The barred?

Prologue

I can’t for the life of me think who she was, or why I was at her house: visiting with someone else, I’d guess. She was a cultured lady, Pākehā, with grey hair, about retirement age. I recall her house was orderly, with books, and she sat in an armchair. I reckon I was 18 or 19. She must have asked me what I was reading or what I was studying.

When I was in sixth form, I’d been made to read Macbeth - or at least, to listen to it. We spoke it aloud in class, with our spotty faces and Southland accents, from our ratty school-issued texts.

Probably, a handful of kids were interested. Others knew that, interested or not, they had to listen well enough to pass the class. For the ones who just wanted to get out, at a time when school leavers could still find jobs - the kids for whom the curriculum was never designed - it was the last tedious class of its type they would have to stick out. I can’t remember what character’s role I voiced from the ratty text, if any.

That year I made it to the end of two other things I can remember. The Crucible, with its metaphor, its hopeless heroes and its venal fucking failures, is still my touchstone. Wuthering Heights, if I’m honest, was a little bit sexual in a schoolgirl way I should probably have grown out of.

And I finished Macbeth. I don’t even know why I liked it. The blood-rawness of it, or the imagery, the supernaturality. That it was the first thing I’d read, even if tenuous, about my own Scots history. That Lady Macbeth was such a badass bitch she went mad: this aspect really worked for me.

There were other books I did not finish. This is because of a thing I didn’t think to talk about: I just assumed I was thick. I struggled to read.

For starters, I mostly read at the same pace I would speak. It was painful; but any quicker and the music, the meaning, simply slipped through my fingers. School was hard for me. University was too, but I still studied English lit amongst other things - answering essays, anxiously and hopefully, on novels I’d half-read. Other students had point-and-shoot brains, but I had a meandering birdwatching clusterfuck between my ears. I did my best with what I had, the classroom sometimes a place of pleasure, other times a place of shame.

Over many years, and with practice, I got better at reading - aided by the fact I could now choose to read what I wanted.

But at the lady’s house, when I was 18 or 19, I still had a long way to go on my reading journey. I wanted to be what she was - middle class, respect-worthy, clever - even as I was intimidated by her. So when she asked whatever it was, what I was reading or studying, I grasped for something to make me look smart. I hit on Shakespeare. Shakespeare makes people smart. I said, with an earnestness that gives me IBS just thinking about it, he makes such remarkable observations about human nature.

And then I smiled weakly, because I’d basically played all my cards and had nothing to back that shit up with.

She was gracious about it. I was able to sit back and relax in the knowledge I was a plonker.

Act I

I’m going to preface this carefully. I’m not knocking Shakespeare. He was a good writer, and probably a good bloke. If he was in Upper Hutt, I’d take him to Brewtown for a pint. But he’s not, and there are other issues at play.

By now, you know the story. Creative New Zealand declined a funding application from Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand, for their Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival - an annual event for high schoolers. In their response, Creative New Zealand used the phrase, ‘this genre was located within a canon of imperialism’, one sentence in 11 pages - and it is unclear that this was a significant reason for declining.

The story may have been suspiciously scant, but old white people were fuming. If only they’d read Othello, about a guy who had a bit of information, got the wrong end of the stick, and went off so half-cocked that Shakespeare wrote a play about it.

The Spinoff did some actual journalism, inflaming the situation with woke shit like facts. They underlined that:

• There was never a risk the Shakespeare festival would be cancelled. Never.
• The funding the organisation sought was for stuff not essential to the festival, namely an executive assistant and succession planning. This in a sector where many organisations struggle to keep the lights on.
• Contestable funds are contestable. The clue is IN THE NAME. There is no automatic entitlement to them. We’ll come back to this.
• Other organisations get declined all the time, yet no one loseth their veritable shit over it.

But the damage was done. Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand claimed the bard was being ‘cancelled’. And that was enough for people whose education had taught them how to grapple with great literary works, but not read past a soundbite.

Act II

Let’s return to the comment that exacerbated everything.

I am spectacularly unqualified to talk about Shakespeare’s views on race or colonisation. The best I can do is repeat from a lecture I once went to, on The Merchant of Venice. Was Shylock, the Jewish character, just a nasty caricature? Or was he a little sympathetic, shaped by the racism and rejection all around him? Was Shakespeare just sitting on the fence, like I am right now, his numb arse way more arty and accomplished than mine?

I remember the lecture because it was thought-provoking. It’s human to want a world that is black and white, divisible into heroes and villains, able to be captured in a soundbite. But that’s not reality. Maybe Shakespeare was talented and associated with imperialism. It’s exactly the kind of morally complex shit he kept writing plays about.

Let’s now talk about the fund the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand applied to. Although Creative New Zealand don’t use the word, the funding it provides is contestable, for right or for wrong. There is a limited pot - they can only spend the money they’re given - meaning there won’t be enough for everyone. Money granted from the pot lasts for a fixed period, so all organisations will need to reapply. Each application will be judged by its quality and its fit with the purpose of the fund. Contestability comes straight out of economic paradigms developed mostly by white blokes, and we usually like it, so long as we’re winning.

Because that’s the problem, isn’t it?

Maybe Creative New Zealand got it wrong. But to conclude that Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand was treated unfairly, you’d have to have read all the applications. Some of the detractors didn’t need to. They simply knew that Shakespeare - well, not the guy himself, but a tribute act - must be better, more relevant. Must be, and should therefore come first, displacing someone else. They did not consider, even for a minute, that there could have been stronger contenders, least of all from Māori or Pasifika organisations: that’s just PC gone mad. Civilisation’s already peaked, I guess, with a European guy born 1564. Others need not apply.

That lecture years ago on the Merchant of Venice - on its ambiguity towards racism - was given by a kindly, unexceptional, middle-aged white man. I liked him. Shakespeare had some remarkable observations about human nature: the lecturer stepped us through them. It occurs to me, as I write this, that I never questioned the curriculum; that, for all Shakespeare was extraordinary, if I’d wanted literature on contemporary racism, there might have been commentators better placed than a centuries-dead white dude.

The lecturer was a good person, committed to learning, and I think that I am too: but I suppose I never thought to raise this stuff, and I don’t know how he would have answered.

Act III

It’s a big leap to go from ‘an organisation missed out on contestable funding’ to ‘Shakespeare is being cancelled and white people and their culture are under attack by a maliciously-orchestrated woke government agenda’. Yet I’ve never seen so many leap so far, on their white arthritic knees. And it’s not like these people are all Shakespeare devotees: literally no one has Titus Andronicus on top of their summer reading pile. The ones howling loudest will be spending Christmas at the bach drinking G&Ts and reading Frederick fucking Forsyth in boat shoes.

Whatever.

The Prime Minister stepped in. She announced that the Ministry of Education would ‘find a solution that ensures the programme will continue to be offered to schools’.

Here’s why that was a mistake.

First, it bought into misinformation, reinforcing the wrongheaded claim that the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival was at risk.

Second, it undermined Creative New Zealand. They’re a crown entity, a kind of government organisation deliberately set up to make decisions independently from the influence of Ministers. I can’t say whether they’re good, bad or indifferent: they’ve certainly been criticised. But if there’s a problem with a crown entity, the Government’s responsibility is to improve the organisation’s performance - not be seen to undermine it, or the people who work for it, by publicly steamrolling its decisions.

A National MP called this all a U-turn, and he got a bunch of likes. The Government did nothing to contradict him, making out it was reversing a decision it never made.

Epilogue

I’ve given you reasons one and two. The most important is the third.

In my undergrad days, the days I dreamed Shakespeare would make me look smart, I learned about this thing called ‘hamartia’. It’s a Greek concept, and it loosely translates as ‘a fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero or heroine’. It means a person might believe they’re doing right, but they’re still fucking up, and it will come back to haunt them. You can’t understand the bard without it.

The issue - or at least, the immediate issue - has been dealt with. An organisation complained, and the PM responded. They will now get more money, whether or not their application was any good: we will never know either way. We will not hear from the other organisations that missed out, and who may shut their doors, but whose work we do not regard so well, because we weren’t forced to read it at school. This is not about facts.

The victory, if you can call it that, goes to the thin-skinned Facebook-comment howlers. They have convinced themselves - in the face of all evidence, because that no longer matters - they are somehow barred from a society that hates European culture. They hear ‘You can’t always go first’ as ‘You don’t matter’, because they may have been told all the world’s a stage, but they still expect to be at the stage’s centre.

In its eagerness to fend off accusations of ‘wokeness’, this decision’s given a legitimacy to the loudest, least factual complaints; has made a rod for all our backs.

It’s the kind of drama - comedy, tragedy, farce - Shakespeare might have written.

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