Between suspended teachers and anti-racist seminars to contextualize the texts, Bardo’s works resist the cancel culture but are questioned. Attention and prudence grow
George Orwell, in 1984, predicts that by 2050 but perhaps even earlier, “all the literature of the past will have been destroyed: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron… transformed into something opposite to what they were before. Thought will no longer exist … Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think ».
That’s a terrifying warning, and thankfully in democratic countries, great literature is not openly at risk of censorship, but certainly the great authors of the Western canon live complicated years: lately it’s up to Shakespeare, one of the “dead white men” accused by the academy of a series of crimes including racism, colonialism, sexism.
Those who claim that are isolated (for now) Shakespeare, obsolete, can be removed from the curriculum, but the point is that even the London Globe Theater – it stands on the ashes of the original Shakespearean, an architectural jewel a few steps from the magnificent Tate Modern – is now organizing “anti-racist seminars” to “decolonize” the corpus of Bardo’s works.
Those of the Globe, at least, are seminars, but for sure there are works openly branded by now, in the Anglo-Saxon world, as “problematic” — The storm for the enslavement of Caliban,
The Taming of the Shrew
for misogyny, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream pernicious stereotypes have been found, and so on. In this unfavorable climate, prestigious professorships can also shake: since history has a cruel sense of humor, he has just ended up suspended from teaching – from the chair of musical composition named after Leonard Bernstein by the excellent University of Michigan – Bright Sheng, Chinese composer born in ’55 to whom as a child he cultural revolution immediately seized the piano.
Sheng’s fault: surely the imprudence, if in order to introduce the Verdian Othello to the students he had the (objectively bad) idea of showing the students just the Shakespearean Othello of 1965 with Laurence Olivier. The great English actor made the choice – moreover already a harbinger of controversy in the newspapers at that time, not only in 2021 – to interpreting Othello with a curly wig, impressive pitch black dye on the face, red retouched lips to make them more fleshy. Period document: now Othello is acting without a wig and without make-up or at most with a thread of foundation. The students’ revolt was immediate, the composer’s apology letter and the suspension from teaching were inevitable.
How to play Othello is a living theme in the world of theater: if the actor is not black, the heavy make-up he once used has been filed away – it is unlikely that it does not evoke, in black audiences especially in America, the painful legacy of the “blackface”, the shows of white musicians dressed in blacks with shoe polish on their faces, grotesque white lips, caricature accent. Shakespeare, in his grandeur, goes beyond skin color and gender: currently in the West End triumphs a woman and black Hamlet, the talented Cush Jumbo (in Italy we saw Elisabetta Pozzi in the role of the Prince of Denmark). Caution would require, in the case of Michigan, given the current climate, at least to first warn the students that they are about to see the document of a time different from ours – which is obvious for the more mature, but in 2021 where many conceive art as a mirror, repetita iuvant (Disney often puts a warning before its older cartoons).
Othello, moreover, it has been a philosophical battlefield for centuries: the Americans who staged it in the slave age resolved the impasse by considering the noble Moor a white, not a black. Paul Robeson, who played it in 1943, instead considered the tragedy an indictment of white racism. It is difficult to “erase” Shakespeare, translated into more than a hundred languages, represented worldwide, two billion copies sold (The merchant of Venice, objectively anti-Semitic, nevertheless resisted for artistic merits), but it takes attention. In his memoirs Nelson Mandela – a passionate reader of Shakespeare and the Greek classics – tells the story of a clandestine meeting in the 1950s: hearing the mention of Caesar and Brutus, someone asks perplexed: «Who are they? Died?”. Yes, concludes Mandela, but the reality of the betrayal is very much alive. Like Shakespeare.
October 20, 2021 (change October 20, 2021 | 09:16)
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