Killing Free Speech. Et Tu Delta? Et Tu Bank of America? – Newsweek

This article first appeared on the History News Network.

The recent furor in the right-wing press over the New Yorks Public Theatres current anti-Trumpian Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar would be funny if it wasnt so predictable.

Following on the heels of the public castigation of comedian Kathy Griffins inopportune tweet of two weeks ago (which in light of ShakesGate Im inclined to now charitably interpret as a promotional still for a contemporary staging of Euripides The Bacchae ), conservative sites have gone apoplectic over the insensitivity of director Oskar Eustiss decision to stage the play in Central Parks Delacorte Theater, a production which exemplifies the observation that Shakespeares political masterpiece has never felt more contemporary.

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The productions unsubtle message was not lost on the audience when the ancient Roman dictator appeared with a ridiculous blonde bouffant, a cheap, inexpertly knotted tie hanging below his crotch, and a wife who purrs in a Slovenian accent.

As could be guessed, the clanging chorus of the conservative news media was not amused. Fox News, who share Eustiss distrust of subtlety, disingenuously headlined one of their articles with NYC Play Appears to Depict Assassination of Trump, as if one of the great plays of one of our greatest playwright were simply only a NYC Play.

Its telling that after much deserved mockery, the editors at Fox amended the article to more prominently state that the mock assassination occurred in a production of Julius Caesar," as if the initial ambiguity in their title wasnt intentional.

Oh, the Bard, ahead of his time, a coastal elite liberal and dead for four hundred years! Of course that the character of Caesar is in many ways the hero of the play was lost on these pundits, as indeed was the fact that the text itself is vehemently against political violence.

Furthermore, in making Caesar Trumpian the director inadvertently complimented a man as consummately incompetent as our current, accidental, Head of State.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.; Julius Caesar. Sculpture by John Gregory (1932). Vysotsky, public domain

Despite that, both Bank of America and Delta Airlines pulled their financial support for the play, for an upstanding institution like Bank of America (which surely has never been responsible for any damage to the lives of actual people) could not be associated with such an intemperate play as Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare has never been politically neutral, and the right-wing anxiety over a New York production of a classic play belies how little of their defense of the canon and of great literature since the heyday of academes Culture Wars of a generation ago was actually just disingenuous posturing.

As a teacher of Renaissance literature Ive often been bemused by conservative hand-wringing over trigger warnings and snowflakes in need of safe spaces and yet anxiety over art often seems to be a particularly reactionary impulse.

There is a cottage industry of right-wing pundits with apocryphal stories about sensitive young undergraduates unable to read Macbeth because of violence, or The Merchant of Venice because of anti-Semitism. The phenomenon of overly-sensitive undergraduates clambering against free speech matches little of my or many of my colleagues experiences as regarding college education today.

Ill note that the petulant opprobrium at Shakespeare in this season of our discontent seems to exclusively be coming from the right side of the aisle, or as scholar Stephen Greenblatt remarked to the Guardian:

Whats kind of amusing, in a slightly grim way, about this is to have Julius Caesar of all things suddenly the point at which the right can no longer endure free expression, which theyve been hollering for .... Every time they send out a crazy provocateur on campus, they go bonkers if there are protests.

Bad faith conservative defenders of the humanities, from William Bennett in the 1980s to the more noxious western nationalists of today, conveniently try to obscure the historically subversive nature of so much of canonical literature. Elsewhere, I have written that the conservative defense of the canon is so often a celebration of mere wallpaper, a means of demonstrating ones education, pedigree, or wealth.

If there was any doubt about the conservative war on the humanities (their claim to be supporters of free speech being shown as totally empty), witness Trumps catastrophic proposal to defund the National Endowment for the Humanities, an act that is at least honest in its brazen philistinism (in contradistinction to the ravings of the William Bennetts and Lynn Cheneys of the world).

Lets remember whats implied with things like the Fox headline theirs is not only an attack on Eustis, or a New York theatrical production, but it is also an attack on Shakespeares play itself. If conservatives are made uncomfortable that an onstage tyrant reminds them of the president, maybe theyd do better to ask why that comparison is so easy to make in the first place.

Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber once provocatively wrote that Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare. She continues by saying that one of the fascinating effects of Shakespeares plays [are that].they have almost always seemed to coincide with the times in which they are read, published, produced, and discussed.

Julius Caesar has as its subject themes like authoritarianism, treachery, and violence, it serves to reason that in authoritarian, treacherous, violent times Julius Caesar will appropriately enough be on our minds. Julius Caesar, as befitting a Republic such as ours which always made great significance of our perceived Greco-Roman ideological origins, has been perennially reinvented over the years, from Orson Welless landmark anti-fascist version of the 1930s, to an anti-Obama production in Minneapolis five years ago (Ill add that Fox News was silent on that one).

Shakespeare, like all great art, is ours to invent and reinvent. Donald Trump Jr., when not accidentally confirming James Comeys account of his interactions with Trump Sr., took time to tweet Serious question, when does art become political speech & does that change things?

Well Mr. Trump Jr., its inadvertently a good question I would argue that art is always political speech, and that that changes nothing. Shakespeare has been enlisted in all variety of political causes, often wildly contradictory ones. The multi-vocal brilliance of the playwright is that he has come down to us as both monarchist and republican, democrat and authoritarian, elitist and populist. There are worlds within the plays of the folio, and that is precisely what can be so threatening about him.

ShakesGate puts me in mind of Shakespeares younger colleague (and sometimes collaborator) Thomas Middleton, whose 1624 Jacobean play A Game at Chess was "the greatest box-office hit of early modern London, in part because it contained thinly veiled representations of both King James I, and the Spanish King Phillip IV (in violation of a law which prohibited depictions of living monarchs).

After nine sold out performances, the play was shut down by authorities. One imagines that had they existed in 1624, Bank of America and Delta would also have pulled their support of that production.

It is inevitable that all literature is read and reread within the context of the present moment in which we find ourselves. Shakespeare himself said as much in Julius Caesar when Cicero remarks,

Indeed, it is a strange disposed time:/

But men may construe things after their fashion, /

Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

We are in our own strange disposed time, and it is inevitable that well construe literature after our own experience, separate from the historical concerns which helped to produce said literature. Thats the same as it ever was.

But ironically, the rather immutable message of the play is provided in a playbill gloss by its director, who writes that Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means. This, it would seem, is crucial, for in such context a production as this can be read as anti-trump without being pro-violence, with Eustis continuing by explaining that To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.

And this, I think, gets to the heart about what the right finds so dangerous about Shakespeare in this circumstance. It has nothing to do with taste or appropriateness, and everything to do with the fact that such a classic text is able to see a tyrant for precisely what he actually is.

Ed Simon is the associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Killing Free Speech. Et Tu Delta? Et Tu Bank of America? - Newsweek