William Shakespeare, you will be canceled.
An increasing number of awakened teachers refuse to study the Bard – accusing his classic works of promoting “misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny.”
A slew of English literature teachers told the School Library Journal (SLJ) how they were setting aside the likes of ‘Hamlet’, ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to ‘make way for modern, diverse and inclusive voices’.
“Shakespeare was a tool used to ‘civilize’ black and brown people in the English empire,” said Shakespearean scholar Ayanna Thompson, an English professor at Arizona State University.
Teachers must also denounce “the whiteness” of the assumption that Shakespeare’s works are “universal,” insisted Jeffrey Austin, head of the English literature department of a Michigan high school.
Claire Bruncke, a former Washington public school teacher, told SLJ she had banned the Bard from her class to “stray from centering the story of white, cisgender, heterosexual men.”
“Eliminating Shakespeare was an easy step I could take to work towards that. And it turned out to be worth it for my students, ”she insisted.
Other teachers said they stuck with Shakespeare, but reformulated his works through a more modern lens.
Sarah Mulhern Gross, an English teacher at High Technology High School in Lincroft, NJ, said she taught “Romeo and Juliet” “with a side of toxic masculinity analysis.”
In her SLJ article, “To Teach or Not To Teach,” librarian Amanda MacGregor acknowledged the Bard as a “wordsmith of genius” responsible for “masterful puns, creative language, biting humor, puns and innovative characters.”
Yet she understood why so many teachers “struggled” and eventually “gave up Shakespeare’s work.”
“Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with a lot of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogyny,” MacGregor wrote, with misogyny targeting black women as the last word.