Or do you?

Shakespeare grows increasingly difficult to grasp for today’s English speakers as the language moves on, creating and bending itself as it always has – as it did in Shakespeare’s time. I know we all struggled with it at school, even those who would go on to do BA’s in English at varsity, where they had to deeply explore a number of his plays.

The simple fact is that the language is different enough from today’s that it’s sometimes difficult to grasp what is being said, which strikes at the fundamental point of any story: “What does that word mean? What did that sentence say?”. As with any language you can get into the rhymes and rhythms of it if you apply yourself for some time, and it can be very rewarding when you do. But most people don’t.

I was lucky in that I got Romeo and Juliet in 6th Form (Year 12 now), which I grew to like a lot and which I loved when it became the basis for the witty and clever film Shakespeare in Love which won the 1999 Oscar for Best Picture (even if that did piss off fans of Saving Private Ryan).

Still, whatever the challenges in grasping his plays the fact is that Shakespeare has left the English-speaking world with a huge body of deeply intelligent work with meaningful thoughts on the unchanging nature of humanity in all our cruelty, greed, passion, love and decency – stories that resonate with our lives and our society today for that reason, with phrases that unknowingly fall from our lips.

Which all means that it’s still worth it to run his plays, including in schools with the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival, which is run by the Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ, and like other art in NZ, to get funding from the government.

Or at least it was. For the first time in 10 years, Creative NZ declined a funding proposal for $31,000 to go towards the Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ for 2023 – 2025.

Fair enough you might say; there’s only so much money to go around. Oh, but then the reasons for the decline were given and they were very much what we have come to expect in today’s world:

The board signalled concerns that the organisation was “quite paternalistic” and that the genre was “located within a canon of imperialism and missed the opportunity to create a living curriculum and show relevance”.

One assessor said the application made them “question whether a singular focus on an Elizabethan playwright is most relevant for a decolonising Aotearoa in the 2020s and beyond”.

Wankers. As Super Old Lefty, Martyn ‘Bomber’ Bradbury says:

This isn’t an academic argument, this is a gleeful woke cultural book burning! This is what ISIS does, destroy the art of other cultures so theirs is paramount!

His comments were added to by the following luvvies:

Robyn Malcolm called the agency “complete knobs”, Sam Neill says it made New Zealand “look bloody stupid” and Hurst said it was “beyond short-sighted, reactionary and just plain dumb”.

Your monkeys, your circus, you clowns. They’re all lefties and I’ll bet all three vote Labour or Green as regular as clockwork. I’ll bet they also support “Creative NZ” and “NZ On Air” and RNZ and cry along with John Campbell.

In other words it’s their ideology that created this shit, both in terms of demanding that Big Government fund the arts via institutions full of luvvies like this, and in terms of hatching the” thinking” (like CRT, Political Correctness and Woke in general) that leads to shite decisions by those luvvies.

Also I’d bet they’ll squeal were anyone to propose just disbanding this body. There’s nothing wrong with the Artistic Central Planning and Control Division – aside from the people running it, so take them out the back, shoot them, replace them, and it’ll all be good. Always work a treat, ammirite?

I saw the same problem in 2020 when poor old Chris Trotter was bemoaning proposed changes to the RNZ Concert Program – like dumping big chunks of their classical music (And Now For Something Completely Different):

Certainly, there is a fairly obvious prejudice against the high-culture featured on RNZ Concert. Such programming seems to be regarded as evidence of Pakeha elitism at work. In the material presented to the board, this is framed as being, if not a “bad thing”, then most certainly as “something to be avoided”.

“High culture”? Outrageous! We can’t have that language!

Two years on, Chris comrades are getting less subtle:

Shakespeare sucks. He sucks because he’s been done to death, he sucks because he’s often unintelligible, but most importantly he sucks because we’re not allowed to say he sucks.

That’s Stuff.co.nz, as quoted by The Daily Blog. As I pointed out to Trotter:

Chris and others voted to create this institution and support it with tax payer money. Did they really think that other voters would not one day appear, grow in numbers and political power, slide into the grooves of power controlling such institutions and use them to their own ends while waving goodbye to the past preferences of the likes of Chris as the older generation slips beneath the earth?

It would seem so. He mentions Stalin but never thinks of the obvious parallels.
…
If you don’t want to get “a bullet in the back of the head”, don’t give said government institutions so much power, even if you start off thinking that you’re doing it for the good of everyone. That’s how this goes on matters large (USSR) and small (RNZ), deadly (NKVD) and merely irritating (reducing the amount of Classical Music).

At this link Martyn Bradbury has a list of Creative NZ board members with email and phone numbers, should you wish to complain. I won’t be doing so because even if these people do change the decision they won’t actually change their ideology, which is the real problem here; this will pop up again and again. No, better to destroy Creative NZ, which is what ACT is proposing to do – to the groaning pain of some on the Left who are also lamenting this decision by their side of the fence while recognising that only ACT is standing up on this (“Unlike the Republicans, the National Party does not do culture wars“):

The board that signed this off will be gone under ACT,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

“They’re happy to provide $107k to “The Savage Coloniser Show’ which claims to “address James Cook with fury” and “breaks the colonial lens wide open”, but they won’t provide less than one third of the funding to a successful festival that celebrates one of the greatest influences on the English language.

Perhaps this will be their “Woke Breaking Point” (Miranda’s speech)?

Anyway, excellent news, but frankly I’m more of “The carpet bombing of Wellington will commence in ten minutes” kinda guy. I like to think it’s very Shakespearean.