TRIGGERnometry - August 23, 2024


Can Shakespeare Survive the New Puritans？ - Andrew Doyle


Episode Stats

Length

9 minutes

Words per Minute

156.10883

Word Count

1,509

Sentence Count

90

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:30.000 The Puritans had it in for Shakespeare.
00:00:37.000 With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood.
00:00:41.000 As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, boards, pandas, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane and godless persons.
00:00:56.000 Those were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histromastics, 1633.
00:01:01.000 He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the Puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down.
00:01:07.000 When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public's appetite for drama.
00:01:16.000 It was Shakespeare's work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.
00:01:22.000 Now the bard faces another breed of Puritan, more sensorial than the last.
00:01:27.000 We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably, those in the creative arts have turned out to be the most conformist of all.
00:01:35.000 Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrong-think is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics.
00:01:44.000 Virtually all productions of Shakespeare's plays that I've seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time.
00:01:52.000 Today's audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.
00:01:59.000 Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether.
00:02:03.000 We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers,
00:02:09.000 and the little sermons in the programs by directors who think their job is to educate the masses.
00:02:14.000 One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show's content, he's willing to accept it.
00:02:21.000 I suppose it's like going for dinner in an especially pious household and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.
00:02:28.000 Theatre-goers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold.
00:02:36.000 Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice.
00:02:41.000 In his work, we find ourselves unmolested by ideology.
00:02:45.000 We know nothing of Shakespeare's opinions on matters of politics or religion,
00:02:48.000 and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile.
00:02:53.000 I think A.L. Rouse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare saw through everybody equally.
00:03:00.000 Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.
00:03:04.000 Even in Henry V, written at a time when England was gripped in a patriotic fervour,
00:03:09.000 Shakespeare ensures that our hero is morally ambiguous.
00:03:13.000 When Laurence Olivier made his government-funded nationalistic film adaptation during World War II,
00:03:18.000 he was compelled to excise the moment where Henry at Agincourt orders the French prisoners to be killed.
00:03:25.000 It simply wasn't on for this paragon of Englishness to behave so ruthlessly.
00:03:30.000 If you're looking for a Disney-fied world of goodies and baddies, Shakespeare isn't for you.
00:03:35.000 But this is precisely the world imagined by the high priests of critical social justice,
00:03:40.000 those killjoys who have invaded the theatre industry and seek to deprive us of our cakes and ale.
00:03:47.000 You're either in lockstep with every aspect of their doctrine, or you're on the wrong side of history.
00:03:53.000 And when an ideology captures an organisation, that organisation ceases to function effectively
00:03:58.000 and becomes a mere conduit for the propagation of the creed.
00:04:02.000 The two major companies responsible for producing Shakespeare's works,
00:04:05.000 The Royal Shakespeare Company and The Globe in London,
00:04:08.000 are now seemingly beholden to the tenets of wokeness.
00:04:12.000 The Globe regularly holds anti-racist Shakespeare webinars,
00:04:16.000 which assemble scholars and artists of colour from a wide variety of backgrounds
00:04:21.000 to examine Shakespeare's plays through the lens of race and social justice.
00:04:25.000 It sounds like some kind of punishment,
00:04:27.000 but apparently there are people who actually attend those kind of sessions voluntarily.
00:04:31.000 And in 2022, The Globe staged a new play called I, Joan,
00:04:36.000 which presented Joan of Arc as non-binary on the basis that she was powerful, independent and wore armour.
00:04:43.000 Presumably a female Joan of Arc would have been too busy knitting,
00:04:46.000 gossiping and shopping for shoes to fight the English.
00:04:49.000 To accompany the production, an activist academic called Kit Hayam was invited to write an essay
00:04:55.000 in which it was claimed that Queen Elizabeth I could have been non-binary for similar reasons.
00:05:00.000 She was even assigned they-them pronouns.
00:05:03.000 According to Hayam,
00:05:04.000 Elizabeth I described themself regularly in speeches as king, queen and prince,
00:05:11.000 choosing strategically to emphasise their female identity or their male monarchical role at different points.
00:05:18.000 One thinks of the Queen's famous speech to the troops at Tilbury,
00:05:21.000 I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.
00:05:27.000 For the literal minded, this wasn't a declaration of strength, but a coming out party.
00:05:33.000 The decline of The Globe theatre has been ongoing for some years now.
00:05:37.000 Former artistic director Emma Rice, who was perhaps the first to use The Globe as a springboard for identity politics,
00:05:43.000 even admitted that she found Shakespeare boring.
00:05:46.000 While there's nothing wrong with that, it does seem odd that she found herself applying for the job.
00:05:51.000 It's a bit like training to be a chiropodist when you can't stand the sight of feet.
00:05:55.000 And when the current artistic director Michelle Terry took on the role in 2018,
00:05:59.000 she made it clear that diversity and inclusivity were her priorities.
00:06:04.000 As she said to Time Out magazine,
00:06:07.000 I think this binary way of looking at gender, looking at the world, has reached a tipping point.
00:06:11.000 We're doing a gender-blind, race-blind, disability-blind production of Hamlet.
00:06:16.000 That show didn't go well, as one critic waspishly mused,
00:06:20.000 to leave or not to leave, that is the question.
00:06:24.000 In 2021, The Globe produced a new woke reimagining of Romeo and Juliet,
00:06:29.000 in which the drama was reinterpreted as a comment on mental health.
00:06:33.000 The lovers' obsession for each other was presented as some kind of mental disorder,
00:06:38.000 with statistics about depression among teenagers projected onto a screen above the stage.
00:06:43.000 The suicides at the end of the play were explained away in similar terms.
00:06:47.000 Never has tragedy been so tedious.
00:06:50.000 And so it was refreshing to see the recent site-specific production of Macbeth at Doc X in London.
00:06:56.000 As much as I admire its stars, Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma, my expectations were naturally low.
00:07:02.000 On making our way into the auditorium, the audience passed through a kind of war zone,
00:07:07.000 complete with the rubble of fallen buildings and a burnt-out car.
00:07:10.000 Any sense of an immersive experience was impossible, really,
00:07:14.000 with so many punters taking selfies next to the car while carrying their plastic beakers of wine.
00:07:19.000 Gimmicks aside, once we were 15 minutes into the show, I felt a sense of relief.
00:07:25.000 This was actually Shakespeare's play.
00:07:27.000 Updated to a modern setting, to be sure, but otherwise intact.
00:07:31.000 There were some textual modifications here and there.
00:07:33.000 Duncan's entrance was postponed so that the captain's account of the battle
00:07:37.000 could be delivered in the form of a soliloquy.
00:07:39.000 And the scenes with the porter and Hecate were removed.
00:07:42.000 Something is always lost in such interventions, but these are minor grumbles,
00:07:47.000 and at least we weren't subjected to moralistic hectoring disguised as drama.
00:07:51.000 This production may not have soared to the heights of which Shakespeare's masterpiece is capable,
00:07:56.000 and I had some reservations about the choice to present Macbeth as an awkward and weather-worn veteran,
00:08:01.000 but it was a fairly solid effort.
00:08:03.000 And all it took was for the director to have some faith in the text
00:08:07.000 and the immense power of Shakespeare's words.
00:08:10.000 The show worked precisely because it didn't attempt to force the square peg of Shakespeare
00:08:15.000 into the round hole of intersectional monomania.
00:08:18.000 When the fashionable beliefs of our time are imposed onto historical works of art,
00:08:23.000 they are invariably denuded of much of their profundity.
00:08:27.000 The two gentlemen of Verona will always be preferable to the two trans women of Brighton and Hove,
00:08:32.000 because the universal human themes of love, friendship and infidelity
00:08:36.000 are far more exhilarating than tokenistic identity politics.
00:08:39.000 Shakespeare will endure far longer than this current ideological fad,
00:08:44.000 however much its disciples try to tear him down.
00:08:47.000 He defeated the Puritans during his own lifetime,
00:08:50.000 and we can be sure he'll do so again.
00:08:53.000 If you enjoyed this video, please do check out my substack,
00:08:56.000 where these articles appear weeks in advance.
00:08:58.000 There's lots of other material there too, so please check out the link in the description.
00:09:09.000 There's a link in the description.
00:09:10.000 Thank you.