SHAKESPEARE HIS BLACKWASHING
Many years ago, most people who earned a Ph.D. in English
had to study the works of William Shakespeare.
That was a good thing. The requirement
ensured that a British-rooted variety of cultural literacy would circulate in
the Profession. It could trickle down, through the public schools and Classic
Comics, to the American common reader. The wheel of Fortune has turned.
In 2015, people who are earning Ph.D.s in English can bypass
Shakespeare. They may remember something from Hamlet, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, or King Lear ---plays they may have read in
middle school and/or high school. Unless
the Ph.D. candidate is specializing in theatre or British literature or desires
to become the next great authority on Shakespeare, she or he may not be
required to refer to Shakespeare on qualifying examinations. We don’t blame our
Ph.D.s for having minimal interest in Shakespeare, because the twenty-first
century demands that they give more attention to what the living are saying
than to what the dead have said.
Neither the Profession nor the humanities should fear that
Shakespeare does not get attention. He
does. The American common television viewer has replaced the American common
reader. The viewer profits greatly, as a result of what screenwriters produce, from
the resilience of Shakespeare’s legacy.
For example, the ghetto-fabulous Fox network serial “Empire” is an
elegant rewriting of Shakespeare’s King
Lear, replacing Lear’s dementia with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)
and his kingdom with a parcel of the crime-infected and enormously lucrative
American music industry. The very popular AMC series “Breaking Bad” obviously
incorporated Polonius’ advice from Hamlet
and Iago’s advice from Othello: Mr.
White was most certainly true to himself as he put great amounts of drug money
in his purse. “Empire” and “Breaking
Bad” are good examples of how bourgeois realism works in television and film.
William Shakespeare, the masterful plagiarist, has achieved immortality in the
Western imaginary. We have done an excellent job of blackwashing him more
thoroughly than he blackwashed himself. And he did a damned good job of blackwashing
in The Tempest. N.B. –blackwashing stands
in diametrical opposition to whitewashing. Go figure.
In the spirit of blackwashing, we should invest time in
reading Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s
major contribution to the genre of revenge tragedy, and in viewing the clever
film adaptations of that play from 1997, 1999, and 2000.
Titus Andronicus
is a stunning situation report on the twenty-first century human condition and
its meandering passions, including our confusion about virtues, viruses, and
vices. It is a consciousness-catching play, an effective emotional trap. It generously
answers this question: Who is Shakespeare and what was he, that all your elders
commend him?
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. February 3, 2015
