Decolonizing Shakespeare: A Job for Monty Python

Back from comedy to reality. Archives are being reviewed, and terms deemed problematic from a contemporary perspective are contextualized or removed, while alternative viewpoints are foregrounded. Anyone who has visited a museum will recognize the accompanying panels that claim to contextualize works of art.

In practice, they often construct a parallel reality in which, through a mixture of fashionable ideology and historical distortion, artists of earlier periods are disparaged on the basis of present-day ideas and accused of offences they could not even have conceived in their own time. If an artist depicts a beautiful woman, perhaps even in the nude, and emphasizes her beauty, he is labelled a sexist. If he portrays indigenous people from a European perspective, he is deemed a racist.

Long Before the Age of Empire

Shakespeare, too, is judged by standards that arose centuries after his death. He himself had no influence over the later colonial use of his works. To present him as an indirect carrier of colonial ideology blurs, in an entirely impermissible way, the boundary between reception and authorship.

Such museum practices are contradictory and ultimately absurd. On the one hand, they seek to remove or reinterpret problematic elements. On the other, they claim to make history critically visible. Yet adapting historical sources to contemporary sensibilities risks smoothing over the past rather than making it intelligible. History, including literary history, is never free of conflict. Attempts to bend it into a more comfortable shape inevitably lead to distortion.

Shakespeare is not spared this levelling impulse. The English playwright is no longer to be presented as the singular summit of world literature, but as one author among many of equal standing within a global canon.

In the British Empire, Shakespeare’s linguistic brilliance was regarded, with good reason, as a symbol of a highly developed culture. His works served in colonial education systems as a benchmark of literary excellence. Postcolonial criticism may have a point in suggesting that local writers were sometimes overlooked, insofar as traditions of poetry existed in the colonies. Yet the very idea of cultural universality now falls under general suspicion. Shakespeare’s global reception, from India to Africa, demonstrates the opposite. His works have been appropriated and reinterpreted in a multitude of ways.

A Universal Genius

Critics of attempts to decolonize the playwright argue that such global appropriation is a sign of cultural openness rather than dominance. The notion that universality is inherently "colonial" may, paradoxically, amount to a new form of cultural limitation.

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Ultimately, the postcolonial effort to dismantle hierarchies leads to fresh simplifications. If Shakespeare is no longer permitted to be regarded as the greatest writer, but must instead be seen merely as one among many, aesthetic judgement becomes politically regulated. Questions of literary quality are replaced by ideological criteria. That such a step is more likely to harm than to enrich the diversity of literature ought to be self-evident.

In the end, it is striking how little this debate affects Shakespeare’s reception worldwide. Outside the confines of self-appointed cultural elites, his works continue to be read, performed and reinterpreted. Scholars of literature and theatre see precisely in that adaptability his enduring strength, the capacity to be placed in ever new contexts without being reduced to a single interpretation. In essence, that is what defines a classic. Or, to put it in the poet’s own words, the world is a stage, and the interpretation of his works appears to be a play without end.

One might agree with Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."