TRIGGERnometry - August 23, 2024


Can Shakespeare Survive the New Puritans？ - Andrew Doyle

Topics
wokeness and Shakespeare productions
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Andrew Doyle
Mentioned
Shakespeare Queen Elizabeth Kit Hayam Henry VIII Macbeth Laurence Olivier William Prynne Michelle Dowery Black Panther Ralph Fiennes Bob Mueller Indira Varma Charles III Emma Rice Juliet Duncan Verona
Kevin Sorbo： How I Got Blacklisted by Hollywood The Reality of Sex & Gender, Evolutionary History & Free Will - Richard Dawkins

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

156.11

Word count

1,509

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A playwright who has never been accused of being a hypocrite, William Shakespeare was a man of many talents. He was a poet, a playwright, a philosopher, a writer, and an actor. And yet, when he died in 1650 at the age of twenty-five, he left behind a life of isolation, isolationism, and isolationism.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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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. 0.99
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. 0.97
00:00:56.000 Those were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histromastics, 1633. 0.97
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. 0.99
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. 0.86
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, 1.00
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. 0.58
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, 1.00
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, 1.00
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.