Tweets and hashtags of outrageous fortune

Ok, settle down everybody, no one is canceling Shakespeare. I mention this because of an opinion piece on The Washington Post from a columnist who saw some tweets from #DisruptTexts and is now leaping to the defense of all literature everywhere against left-wing "busybodies" (the columnist's word, not mine) and their famously anti-literary agenda. 

Above: the exact opposite of that.

Meanwhile, at the
Hall of Literary Justice...

Columnist Kathleen Parker starts her piece off with a none-to subtle suggestion of left wing conspiracy:

"Just when you thought our so-called cancel culture couldn't get any more ridiculous, the calibrators of literary justice surpassed themselves recently by targeting the Bard himself as just another racist, genders, homophobic fellow."

-Parker, on so-called cancel 

culture and the calibrators of 

liter-wow, paranoid much?

Ok, so, couple of things. First, can it be so-called? Like, that kind of suggests it isn't a real thing, which kind of undercuts the point. Secondly, she knows there isn't a cancel culture headquarters, right? There's isn't a smokey boardroom somewhere where a secret cancel council decides who to cancel next. 

"Excellent, operation Carano is proceeding nicely...
Now, who's career shall we ruin next for no reason at all!"

-The Cancel Council

Pictured: Shakespeare's grave,
wherein his headless corpse just
lies, not reevaluating anything.

And can you even cancel a dead person? My admittedly inexpert understanding of the phenomenon of "cancelling" someone, is that it's a sort of social media based ostracization where the cancelee--usually a famous person--is called out for shitty things they've said or done in hopes that they might stop and that it might help others examine their own bad choices. It's a technicality, I know, but Shakespeare died in 1616, so cancelling him now-which is not what anyone's trying to do, but we'll get to that--isn't going to change his behavior. 

And not for nothing, but he also
believed in actual witchcraft, so... 

Also, I kind of feel like people who refer to Shakespeare unironically as the capital "B" Bard, are already not looking at his work critically. Look, I love Shakespeare, but yeah, the guy was a white male in Elizabethan England, so by our standards his plays absolutely contain racism and genderism. Sexism and anti-semitism as well. And while I can't think of an example of homophobia, and I'm not sure gay as an identity even existed back then, I'd buy that there's homophobia in there too. So anyone suggesting that his work might be problematic to twenty-first century audience would be correct. 

Above: a picture of a straw man
someone left here. Wasn't me.

But canceling him? No one's canceling him. The organization Parker takes issue with in her piece is called #DisruptTexts and it's run by a group of four women, all of them people of color and all of them educators. Their mission statement makes it clear that they don't support censorship or banning books, but instead that they're just out "to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum..." So what even is Parker talking about when she says they're "targeting the Bard himself"?

"Called on account of plague" would
have been familiar to Shakespeare.

She sites some tweets, but they're from 2018, so if #DisruptTexts' goal was to bring the Big Shakespeare lobby to its knees, then they've failed. But it wasn't, so they didn't. People still produce Shakespeare's plays or, at least will when it's safe for a couple hundred people to be in a room and breathe all over each other for the two-hours traffic of the stage or whatever. And I think most productions now use the problematic content as a starting point for discussion. I've worked on a few and that's what we always did. That's all #DisruptTexts is trying to do. 

Despite Parker's weird and unnecessary defensiveness, I don't think #DisruptTexts are saying no more Shakespeare, I think they're saying not just Shakespeare. And that maybe it's not just straight, white, European, mostly male artists who have something to say.

Pictured: the Western Literary Canon which, I mean,
 a NASCAR race in Nebraska with free admission
for Republicans would have more diversity.