Stratford-upon-Avon. The idea of ‘decolonising’ the great writer William Shakespeare has become the subject of cultural debate in Britain. Among those affected is the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. The discussion rests on the claim that the veneration of Shakespeare as a ‘universal genius’ forms part of a Eurocentric outlook that emerged in the context of colonialism. A study published in 2022 argues that presenting Shakespeare as the world’s greatest poet ‘reinforces the ideology of white European superiority’.
In that spirit, not only the works themselves but also their presentation in museums are to be critically reassessed. The aim is to create an ‘inclusive museum experience’ in Stratford-upon-Avon, one that makes visible the influence of colonial structures on interpretation and reception. Translated into plain language, it amounts to white self-hatred seeking to diminish one of the greatest writers the world has produced.
This is one for Monty Python
The very demand to ‘decolonise’ William Shakespeare sounds, at first glance, like a new project for Monty Python. The troupe around John Cleese might indeed succeed in wrenching a 16th-century writer so far from his historical context that a man who lived long before the height of the British Empire becomes the object of postcolonial critique. There is no doubt it would be pitch-black British humour.
One can already picture a non-binary Juliet and a body-positive Romeo with a migrant background retreating into a safe space to escape their supposedly racist parents. The casting would have to follow suit. The old white man Iago, who of course intrigues against Othello for purely racist reasons, might still be portrayed as white. Everyone else would have to be PoC or LGBT. Points for victimhood in other categories would no doubt also be welcomed.
Back from comedy to reality. Archives are being reviewed, and terms deemed problematic from a contemporary perspective are contextualised or removed, while alternative viewpoints are foregrounded. Anyone who has visited a museum will recognise the accompanying panels that claim to contextualise 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 emphasises 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 decolonise 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.
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.’