Can you extract a pound of flesh without blood? How the power struggles in Shakespearean drama speak to an age of decolonisation

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are advised that this article names and quotes a deceased person.

Last October, New Zealand’s arts council pulled funding for the Shakespeare Globe Festival, a school event of 30 years’ standing. They said it lacked relevance to decolonising Aotearoa. Days later, with the support of then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – once a participant – the program was reinstated.

This tug of war has been played out across the decades of the decolonising era, during which the pedagogical value of Shakespeare’s work has often been called into question. But the argument’s terms of reference are often confused. Attempts to cancel Shakespeare events and remove his plays from educational curricula are based on a misguided sense of how drama is made.

Cultural forms, such as drama, are not policies; they are creative practices. To be better custodians of all cultures, we need to understand that they are made of living layers. Shakespeare’s work is less like a limb requiring amputation, and more like a layer of living tissue that has been constantly revitalised through friction with its surroundings.

The British imperial project spread Shakespeare’s work throughout the world, but imperialism cannot take credit for the diverse range of uses to which millions of people have put it. If we pay attention to the layered, living history of Shakespeare in performance, rather than its superficial cultural capital, we discover that it is just as useful for exploring difference and diversity as it is for affirming continuities.

Read more: Much ado about Shakespeare – why it's time for a New Zealand national theatre

A habitable story-language

Shakespearean drama is a habitable story-language shared by more of humanity than any other single author. As James Evans, Deputy Director of Australia’s Bell Shakespeare Company, sees it:

For us, Shakespeare is the world’s playwright. He transcends the label of “Western culture” and speaks to each of us as human beings.

Evans finds evidence in the fact that “Shakespeare has been translated into over 100 languages”.

The enduring and widespread popularity of Shakespeare has elicited many explanations. The one reached for by those who see banning Shakespeare as essential to decolonising educational curricula is that his work has been used to perpetuate white patriarchal privilege. Such criticism points to an idea about Shakespeare, but implies a limited curiosity about the drama itself and the felt experience of its interpretation in the world today.

No doubt knowledge of, or professed affinity for, Shakespeare’s plays can be mobilised to confer or perpetuate class privilege. This is an example of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital”. A carefully placed Shakespeare volume on your coffee table may signal your privileged class origins.

But so what? Shakespeare did not emerge from privilege. He did not go to university; his regional accent would have made him a misfit in London. His plays, if you dare to go beyond the cover, mock social climbers (even though he was one) and dramatise struggles against arbitrary systems of power.

Injustice based on ingrained prejudice is a key theme in many of Shakespeare’s plays. The engine of the dramatic action is often resistance, revolt or revenge. Romeo and Juliet, Cordelia and Kent in King Lear, Desdemona and Othello, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Isabella in Measure for Measure – these are just some of the characters who suffer in structures of power that protect the privilege of the oppressor. And many of these characters speak truth to power, even while they are experiencing the vertigo of systemic injustice.

The earth is not dead

This makes it unsurprising that Shakespeare’s plays have had strong imaginative uptake by artists of First Nations origin, who have used Shakespeare to challenge the philosophical status quo of modern Western thought. As recently as 2020, a West Australian theatre company produced a version of Macbeth adapted into the Noongar language. This process of creative appropriation revitalises the drama and, in turn, contributes to its ongoing popularity.

A wonderful example of such revitalising friction emerges in an interview with Peter Hinton – director of an all-Indigenous Canadian production of King Lear staged at the National Arts Centre in 2012. Hinton refers to the scene near the end of the play, when the elderly King staggers onto the stage carrying the body of his daughter, Cordelia:

I know when one is dead and when one lives;She’s dead as earth.

Hinton recounts how August Schellenberg, the Montreal-born Métis actor playing Lear, claimed that the words were “hard to say” because “the earth isn’t dead”. In Hinton’s account, this began a journey of “opening up the play in a new way”.

Beginning with Peter Brook’s landmark 1971 film adaptation, King Lear has been interpreted in Anglo-European contexts as nihilistic. The king is read as a paranoid autocrat unleashing cruelty and suffering that ends in unredeemable loss.

But this is a partial and biased interpretation shaped by Eurocentric preoccupations. The moral transformation of Lear actually contrasts sharply with modern autocratic dictators and Cordelia’s forgiveness of him transcends the retributive pattern of the play’s world. The reconciliation between Cordelia and Lear is nothing short of miraculous, even if it is followed by their demise. Think how much more nihilistic (and boring) the play would be if Lear doubled down on his rejection of his daughter, or if Cordelia refused to forgive her repentant father.

Schellenberg, approaching the play from an Indigenous perspective, was able to breathe new life into the possibility of spiritual transcendence through connection with the earth – the earth is not dead. His story demonstrates how cross-cultural adaptations can generate productive friction between the embedded cultural norms of the text and those of its adapters.