In 1932, the Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on Shakespeare’s
birthday with President Herbert Hoover and Robert Frost in attendance.
The Library would house the world's largest collection of Shakespeare
First Folios, and and hundreds of thousands of volumes gathered across
the centuries.
"In almost unbelievable fullness and richness, we assembled books,
pamphlets, documents, manuscripts, relics, curios," James Quincy Adams
Jr, its first director, wrote. "The library is thus more than a mere
library; it is also a museum of the Golden Age of Elizabeth, and a
memorial to the influence that Shakespeare has exerted upon the world's
culture."
These days, the Folger Shakespeare Library has a new mission. And it isn’t Shakespeare.
After George Floyd died during a confrontation with police, the director
of the Folger Shakespeare Library declared that, "the fight against
racial injustice is essential to what we do as an institution."
What does Floyd have to do with Shakespeare and what does racism have to do with the Folger Library?
In the Soviet Union or Mao's China, every subject, no matter how
abstruse, had to be studied through the lens of Marxism-Leninism or
Maoism. Shakespearean characters, according to the Communists, were
revolutionary figures, and were trying to solve the "central problems"
of a "bourgeois society."
But what the Communists did to Shakespeare was nothing compared to the Folger Library.
The Folger Shakespeare Library, once known for being able to display
medieval lutes, classic playbills, and theatrical costumes, is now
hosting Critical Race Conversations.
The Critical Race Conversations are the outcome of a formerly respected
institution declaring that diversity is "central" to its mission with a
focus on race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Its current fellows include the likes of Wan-Chuan Kao, who claims to be
a "queer medievalist of color" and applies Robin DiAngelo's racist
White Fragility tract to characters in Chaucer turning pale.
The Critical Race Conversations are built around Critical Race Theory, a
Marxist idea taking root in an institution founded by a Standard Oil
executive, which reduces all human society to racial tribalism.
Much like Soviet analyses of Shakespeare, the current crop have nothing
to say about the Bard, and, like their Communist counterparts, they
don’t especially care about the Bard. Communist academics was roughly
divided between censored scholars who knew that the only way they could
discuss their favorite subject was by cloaking it in Communist jargon,
and hacks who knew that they could get through any topic by reciting
clichés about class, bourgeois society, and the inevitable triumph of
Communism.
There’s still enough academic freedom that the racialist hacks
inevitably fall into the latter category. They don’t know anything about
the subjects they’re stomping over and they don’t remotely care. And
anyone objecting to the jackboots on the folio will be accused of white
privilege, fragility, and racism.
And so, the Folger Shakespeare Library, or its name, currently being
used by institution with all the intellectual credibility of a Communist
academic explaining that Hamlet was an indictment of capitalism,
presented, “The Sound of Whiteness, or Teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Other
‘Race Plays’ in Five Acts.”
What other “race plays” you might be wondering.
One of the two participants in this farce, Jennifer Lynn Stoever is a
white woman who writes about hip-hop, and the other, David Sterling
Brown, is a Shakespeare critical race studies scholar, who apparently
insists that Cleopatra is black and accuses Antony of racism. If you
know anything about Greek and Roman history, you officially know more
than Dr. David Sterling Brown.
A summary of Brown's lecture includes nonsense like, “Caesar taking
advantage of Cleopatra’s black body for profit” and Cleopatra committing
suicide to reject "the white supremacy of Caesar".
Brown also denounces the bigotry of Shakespeare critics who failed to
hear the “canonization of sexual violence against black men” in the
Merchant of Venice. That one might have made even Shakespeare scratch
his head since Brown is referring to the Prince of Morocco, the ruler of
an Arab country who is described as “tawny”, and whose sexual violence
consists of being rejected by Portia. Like all her suitors.
But in Soviet Shakespeare studies, you didn’t need to know anything
except that Communism was good and America was evil, in its modern
academic counterpart all you have to know is that whiteness is evil and
blackness is good, and everything and anything consists of the former
oppressing the latter.
Critical race studies in Shakespeare just consists of inventing black
characters and their oppression. Paint over Arab and Greek characters as
black and the rest of the sophomoric dualism all but writes itself.
Emily Folger, a Shakespeare scholar in her own right, and the wife of
the Folger Library's founder, who helped subsidize the building,
described the Bard as "one of the wells from which we Americans draw our
national thought, our faith and our hope.”
But the Folger Library now aims to teach Americans despair.
The Folger Library's Shakespeare Quarterly, once a good source for
scholarly material, is now filled with identity politics detritus like
“Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race”, and “Beauty and
the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender”.
The latter includes a sentence that insists, "we must help initiate
discussions of race and whiteness, especially in Renaissance classrooms,
where students may least expect it."
The real purpose isn’t Shakespeare: it’s the tedious struggle sessions of political indoctrination.
The dawn of the computer age gave us the term GIGO or Garbage In,
Garbage Out. The premise of GIGO was that the process was good, but the
material was flawed. Social justice academia reverses the equation. The
material may be good as gold, but it always comes out as garbage on the
other end because the process is fundamentally bad and all it does is
turn everything into bad copies of itself.
Academia has become a system for feeding anything from the body of human
knowledge into an idiot fax machine that turns it into racial dualism.
The process isn’t analytical, it is, ironically, colonialism.
Take one of America’s national intellectual treasures and the greatest
playwright in history, and then colonize them by replacing the richness
of their scholarship and ideas with the same generic cant as every other
academic field, and what you have is the intellectual equivalent of
McDonalds.
Critical race studies has nothing to say about anything outside itself.
Its meta-analysis is really an echo chamber and the only thing its lens
sees is its own reflection in the mirror. Academics turn to it, not
because it might reveal new unexpected insights, but because they know
exactly what they’ll get.
A critical race reading of Shakespeare isn’t daring and shocking, as its
perpetrators like to pretend, it’s another tedious outpost of the
franchise that has gobbled up academia, politics, and the entire
culture. Once you know it’s there, it has nothing new to say. It isn’t
breaking new ground, but dressing up old pieties in ruffs and hose, or
spacesuits, togas, and any other costume that covers its nakedness.
Once upon a time, class readings were provocative and shocking. And then
they became as exciting as a Soviet machine shop. What had once been a
revolutionary idea had become a set of ossified clichés coming down the
assembly line of a totalitarian system justifying its abuses with
revolutionary slogans.
The Soviet elite turned to racial critiques to invigorate their
political messages. Our own leftist elites likewise turn to racial
radicalism every time they sense that their propaganda is growing stale.
They dress up the same old clichés in a racial message in the hope that it will buy them another year.
The Folgers had no children. They collected everything of Shakespeare
that they could with the vision of building the Shakespeare Library.
And, even out of the ashes of the Depression, it rose. And now, fell.
The Folger Shakespeare Library no longer has anything to say about
Shakespeare, but many of the same things to say about race and leftist
politics. It offers the same clichés that countless institutions in its
vicinity and around the country have on tap at every level making it
hopelessly redundant.
An institution about the world’s greatest playwright has a reason to
exist, but yet another social justice outpost with Shakespeare’s name on
it, a dead white man who must be denounced as a racist, doesn’t. The
Folger Shakespeare Library’s lighted fools strut and fret, telling their
ideological idiocy, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing
except the destruction of everything that their radical politics touch
.
