Posts tagged: shakespeare
revisionist lay criticism for shakespeare is so popular both as like, word-of-mouth truisms — “romeo and juliet isn’t REALLY about love, everyone gets it ALL WRONG, what it’s REALLY about is—” (which is like the literary equivalent of urban legends about hidden legendary pokemon in pokemon red) — and well-meaning but ill-advised attempts to make the supposed canon ‘edgy’ and ‘relatable,’ no shakespeare’s not dry and irrelevant he’s REALLY relevant he’s SUPER relevant! and entertaining too! it comes off as kind of a fearful tryhard bleat, ineffectual flailing in the face of losing kids to paranormal ya and video games. which. the works of william shakespeare are many things but strictly textually relevant to the life of the average american teenager is not one of them. so good luck with that
actually what gets on me more is the common (in fandom and some starry-eyed lit departments) and hopeful claim that shakespeare is or was ~SUBVERSIVE~: usually pointing to the obvious and common elements of tongue-in-cheek homoeroticism and genderbending/crossdressing in his plays. which. uh, again, values dissonance. it’s not that he was flouting taboo, it’s that sociohistorical ‘progression’ even within the same or related cultures is, well, fictitious, but moreover is not actually a linear march from some nebulous state of conservatism to some nebulous state of progressivism with a few setbacks and regressions; the sexual morals of london of shakespeare’s time weren’t the sexual morals of today’s london, and they certainly weren’t the sexual morals of today’s united states. there’s a big difference between asserting that the staging of shakespeare’s work can be harnessed to some progressive purpose in the present day US against our particular shades of puritanical morals and asserting that they were radical purely on grounds that they might make rick santorum uncomfortable.
one can’t just decide that the things one likes and finds personally empowering are intrinsically radical and subversive on a macro, historical level because one wants them to be
… well, one certainly can, as evidenced by the vast majority of tumblr. but. but it’d make me PEEVISH ok
There are definitely valid concerns in this post. For one, assuming that society is inevitably marching from some more primitive state to some more advanced and enlightened state, and that all things can me placed somewhere on this path is not only simplistic and wrong, but rooted in racism and imperialism and very problematic.
The idea that the mores of one era and place can be at all mapped on to those of another is also a really problematic thing, and is an issue in both lay and academic criticisms - don’t think folks in ivory towers are immune from the inability to see the times so differently.
This comment interests me on a meta critical level, though, because that at least since the Romantics, every single movement I can think of has found a way to claim Shakespeare as if not the first of their canon, as a fore runner, or predictor of it - I have read naturalist claiming Shakespeare was a revolutionary in naturalism. Modernists and existentialists were fond of calling him the first modernist or the first true tragedian since the Greeks and thus the founder of their movement. Looking for a foundation in Shakespeare is practically a requirement at this point for a new field of theory and criticism or a new school of play writing. Everyone tries to stage Shakespeare as per the dictates of their favorite school of drama.
So this is very far from either new or lay.
Before I continue, I should note I am by no means very well studied in Elizabethan England nor do I claim to have read, let alone studied, all of Shakespeare’s writing.
But to claim that Shakespeare wasn’t at all subversive is something I question. Yes, it is very true that gender bending would have not been seen as something at all subversive - rather as a kind of sly bit of comedy for a theatre where all parts are played by men anyway. Plays were subject to censor, and Shakespeare’s own family were subject to arrest for religious and/or political reasons. So he was very much aware of the politics of the age. Plays were also “vulgar” entertainment - they were specifically made to appeal to the non-elite as well as the educated. In that sense alone, the Marxist readings of Shakespeare have grounding. In a sense, his play’s contemporary success means he had a good finger on the pulse of his contemporary politics of the “masses” and the elite.
His plays are also noted for breaking with the “standards of drama” of the day. Someone more versed in Elizabethan drama can tell you more, but some contemporary critics noted that he seemed to want for knowledge of convention and knowledge of the canon. That alone can be taken as subversive. People often called him a “natural, unlearned genius” though that comment probably gained popularity due to the Romantics love of that kind of thing.
But it is also important to remember that when a piece of literary criticism mentions “Shakespeare” they might be referring to the canon of Shakespeare’s writing, rather than the man himself. And any arguments they make about the text thus no longer depend one bit on the man himself, and become very easy to divorce from time and place. The gender bending in Shakespeare might not have been subversive for the Globe stage in the 1500’s, but if an all women’s Shakespeare troop preforms the Twelfth Night for an AIDS benefit, suddenly the genderbending becomes very subversive. It’s part of what happens when you allow for Death of the Author - it also kind of kills the original context. (OP did touch on this)
Which takes me to the part I take issue with the most in the original post.
Of COURSE Shakespeare’s canon is relevant to today’s youth. How could it be relevant and critical to every art movement up through the 20th century and suddenly stop?
How are two teenagers, restricted by their parents generations war, stuck in a city plagued by gang violence, caught up in a youthful passion turned tragic NOT relevant to inner city kids? Did you miss West Side Story?
How is Othello and Merchant of Venice not important to students facing discrimination today? Are there no more young women whose lives are controlled and constrained by men?
I mean, here, have a screenshot from a mid 1990’s cartoon from a franchise still making millions in the box office.

He does the whole quotation, but I am not going to subject anyone to more of that animation style. I mean, you’ll be pretty hard pressed to find a Jewish High School in this country that doesn’t make it’s students read that play and discuss it on length. Or HERE is a link to a Key and Peele sketch from this year on Othello, for that perspective.
By the way, OP, I mean you no ill will, if you even read this - this post was stuck in my drafts for who knows how long basically until I had the brain power to get around to typing until I had an excuse to make everyone look at 1990’s animated Hank McCoy.