humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

Sorry, Will, you're barred
By Simon Spungin
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961776.html

<only be described as a literary smear campaign, with questions being
asked about his authorship, his parentage, his gender, his race and
even his sexual orientation.

One of the most widely ascribed-to theories is that Shakespeare was a
second-rate actor from the sleepy backwater of Stratford, who put his
name to the works of other, greater men, among them Christopher
Marlowe, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, and even Mary Sidney,
Countess of Pembroke.

There are even some who claim that, in an eerie foreshadowing of the
McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, Shakespeare was actually a front
for a series of out-of-favor playwrights - some because they were
Catholic, some because they opposed the monarchy - who could not
publish under their own names.

This week, a new group joined the Shakespearean fray: nine teenage
girls from a state-run Jewish school in London, who protested
Shakespeare's alleged anti-Semitism in "The Merchant of Venice" by
refusing to answer questions in a national curriculum exam. The girls,
students at the Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School, an Orthodox
institution with 249 pupils, were supposed to answer questions about
"The Tempest," which they had studied earlier in the semester. But
they decided to make a stand and instigated a boycott against the
Bard, despite the fact that the offending work - "The Merchant of
Venice" - was not part of the curriculum and was not part of the exam.

They refused to answer any questions about Shakespeare, citing the
anti- Semitism that is a central theme in "The Merchant of Venice."

This is not about legitimate protest. Nor is it about protecting the
easily offended sensibilities of these poor girls - who were not even
exposed to Shakespeare's horrendous Jew-hatred, but, instead, read a
romantic comedy, that is, Elizabethan chick lit.

It is, however, about challenges - that is, whether we are willing to
expose ourselves to intellectual and emotional challenges. Shakespeare
- or whoever it really was that put words in the mouth of the
"impenetrable cur" - challenged his audience with the "I am a Jew"
speech. How must an Elizabethan audience have felt, having been
whipped into a frenzy of Jew-hatred, to suddenly be presented with a
soliloquy in which the otherwise inhuman Shylock makes an impassioned
plea to his tormentors to see beyond the Jew and recognize him as a
human? How did they feel when challenged by Shylock's rhetorical
questioning: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do
we not laugh?"

Similarly, we must recognize that works of art that challenge us, as
people and as Jews, are far more valuable when we confront them than
when we dismiss them. We can learn much more from "The Merchant of
Venice" - about the historical roots of anti-Semitism, for example -
by studying it than by snubbing it.

The main problem with this Bard boycott, however, is not the girls, no
matter how "unlesson'd, unschool'd and unpracticed" they are. What is
really troubling here is the support that the girls appear to be
getting. According to a report in The Independent, the girls' parents
are fully behind them. The principal of the school in question, Rabbi
Abraham Pinter (and with a name like that, he really ought to know
better), said that while he does not agree with the girls' reasoning,
he respects it. Instead of embodying the very Jewish virtues of
academic inquisitiveness, and a thirst for knowledge, he has given his
tacit approval to a dangerously blinkered approach.

"The Merchant of Venice" is a work of fiction, which examines the
themes of mercy, vengeance and hatred. The anti-Semitic baying of
Shylock's adversaries in the dramatic courtroom scene does not flatter
the play's Christian personae.

To shun Shakespeare's entire body of work because of the anti-Semitism
of some characters in one of his plays could be excused as misguided
adolescent zeal. To condone it, as Rabbi Pinter and others have, is
unforgivable.

Rather than explaining to these girls the error of their ways, they
have told them that it is acceptable to eschew anything challenging,
anything that does not conform in advance to our way of thinking. By
not insisting that the girls sit down and read "The Merchant of
Venice" - or, better still, having them see it performed on stage -
the very people who are supposed to be their guides and their teachers
have failed them.>>
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Art Neuendorffer