Shakespeare's birthplace to be decolonised after ‘white supremacy' fears
Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust owns buildings linked to the Bard in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust also owns archival material including parish records of the playwright's birth and baptism.
It is now 'decolonising' its vast collection to 'create a more inclusive museum experience'.
This process includes exploring 'the continued impact of Empire' on the collection, the 'impact of colonialism' on world history, and how 'Shakespeare's work has played a part in this'.
The trust has stated that some items in its collections and archives may contain ' language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful'.
The process of 'decolonising', which typically means moving away from Western perspectives, comes after concerns were raised that Shakespeare's genius was used to advance ideas about 'white supremacy'.
The claims were made in a 2022 collaborative research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham.
The research took issue with the trust's quaint Stratford attractions, comprising the supposed childhood homes and shared family home of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, his wife, because the Bard was presented as a 'universal' genius.
This idea of Shakespeare's universal genius 'benefits the ideology of white European supremacy ', it was claimed.
This is because it presents European culture as the world standard for high art, a standard which was pushed through 'colonial inculcation' and the use of Shakespeare as a symbol of ' British cultural superiority ' and 'Anglo-cultural supremacy'.
Veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of a 'white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly 'West-centric' worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today'.
The project recommended that Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust recognise that 'the narrative of Shakespeare's greatness has caused harm – through the epistemic violence'.
The project also recommended that the trust present Shakespeare not as the 'greatest', but as 'part of a community of equal and different writers and artists from around the world'.
The trust then secured funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, an organisation that finances projects that boost diversity and inclusion, to help make the collection more international in its perspective.
As part of its commitment to being more international in outlook, the trust has so far organised events celebrating Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet, and a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Bollywood dance workshop.
The trust will continue looking at updating the 'current and future interpretation' of objects in its collection. It will also explore how objects could be used as the focus for new interpretations which tell more international stories, in order to appeal to a more diverse audience.
It has additionally pledged to remove offensive language from its collections information, as part of a 'long, thoughtful' process.
The collections contain not only some of the limited contemporary documents linked to the Bard, but archived material, literary criticism, books linked to Shakespeare and gifts from around the world offered in honour of the writer.
The ongoing closing of sites linked to Shakespeare comes following a trend for more racially-focused criticism of the playwright in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
The Globe Theatre in London ran a series of seminars titled Anti-Racist Shakespeare which promoted scholarship focused on the idea of race in his plays.
Academies taking part in the series made a number of claims, including that King Lear was about 'whiteness', and that the character of Prince Hamlet holds 'racist' views of black people.
A statement from the trust said: 'As part of our ongoing work, we've undertaken a project which explores our collections to ensure they are as accessible as possible.'
Properties run by the trust, including his family home New Place, are not original buildings Shakespeare would have known, but later reconstructions.
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