Shakespeare as a Force for Good

Summary

The disease of Victorian England was claustrophobia - there was a sense of suffocation, and the best and most gifted men of the period, Mill and Carlyle, Nietzsche and Ibsen, men both of the left and of the right, demanded more air and more light.

(Isaiah Berlin, 'John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life')

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94)

For two decades now Shakespeare scholars have been busy exposing the use of this writer in the legitimation of various oppressive regimes - sexual, imperialist, racial, class, and so on. To put it crudely: as World's Most Canonical Author, Shakespeare has become synonymous with the Establishment. Not a few Shakespeare critics would now agree with William Hazlitt that Shakespeare 'had a leaning to the arbitrary [i.e. anti-democratic] side of the question' - or, perhaps, would ruefully second Walt Whitman's accusation that, his 'dramas' being 'the superbest poetic culmination-expression of feudalism', Shakespeare had nothing to offer democracies.

George Orwell once said some authors were 'worth stealing', a truth demonstrated by both left and right attempting to claim them as their own. But many left-wing Shakespearians now concur with their ideological opponents that this writer naturally - or, at least, regularly - suits a conservative agenda.