The reconstructed Globe theater is a masterpiece, a beautiful dream-come-true and a wonderful contribution to the universal Shakespeare industry. If only the productions of the Bard’s plays were as authentic as the theater in which they are performed, instead of being the puerile pastiches that their producers foist upon us.
It was a glorious June day when our pilgrimage group strolled up the South Bank of the Thames from Tower Bridge to tour the re-constructed Globe Theater. The special project of American filmmaker Sam Wanamaker, the Globe is located across the river from the City of London just a short distance from the actual historical site of Shakespeare’s theater.
A tour of the Globe whisks you back to the sixteenth century. The heavy oak beams are held together with wooden pegs, the thatch on the roof we were told, is authentic—albeit treated with a modern fire retardant. The Globe is not just a Disney-esque replica, but an actual working theater. Tickets for the groundlings go on sale the day of the show for just five quid, while the rest of the seats vary in price. Renting a cushion for three pounds is an extra luxury.
While the theater is a faithful reconstruction of Shakespeare’s venue, don’t expect the plays themselves to be authentic. The globe is woke. During our tour the company were busy rehearsing an upcoming production of King Lear with a female Lear. I realize that in Shakespeare’s day gender confusion was not unknown: Queen Elizabeth was famously masculine, and in the theater female parts would have been played by boys, but must the whirligig of time bring in such revenges that Shakespeare’s male characters must now be played by actresses? A female King Lear? I did not see the whole cast list, but are Lear’s daughters now bad boys instead of spoiled girls? Do they complete the charade by calling the play Queen Lear?
No. Of course not. The feminist agenda is not about elevating women but forcing women to assume masculine traits. The same feminist propaganda was evident in the production of Much Ado About Nothing we enjoyed when we returned to the Globe that afternoon. If you remember the play, Leonato is the patriarch whose daughter Hero is maligned by her fiancé Claudio. Leonato’s brother Antonio plays a supportive role in the drama as Leonato berates the unjust Claudio and attempts to steer the cast to a fair conclusion. But wait. In the Globe’s production Leonato and Antonio have been replaced by “Leonata” and her sister “Antonia.” Hero doesn’t have a Dad. There is no loving, protective patriarch. Instead “Leonata” plays the single parent and berates Claudio not with the thundering tones of a righteous father, but with the nagging anger of a momma bear. This switch in the cast is simply presented to the audience without explanation. The directors have therefore emasculated and mutilated Shakespeare’s play without so much as a “by your leave.” This sort of wanton vandalism is like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
The woke approach—a feminist reading of the play which intentionally undermines the patriarchal premise—may be interesting in an academic way, but is it necessary? When I was studying scriptwriting it was hammered home that we should avoid all preaching. “Tell a good story” we were told, “Don’t preach a sermon. Nothing destroys a script more quickly than imposing your message on the story.” Or, as the movie mogul growled to the novice screenwriter, “You wanna send a message? Use the Western Union.”
The same should apply to the interpretation of a play. Spare us the heavy-handed feminist reading, the gay play, the lesbian subtext, and the Marxist reconstruction. It’s not clever, and it’s not funny. I don’t say this because I disagree with the particular sermons being preached, but because it is just so awfully sophomoric, bombastic, crude, and obvious. A female King Lear? Really? Substituting Leonato and Antonio with “Leonata” and “Antonia”? Come now. Remember Ogden Nash’s dictum “Here is a good rule of thumb: Too clever is dumb.”
That this feminist tract should be imposed on Much Ado About Nothing is even more absurd because the play itself deals with the timeless war between the sexes perfectly adequately not only in the dramatic injustice done to Hero, but also in the delicious subplot between Benedick and Beatrice. In Beatrice Shakespeare has created a compelling, fully feminine, boisterous and feisty female. Why drown out this subtle and beautiful interplay and conflict between male and female with a heavy handed feminist re-interpretation of the play? Imposing “Leonata” as a domineering harridan diverts our attention from the truly sympathetic feminist in the play: Beatrice.
The other ridiculous irony in this gender-bending, woke approach to Shakespeare is that it has no logical end point. Shall we have a female Hamlet? Will she be called Hamlette? If so, must Ophelia be a fella? Why not have a Lord MacBeth who manipulates his wife to do the dirty deed rather than the other way around? Or for that matter let us have a Lady MacBeth played by a man, while MacBeth is played by a woman. We’ll call him “Mack” and she can be “Beth.” The Globe is all the world, and if all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, then why not let all the men play the women and all the women play the men, and then the Globe can be complete in its woke sermonizing, and be one huge self-congratulatory, self-righteous celebration of transgenderism.
That this travesty of Shakespearean interpretation takes place in the perfectly-restored Globe theater is especially ironic. There are the oak beams and wooden pegs, the wattle and daub, the thatched roof and the authentic-looking stage, but the directors have distorted the plays with their woke sermonizing. The play, the play’s the thing wherein they’ll catch the conscience of the Queen.
To be consistent with the banal modernistic interpretation, the globe theater should be made of plastic, vinyl, steel, and glass and fitted with jumbo flat-screen TVs with a booming sound system instead of a stage. You wanna be modern and up-to-date? Go the whole hog and do Shakespeare meets a rock concert. You want Queen Lear? Why not just do Queen and have the leather clad cast sing “We Will Rock You?”
I rant. But if my rant verges on the ridiculous it is only because the producers and directors at the Globe have pushed Shakespearean re-interpretation to the edge of the absurd. The reconstructed Globe theater is a masterpiece, a beautiful dream-come-true and a wonderful contribution to the universal Shakespeare industry. If only the productions of the Bard’s plays were as authentic as the theater in which they are performed, instead of being the puerile pastiches that their producers foist upon us.
This essay was first published here in June 2022.
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The featured image, uploaded by Jack1956, is a photograph of a “View of Shakespeare’s Globe set up for a performance of Romeo and Juliet in March 2019.” This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Dear Father Longenecker,
At last someone has given voice to my rage at having to tolerate such stupidity, obtuseness and violation of Shakespeare!!The contagion has reached all parts of the globe and the Globe!
Yes, yes, and yes. I picked up a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales the other day. It was completely Femi-nazied, to borrow from Rush Limbaugh. No wood-cutter in Red Riding Hood. Rapunzel left the prince after climbing down on her own. And I still don’t know what they did to Cinderella, but it was no longer Cinderella. So, buyer beware – if a play, or a seemingly classic book has been written post 2010, it has most likely been “re-interpreted” in a most unsatisfactory way.
What edition was this book? Keep my eyes out so I don’t buy such filth.
We read: “The other ridiculous irony in this gender-bending, woke approach to Shakespeare is that it has no logical end point. Shall we have a female Hamlet? Will she be called Hamlette?”
Given the likely casting, not Hamlette, but Piglet.
“Shall we have a female Hamlet?”
There have been female Hamlets for well over a century. You may or may not care for the choice, but the outrage seems a little disingenuous.
We are all sick to death of this nonsense: woke is usually morally wrong – and utterly boring…
In the days of Shakespeare, when men were the only actors, part of the humor was a male actor playing a woman’s role who was impersonating a man. Now it’s just total confusion.
And here in Mpls the Guthrie joyfully advertises “Not Your Grandmother’s Emma!”
I refuse to give my Money, Energy, Attention or Time to miscreants intentionally polluting our great Western culture and institutions!
They enjoy doing this because like ghouls and imps, they feed off of our dismay and horror and most importantly, dollar$…they are not doing it for the love of the Art or the duty to introduce Great Works to the next generation.
We should collectively turn away from these agents of chaos and let them “Go Woke, Get Broke”!
Walking Away starts with the first step…
As Fr. L. indicates, such travesties of classic works become paradoxical when carried out in very traditional auspices like the Globe Theater. Such arts folk seem to want to have it both ways: postmodernism with a thin veneer of tradition.
To my way of thinking, these violent distortions are signs of a culture and civilization that have fallen into ennui (people are bored by classic texts as they are) and no longer has anything to say. Hence the endless emphasis you see in the literature of arts organizations on “rethinking” and “reinterpreting” everything and on “pushing boundaries,” etc. To me this is a sign of a culture, not expanding into new horizons, but rather at a point of exhaustion.
I’m afraid the Globe has become a Social Justice factory for woke sermonising. It used to be a place for serious productions of Shakespeare but it’s all about tedious agitprop now. This year’s production of Julius Ceasar was dire with the two most important characters played by and as young women: Brutus and Cassius. This was,apparently, to tell us something about ‘women and power’.
I first got wind of this nonsense when my father, a Globe regular, came home saying they had made Henry V a woman…From their website I see the witches in Macbeth are now three men…Oh, but Othello is still black. The wokesters’ role-reversing only goes so far.
Such a travesty. We are all drowning in the wake of woke. Maybe there have been female Hamlets for well over a century, but today’s excessive woke ideology has joined forces with other nefarious ideologies to tear down important societal traditions and institutions in order to remake them with “modern” and “progressive’”notions of right and wrong, good and evil. In other words, to condone sin.
“…but is it necessary?“ My thoughts exactly while watching the youth production of Romeo & Juliet at the Globe recently. I enjoyed parts of the production and some of the acting, but the unnecessary and seemingly unending hip thrusts and playing up or “discovering” sexual innuendo was completely unnecessary. It may have sailed above the minds of very young children in the audience, but it was tiresome to watch. If you want the young to discover the greatness of Shakespeare, a writer who understood people and events before the Enlightenment helped us misperceive ourselves, the professional and academic theater are not the destination and perhaps an impediment. It’s all about social justice and pandering. Pull any ten technically competent directors or actors out of a rehearsal or a conservatory class, and I suspect all will tell you that the traditional interpretation without a message or anything cute or “interesting” but simply the story and the language well presented, which is a feat and liberating if done well, is “not interesting.” In other words—and this is news to no one—most of all the genuine humane artists are dead. You are better off ignoring the theater altogether and instead reading the plays aloud to yourself with a glass of wine, with a class or like minded friends, or just watching or listening to a recording of one of the many notable and “boring” productions from 50 years ago.
Thank you so much for being so emphatic and clear. I will not waste my time or money in a mistaken belief that they would not be wasted on The Globe and it’s productions these days. May it stand long enough to outlive the woke fad so we can see the Bard’s plays there more authentically.