PRAGERU IS WRONG ABOUT SHAKESPEARE (AND MUCH MORE)

Due to the new right-wing US government, PBS (with memorable, progressive edutainment shows like Sesame Street or Arthur) will maybe be replaced by right-wing juggernaut PragerU, who have given me serious pet peeves:

PragerU says Columbus was "neither a hero nor a villain, but a person;" and that we should NOT judge a Renaissance person by our twenty-first century standards... at the same time they praise Columbus for spreading civilisation and Catholicism among the barbarian natives, some of whom regarded a human baby as a toothsome morsel (but they don't give the whole story: were these babies those of the tribe itself, or child prisoners of war? And was that an everyday meal or a festive delight (like Christmas turkey or Easter eggs)? I think it was a festive delight, and that those babies were prisoners of war!).

But that is nothing compared to PragerU's perception of Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon! Not only do they put the Bard ON A PEDESTAL (they rank Hamlet up there with the King James Bible, Newton's Laws of Physics, and Plato's Myth of the Cave, and they say Shakespeare inverted the modern world/existentialism); they ONLY ALLOW us to read or watch certain of his plays:

Hamlet

King Lear

The Scottish Play

Julius Caesar

The Henriad

And that's it. No Romeo and Juliet, though it is about young love (love so young that in our days they'd be doing Maths tests and chasing Pokémon). No Othello, my favourite (though it stars the first Sub-Saharan and/or Muslim hero in Western literature, and depicts him in a loving interracial marriage --until that scoundrel Iago ruins everything). No Merchant of Venice (mostly for Shylock / Shiloh: "Hath not a Jew eyes?" sounds too controversial, but also Portia crossdressing and becoming a lawyer). No Midsummer's Night Dream (whose potions can be read as drugs), no Taming of the Shrew (which deals with gender roles and expectations), no Coriolanus (our Roman generals would never rebel against the Res Publica!), and last of all no Tempest (with a character like Caliban, anagram of "cannibal," and a plot about colonialism).

BTW, Shylock is actually Shiloh, Fluellen is actually Llewellyn, and Imogen is actually Innogen.

The only Shakespearean plays that PragerU approves of are royalist, patriarchal, and with an all-white cast. In all of these plays, a usurper assassinates the ruler and takes over the throne, but is in turn defeated by the rightful heir, ready to claim his place. No plays about social or identity issues (like gender, race, queerness, drugs, or colonialism). They're missing out on a lot of Shakespeare!

Moreover, PragerU states that Shakespeare COINED expressions like "breaking the ice," "wild goose chase," "all that glitters is not gold," and many others; when obviously these idioms existed before the Bard, they were spread by word of mouth, and it's in his plays that we first find them printed and published, as words that sit in black on a white page (or screen, nowadays). Saying that Shakespeare coined, for instance, "breaking the ice," is as ridicuulous as saying that Andersen wrote "The Princess on the Pea" or "The Emperor's New Clothes," or that the Grimms wrote "Snow White" or "Hansel and Gretel." These fairytales already existed as oral tales, and the Grimms and Andersen only wrote and published their own versions, and those versions became canon. The same goes for Rafael Pombo and "Rinrín Renacuajo" ("Froggy Would a-Courting Go"), "Simón el Bobito" ("Simple Simon"), and "Pastorcita perdió sus ovejas" ("Little Bo-Peep"); like PragerU's saying that Shakespeare coined expressions like "breaking the ice," "wild goose chase," "all that glitters is not gold," and many others is like when many Latin Americans say Pombo wrote these nursery rhymes, which had existed many centuries before in (especially British) oral tradition.

The most glaring things PragerU has said is that leftish millennials (like me) are ruining high culture. That some universities have replaced the portrait of Shakespeare in their hallowed halls with that of a black lesbian poet (NOTA BENE: "Shakespeare" has a proper name here, while the "black lesbian poet" remains unnamed, only identified by identity markers!). That visual art has gone from excellence, beauty, and the sublime to scatological and sexual themes: URINE AND FAECES (as Dennis Prager puts it). As examples, he criticizes artworks like a fresh banana duck-taped to a wall, or a golden toilet, in which museum visitors could relieve themselves and flush it (but readymades from Dadaism and Surrealism could also fit Prager's critique: Duchamp's urinal fountain; his L.H.O.O.Q. --elle a chaud au cul, she has a hot bottom, ie she is turned on-- a Mona Lisa card on which he drew a moustache, a goatee, and glasses; and Merde d'Artiste --Artist's Shit--, which was sold in tiny pots at huge expense, and happened to be the faeces of author Piero Manzoni).

I think that at least music (urban music, like reggaeton and trap) and TV, especially reality shows and superhero films, have gotten FAR worse in the present day; but I have nothing negative to say about readymades, no matter how scatological or erotic they might be. I am proud of being a literary geek (especially when it comes to fantasy and historical fiction) and a connoiseuse of opera and of fine art, and a queer (aroace) person but I don't think the evergreen classics are going away anytime, and anyone can enjoy them - I enjoy works that, like Othello (the Shakespeare and Verdi versions), Les Misérables (the book, the 2012 film, the BBC miniseries, and the stage musical), and the Wizarding World (as a book, on stage and screen), that spark conversations about identity, otherness, and related issues. I am also worried that this snuffbumble (about Shakespeare, about Columbus, about gender, about race, etc). will spread through Gen Alpha and the subsequent generations; that we will become Fascist... and both Othello and Sesame Street, both women going to university and gays and lesbians getting married, will be punished by death penalty.

De Prageris fanaticibus,

libera nos, Domine!

PS. The Book-Club video calls Shakespeare working-class, but he was more like lower-middle-class (petit bourgeois; his dad was not only a master glover, but also the F-ing Mayor of Stratford). If he didn't go to university, and only had a primary education, it was only because universities were closed off to commoners, and nearly all uni students in the Renaissance were lordlings - no chance that a mayor's son from the provinces would have an Oxbridge education, but still, though he knew "little Latin and less Greek," he knew some French as well (just read or watch the Henriad!). He was lower-middle-class, petit bourgeois, but he at least had read some books and had a primary education. 

This reminds me of Menocchio (Domenico Scandella) in The Cheese and the Worms, who also was lower-middle-class / petit bourgeois (a master miller), lived during the Renaissance, and had a primary education and read his own books, aside from those he borrowed from the local priest / librarian. Menocchio loved to read, and among his reads were the Quran in Italian, the Travels of Sir John de Mandeville (a British noble who travelled through Asia and the East) in Italian, The Dream of Caravia (a satirical poem), Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Golden Legend (lives of the saints), the Decameron, and lunaries (calendars with the phases of the Moon, the life cycles of plants, etc.). The title comes from his cosmovision; influenced by his reads, he rejected the Creation account in the Book of Genesis and had his own creation account, influenced by Ovid in particular:

"All the elements (water, fire, earth, and air) were jumbled together in a chaotic mixture, until finally they coagulated and took their proper places, like curds becoming a cheese; in that cosmic cheese, something like worms / maggots arose spontaneously (in the Renaissance, before Francesco Redi, people thought that maggots generated spontaneously in cheese or rotting flesh - the fly eggs could not be seen by the naked eye), and these maggots became, depending of their degree of development, animals, people, angels, or G*d. G*d was the biggest and most developed maggot, and he was created at the same time at all the other living things."

Menocchio also claimed that Jesus was fully a human, that he had not died to redeem our sins, that Mary was not a Virgin, and that the Pope had no heavenly power, among other things that angered the Catholic Church.

This cosmovision was seen as heresy by the Inquisition, and Menocchio and his family had to move from town to town until, finally, since he didn't retract from his beliefs, he was burned at the stake. If he were illiterate, he maybe would have never come up with his own cosmovision. The Menocchio case illustrates the results of literacy among the Renaissance middle classes, just like that of Shakespeare itself.

Ginzburg argues that Menocchio's beliefs and actions, like those of Shakespeare, were made possible by the advent of print in Europe and by the Protestant Reformation. The printing revolution made books accessible to both Menocchio and Shakespeare, which facilitated the interaction between the oral/popular culture in which the petit-bourgeois were rooted and the literary/highbrow culture of the books, and gave them the words to express their own ideas. Observing that considerable differences exist between Menocchio's references to the books he read and the actual content of those works, Ginzburg argues that Menocchio did not merely adopt ideas that he read in books but rather used elements from those works to articulate his own ideas. The same can be said about the Bard of Avon.