Why Not Censor Shakespeare Next?

They 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.

CC

About the Author

Charles C. W. Cooke

Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.

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They 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.