Since last year, the Globe Theatre in London has been running a series of free webinars called Anti-Racist Shakespeare which “examine Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of race and social justice.” No matter where you are in the world, you can a dial into people having angry, bitter conversations about how problematically racist and misogynist MacBeth, As You Like It and The Comedy of Errors are.

On delving a little deeper into the webinars, it turns out that they have been sponsored by Cambridge University Press, which recently published Anti-Racist Shakespeare as part of its Elements in Shakespeare and Pedagogy educational series. The American academics behind the work claim that they have devised “racist pedagogical strategies and interventions [for educators] in their classrooms” in order to empower students. In reality, they are giving teachers licence to call William Shakespeare an evil white supremacist.

“As a white, European author with an imperialist fantasy of his own” they write, “Shakespeare and his works reproduce those white, European, imperialist agendas. Each of his plays enacts the consolidation of white privilege in multiple ways, including the positioning of whiteness as the ideal, as that which is most pure, as that which is most human…” Worse, they go on to claim that ‘If teachers, students, practitioners, and scholars study Shakespeare without attending to this process, then they rehearse his imperial fantasies and legitimize this white supremacist framework by leaving it unchecked.”

This is exactly what the general public neither wants nor needs, but the Globe is giving it to them anyway, because the people in charge of our beloved institutions have been well and truly been infected by the woke mind virus. The Bard himself puts it perfectly, when Banquo asks Macbeth; “Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?”