Snowflakes on Stage

A postmodern production of "Hamlet" strives to erase Shakespeare's "gender inequity"

Alas, poor Yorick! Our 450 year-old business model has been declared unacceptable due to workplace gender inequities…

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In its obsessive campaign to spoil just about everything, postmodern progressivism has come for the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival.

Since 2000, Shakespeare at the University of Notre Dame has been a popular summer event in this corner of northwest Indiana. The gala performance of the festival’s professional production takes place in August, on or close to my birthday, and for several years before the pandemic imposed a rude interruption my wife’s present to me was an evening with Master Will. This year, the festival is back on track with a full program, and I was looking forward to the professional company’s performance of Hamlet—until, that is, I learned what was being done with Shakespeare’s masterpiece by the troupe that’s putting it on, the 50/50 Shakespeare Project. The following is taken from the Project’s website:

50/50 Shakespeare Project™

Creating gender equity in the workplace of Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s plays are constructed for a 450 year-old business model.

This business model is outdated, inequitable, and in most other industries would be considered unacceptable, if not illegal.

If it were not for the universal renown and veneration of this single English-language playwright the gender inequity rooted in the process of enacting his plays would be in question.

The 50/50 Shakespeare Project™ offers an equitable alternative.

Process

The 50/50 Shakespeare Project™ does not claim to artistically improve Shakespeare’s plays. The project aims to improve gender equity in the workplace of Shakespeare practitioners.

We achieve this by responsibly adjusting the gender identification of certain characters, reallocating some text and action to achieve gender equity throughout the plays, and rebalancing the power dynamic imbedded in the text and structure of the plays that exists because of the standard business model of early modern English drama. Finally we consult leading academics to ensure our adaptations are authentically in the spirit of Shakespeare's work.

We also retain all his famous lines.

Now of course it’s true that Shakespeare’s best plays are marvels of flexibility, infused with the universality of his vision. For instance, Laurence Olivier’s film version of Richard III was gorgeously produced in its original fifteenth-century context, while the 1995 film starring Ian McKellen was set—effectively I think—in an alternate-history version of 1930s England. Stage productions of some of the plays can be minimalist without lessening their impact; Julius Caesar, Macbeth and King Lear come to mind. Characters can be creatively cast; why shouldn’t Chorus in Henry V be a woman, for instance?

And if such artistic license enhances the presentation of the play, well and good.

But that seems not to be the objective of the 50/50 Shakespeare Project, for which neither the play nor the audience is the thing. The version of Hamlet it offers has been modified in the interests of those capricious gods, social justice and workplace equity.

The pretentious jargon quoted above—"the gender inequity rooted in the process of enacting his plays”—gives the game away. Hamlet needs to be shaken up so as to represent “marginalized communities.” Let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be gay lovers. Let Ophelia be a trans woman. Let Horatio be a person of color. And Hamlet? Let the contradictions of his many-sided personality be portrayed as post-traumatic stress disorder; perhaps he was sexually abused as a child. But let Polonius, that “tedious old fool” as Prince Hamlet calls him, remain a white male.

One can so easily imagine the LGBTQIA2S+ Pride Flag fluttering over the castle of Elsinore.

Admittedly there’s something comical in the 50/50 Shakespeare Project’s attempt to correct the social injustices, as it sees them, of Shakespeare’s greatest play. Nor is it particularly original. The Family Shakespeare, a sanitized edition of Master Will’s work published in 1807-18, was inspired by a similar feeling that the plays as they stood were socially unacceptable. (The Family Shakespeare was edited by Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta, thus giving us the word bowdlerize, i.e. to purge a work of content deemed inappropriate.) Leo Tolstoy excoriated King Lear in a 1903 pamphlet, “Shakespeare and the Drama.” The greatest of Russian writers professed bewilderment and disgust over Shakespeare’s great reputation; he considered that Master Will was a hack. (For more on this, see George Orwell’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.”)

But the 50/50 Shakespeare Project’s great offense has less to do with its tweaks of Hamlet—some of which, at least, may be harmless enough—than it does with the ideology that begat them. I mean postmodern progressivism’s Theory of Everything: its all-encompassing orthodoxy. Mussolini’s notorious summation of fascism—"Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state”—is relevant here. The claims of contemporary progressivism admit of no exemptions; not only the present but the past must conform to its dogmas. And so one more brilliant piece of the past, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is being bowdlerized for the sake of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.” Thus Mr. Orwell—ahead of the curve as usual.