“You Got To Put Your Behind In Your Past!”

Once, in one of my Drama classes, we got into a discussion about blackface. A lot of drama students are interested in musical theatre, and one of the ancestors of American musicals as we know them today is the minstrel show, in which white actors (and sometimes African-American ones, too) smeared their faces with black paint and presented supposedly comedic stereotypes of African Americans to mostly white audiences. Couple this with the facts that a) in this particular class, many students opted to do presentations rather than essays for their final project, and b) the school I went to was overwhelmingly white, and you can see how this spiraled into a potentially deeply offensive situation.

In another Drama class, I decided to write a paper on J. M. Barrie’s play (and then musical) Peter Pan. In it, I argued that the fact that the play was a hundred years old and a classic didn’t excuse contemporary companies who performed it from taking ethical responsibility for its portrayal of “Indians”. The professor thought I made some good points but argued that, in the end, I was being unreasonable: I’d already decided that the piece was offensive and wasn’t trying hard enough to give Barrie a break.

Finally, just this week while I was tooling around on the Internet, I came across a discussion about a particular deceased writer and his work (it doesn’t really matter who or where right now). One commentator pointed out that this writer had some political views that we no longer consider appropriate, ones that appeared in his stories; another retorted there’s no point in criticizing past authors based on their worldviews because it’s not like we can change them.

What is the point of these three anecdotes? Well, it all comes back to the question we ended up talking about it in that first Drama class I mentioned: what is an appropriate way to deal with works of art that express morals that are no longer acceptable?

The second commentator I mentioned has a point. Criticizing the parts of Shakespeare or Homer that we find no longer appropriate is ultimately ineffective: we can’t un-write the works in question or undo their tremendous influence on Western culture and arts, and, even if we could, we probably wouldn’t want to. (Sort of like all those Star Trek episodes where people go into the past and try not to change anything because that would be changing the present. Since we don’t know the result of any change, let’s assume it would be worse than what we have.)

But I think it’s a mistake to pretend that our only two choices are “Act like this work is totally inoffensive and use it however we like!” and “Abandon this work completely! Never teach Shakespeare again!”.

The second “choice” seems to be what gets people up in arms: how dare you say The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic and The Taming of the Shrew is misogynist and Othello is racist! Are you trying to destroy Western literary culture by forcing us never to look at any works written before contemporary times? Do you want to banish the classics from the classroom?

Naturally, when your favourite pieces of literature are under scrutiny, it’s also easy to react emotionally to the implied criticism of yourself. I like to think that my enjoyment of Watchmen and Macbeth and The Pillowman says something about me; when somebody else points out nasty themes in those works, it’s like they’re accusing me of believing horrible things, too.

But, at the same time, I don’t think it’s fair to say, “Well, we no longer live in Shakespeare’s time, and we can’t change what he wrote or thought. So we might as well put on The Merchant of Venice whenever we want!”

Why am I choosing The Merchant of Venice? Because not only am I Jewish, but I’ve also seen the play performed by an acting company full of people I know – friends and colleagues with whom I’d worked on a number of shows. People I’d trusted to help me through my first kissing scene or work through dangerous stage fights. People who’d been thoughtful and concerned enough to ask my opinion of the Jewish content of the play before they started. Awesome, intelligent, kind, funny, supportive, loving people.

But you know what? It still hurts to watch.

It hurts because it’s difficult to laugh at the figure of the miserly, money-grubbing Jew who loves his ducats more than his daughter when you run into people who still believe it. It’s hard to forgive a “happy ending” of a forced conversion from Judaism to Christianity when it has been put to you seriously in real life. And just because you know the people performing these scenes are your friends who would never dream of thinking such things, much less acting on them – even if you’re one hundred percent certain that they share absolutely none of the offensive beliefs present in the play (which, no matter how much you trust them, can be difficult) – it doesn’t mean that the hurt goes away. Because no matter how much anti-Semitism doesn’t exist for you, it still exists for me.

And how much more so for works with negative depictions of groups of people still suffering aggressive bigotry! I’m lucky not to get pulled over by cops or have my property taken away because of the groups to which I belong. While I’m not entirely happy with portrayals of Jewish people on TV and in the movies, at least there are plenty Jewish characters, and many are portrayed as positive non-stereotypes. Lots of groups aren’t so fortunate.

I don’t think we should ban Shakespeare or Homer or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or J. M. Barrie for being products of their times. But, likewise, I do think everyone who tells or re-tells a story – as a producer deciding which play to put up, as an actress accepting a role, as a teacher who picks a book to read to the class, as a parent who chooses to introduce his or her children to a favourite movie or book – takes on an ethical responsibility for doing so.

Go ahead and put on The Merchant of Venice, but before you photocopy the scripts, ask yourself if it’s worth hurting people to do so. If your answer is “yes, because…”, that’s fine, although you have to be prepared that others might disagree. If your answer is “no, I guess not”, that’s fine, too. But if your answer is, “no… but I want to, so I’m going to do it anyway and rationalize it somehow!”, then we have a problem.

There’s also the question of how you put it on: there’s a difference between having Tiger Lily dress in “deerskin” breeches with a feathered headband dancing the “ugg-a-wugg” dance and having her in regular North American urban jeans and a T-shirt. One of the things about re-telling stories is that you can support or subvert elements of them in the way you tell them or in the way you discuss them, and that opens the door for subtler responses than “throw it all out” or “just keep telling it”.

Re-understanding old stories isn’t new, either. From the Restoration onwards, Shakespeare has been rewritten and restaged to fit with the dominant zeitgeist. Cordelia survives and marries Edgar while Lear looks on proudly; Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after; song-and-dance-and-special-effects numbers get thrown in the middle of tragedies. Today we have Peter Pan in Scarlet (Geraldine McCaughrean) and Peter and the Starcatchers (Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson). To pretend that there’s one correct way to present a story that reflects its “true” self from the time it was first written or performed is ridiculous.

But then, you don’t have to take my word for it. If you dare read through the Star Trek or Harry Potter or House, M. D. sections, how many different but equally canonically plausible Kirks and Hermiones and Cuddys can you find?

Ultimately, the decision to tell a story, no matter what year it was filmed or what the norms were when it was written, is just that – a decision. But it’s our decision, not Shakespeare’s, and, just like every other decision, it comes with responsibility for the consequences.