I find that I enjoy the works of Shakespeare more when I have reviewed the written text in advance. Reading Romeo and Juliet last week in anticipation of an impending trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario), I was once again struck by how far Shakespeare can offend contemporary sensibilities.
Take the opening scene from Romeo and Juliet. Samson and Gregory, apparently working for the Capulets, bad mouth what they will do to the Montagues if they get the chance. Samson brags,
I will show myself as a tyrant: when I have fought with the men, I will be courteous to the maidens: I will cut off their heads.
What Samson means by “heads” is “maidens,” and the rest of the dialogue makes it clear that what he means is forced rape. This is Shakespeare’s idea of comic dialogue!
Something soft, I suppose, compared to the evil of some of the characters of David Mamet and Harold Pinter. But after all we’ve been reading lately about the deliberate use of rape as a tool of genocide in Africa, it’s a bit crude.
And, of course, one doesn’t have to look for much politically incorrect material in Shakespeare. In Othello, all the characters assume that Desdemona debases herself by making the two-backed beast out of the dark Moor, “a Barbary horse.” In The Taming of the Shrew (also at the Stratford Festival this season) Petruchio teaches submission to Katherina; she becomes almost a Stepford wife. And in The Merchant of Venice, the miser Shylock is the very embodiment of anti-Semitic prejudice, and at the end of the play he is forced to “convert” to Christianity.
As I recall, last year the Stratford Festival posted a warning on their website that The Merchant of Venice was a “controversial” play (as much as they warned about nudity or the use of smoke on stage!). And the program for the Merchant from last year actually seemed to apologize for the Bard:
The antisemitic nature of the work has caused controversy, particularly in the 20th century. Anti-Semitism is not limited to the evil characters in the play, leading scholars to conclude that Shakespeare himself must have accepted at least some of the prejudices of his day.
It is an unfortunate commentary on our politically correct times for a theater company to feel they must apologize in advance for the material in a Shakespeare play, concerned that the audience might confuse the playwright’s biases with those of the director.
No one needs to make excuses for Shakespeare. We should be tolerant enough and humble enough to recognize that in every culture and at every moment in history, educated people of goodwill have had moral blind spots. That includes, of course, 21st-century Americans and Canadians, as well as the man who wrote Romeo and Juliet.