William Shakespeare, you have been canceled.
A growing number of awakened teachers refuse to study the Bard, accusing his classics of promoting “misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogyny.”
A series of English literature teachers told the School Library Journal (SLJ) how they abandoned “Hamlet”, “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet” to “make way for modern, diverse and inclusive voices”.
“Shakespeare was a tool used to ‘civilize’ the blacks and browns of the English empire,” insisted Shakespeare student Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University.
Teachers must also “challenge the whiteness” of the assumption that Shakespeare’s plays are “universal,” insisted Jeffrey Austin, who is the head of the English literature department at a Michigan institute.
Claire Bruncke, a former Washington State Public School teacher, told SLJ that she banished the Bard from her classroom to “deviate from the focus of the narrative of white, gay, and heterosexual men.”
“Eliminating Shakespeare was a step I could easily take to work on it. And it was useful for my students “, he insisted.
Other professors said they stayed with Shakespeare, but rethought their plays through a more modern lens.
Sarah Mulhern Gross, an English teacher at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey, said she taught “Romeo and Juliet” “with a side of the analysis of toxic masculinity.”
In her SLJ article, “To Teach or Not To Teach,” librarian Amanda MacGregor recognized the Bard as a “genius word maker” responsible for “masterful puns, creative use of language, biting wit, innovative words and characters “.
Still, he understood why so many teachers were “fighting” and eventually “abandoning Shakespeare’s play.”
“Shakespeare’s plays are full of problematic and obsolete ideas, with a lot of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny,” MacGregor wrote, with the final word meaning misogyny aimed at black women.