Why Not Censor Shakespeare Next?

T hey started with Roald Dahl. Now they’re after Ian Fleming. May I ask who will be next? William Shakespeare, perhaps?

“That won’t happen!” I hear you cry. Well, why not? Certainly, Shakespeare’s work is extraordinarily widely known. But so is Dahl’s. And so is Fleming’s. And besides: It is the very fact that our society is familiar with a given set of works that makes the totalitarian want to bowdlerize those works in the first place. About our literary “sensitivity readers” there is more than a touch of the evangelical — ultimately, they believe themselves to be saving souls — and the broader the readership, the more souls there are to be saved. Like Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl was targeted because his books remain popular. People read them, they remember them, they are changed by them. In a world in which words are deemed to be violence, this will not do.

So I’ll ask again: Why not do Shakespeare next?

Unlike Dahl and Fleming, Shakespeare is out of copyright, which means that anyone can publish his work in as redacted or unredacted a form as they wish. But it would be naïve to assume that this will alter the obscurantists’ desire. Nowhere has the long march through our institutions been more successful than in the arts and in education, and if, as at both Puffin and at Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., the powers that be determine that Shakespeare’s catalogue could do with an Approved Edition, that Approved Edition will soon become the ruthlessly enforced norm in our universities, theaters, credential-houses, and beyond. The last time this was tried, it failed. Next time — when the full weight of the progressive establishment is put squarely behind the vandals — it will not.

It is often said that Shakespeare has a character for everyone, and, alas, this also holds true for our caviling arbiters of taste. The Tempest’s Caliban is described in the play’s dramatis personae as “a savage and deformed slave,” and in the play as both a “moon calf” and a figure who was “not honour’d with a human shape.” Is that acceptable? Othello includes all manner of racial slurs: Iago tells Brabantio that “now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe,” warns him that “you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse,” and proposes that there is something “most rank” and “unnatural” about Desdemona’s lack of interest in marrying a man “of her own clime, complexion, and degree,” while Brabantio believes that his daughter must have been “enchanted” with “foul charms” to, “in spite of nature,” have consented to “fall in love with what she feared to look on!” Is this “sensitivity”-compliant language? And what about The Merchant of Venice, which is built around a Jewish character named Shylock, who not only plies his trade lending money on the most unpleasant terms, but who is converted to Christianity at the end of the play. Is Caliban misunderstood by modern audiences? Perhaps. Are the aspersions against Othello included descriptively, as in Huckleberry Finn? Maybe. Was Shakespeare in fact sympathetic to Shylock, as might be suggested by his seminal inquiry, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Conceivably, yes. Has any of that tended to matter once the moral panic has begun? It has not.

One finds “non-inclusive” material throughout Shakespeare’s canon. Henry IV is bursting with fat jokes that make the one removed from Dahl’s Matilda seem positively innocuous. There’s, “How long is’t ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?” and “These lies are like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain” and “This bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh” and:

Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in Years?”

Seen from a particular perspective, Macbeth advances the misogynistic trope that behind every guilty-seeming man, there is a woman (in this case, not only Lady Macbeth, the “fiend-like queen,” but the three witches, too) who has manipulated him into carrying out her dastardly schemes. Richard III rewrites the history of England to advance an “ableist” caricature of malevolence. Julius Caesar lionizes and justifies political violence. I could go on.

If this all sounds rather ridiculous to you, rest assured that I wholeheartedly agree. I merely ask this question in the hope of being told where the line is. If one assumes what our self-appointed “sensitivity readers” assume, I can discern no principled reason why Shakespeare should be spared the treatment that has been administered to Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. The new version of The Twits removes a reference to a “double chin”; the new edition of James and the Giant Peach changes “one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled” to “A face that looked like a great soggy overboiled cabbage”; and the word “fat” has been excised from every single one of his books. Why, pray, is that beyond the pale where “stuffed cloak-bag of guts” is not?

The same goes for race. All of Dahl’s references to “black” and “white” have been removed — the BFG’s cloak is no longer black, and characters no longer turn “white with fear” — while many of Ian Fleming’s archaic descriptions of minorities have been expunged. Is Shakespeare different somehow? In Othello, the title character obsesses over his wife’s white skin (“Yet I’ll not shed her blood / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster”), consciously associates his own murderous behavior with darkness (“Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell!”), and then hears this fed back to him by Emilia once the deed is done (“O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil!”) Are we to believe that these ideas destroy readers’ enjoyment of Dahl and Fleming, but not of Shakespeare? And, if so, why?

That, as someone famous once wrote, is the question.