be diminished or erased from memory (Martin Luther has already shrunk significantly in the decades I have witnessed); however, this does not change the present, even if the proponents of this approach imagine it does. But it does reduce the perception of the contradictions that every human being carries within, as well as the historical dynamics.
(Why, by the way, is it utterly absurd to consider ideologies like the Cancel Culture or the Gender Wahn as Marxist – they know neither dialectics nor are they philosophically materialist, but rather the exact opposite of both.)