- Position‹2 of 2
- No, Shakespeare's writing is of his time and place.
- Argument1 of 3›
His work is exclusive and bigoted.
Shakespeare's writings often indulge in racism and anti-semitism, making the audience which can read him without being demeaned far from universal.
The argument
Shakespeare often utilized racist, anti-semitic and sexist language in his poems and plays, and the argument here is that this bears directly on the claim made for his universality. If women and minorities cannot read a work without being offended by it, then the work does not in fact speak to everyone, and a canon that describes it as universal is describing the experience of some readers as though it were the experience of all. "The Merchant of Venice" is the clearest instance. Shakespeare indulges in the Jewish caricature of Shylock as his main villain, drawing on stereotypes about moneylending and greed in order to dehumanize the character. What follows from that is not merely a matter of taste: people as odious as the Nazis have weaponized those same stereotypes in performance of the play. A work whose caricature could be taken up for that purpose without alteration was supplying something usable, and that is an argument about the play's content rather than about how it has been received. The pattern is not confined to one play. Other works frequently feature lines that discuss women as sexual objects, or as essentially different from men rather than differently situated. Characters refer repeatedly to darker skin as though it were inherently ugly, or as though it marked a person as evil. In "Othello", the dark-skinned protagonist brutally murders his wife — a plot that gives dramatic form to the association the language elsewhere merely asserts. Taken together these are the assumptions of a particular time and place, written into the works rather than incidental to them. That is what makes the writing exclusive: it addresses a reader who shares those assumptions, and the reader who does not is placed outside the work rather than within it.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Both Shylock and Othello are characters Shakespeare wrote to be deeply sympathetic. The most famous speech from The Merchant of Venice deals with Shylock's innate humanity, and Othello was manipulated by Iago.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Thoughtful readers can engage with bigoted writing without being personally offended. [Rejecting P2] Shakespeare wrote bigoted characters, not bigoted works.