Shakespeare against cancel culture

Some two scenes after Brutus et al have stabbed Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, “Cinna the Poet” comes on stage. He is walking to Caesar’s funeral and is met with four “plebians” (or “citizens” in some texts) – the same four who one scene earlier were the audience for Brutus’s rationale as to why he killed Caesar, and Antony’s famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” speech. In the previous scene, the citizens change from declaring themselves in favour of Brutus – “’Twere best he speak no harm of Brutus here!” – and anti-Caesar – ‘This Caesar was a tyrant’ – to believing that “Caesar has had great wrong” and that Brutus and the others “were traitors”.

Stirred up by Anthony’s speech, and high off the power of deciding who is right and wrong, in and out, and traitorous and honourable in Rome, the four men interrogate Cinna, asking:

What is your name?

Whither are you going?

Where do you dwell?

Are you a married man or a bachelor?

Answer every man directly.

Ay, and briefly.

Ay, and wisely.

The men are a mob, but a stylised, overtly unreal one: Shakespeare even has them lapse into a repeated order when asking their questions. Once the men find out the poet’s name is Cinna, they believe he is a conspirator and order each other to “tear him to pieces”. Once he elaborates he is Cinna the Poet, his fate is not much better: “tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses”.

My attention was drawn to this remarkably apt moment of an easily swayed populace and an almost proto-‘cancel culture’ in James Shapiro’s new book Shakespeare in a Divided America. Shapiro notes that it is rarely performed as it threatens “to undermine the nobility of the conspirators; including it might suggest that they too had acted like a bloodthirsty mob”.

Since reading Shapiro’s chapter on Julius Caesar – which includes detailed discussion of a post-Trump production that dressed the eponymous character in oversized suits with long red ties – I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the play. I saw a brilliant production of it at The Bridge theatre in London in 2018: much of the audience stood in the pit and were encouraged to shout and jeer at the actors like a mob, and “Make Rome Great Again” hats were sold as merchandise.

But what has stayed with me since reading about and re-reading the play is not its remarkable ability to be cast in any particular political moment: there have been “fascist” productions, Trump productions, “toga” productions – and I could imagine Soviet, Brexit, and even Thatcher productions. The play is so ripe for contemporary political comment that it has become a part of the fabric of political life: when Michael Gove announced his intention to run for leader of the British Conservative Party in the aftermath of Brexit, Boris Johnson’s father remarked “et tu, Brute”.

Nor has it been Shakespeare’s brilliant evocation of politically charged, manipulated anger – a theme which much could be made of in our current predicament. Rather, this one brief scene has really stuck with me.

The mob are not just politically or even randomly “bloodthirsty”: their anger seems to increase when they hear that Cinna is a poet. Everything is multiplied: “tear him to pieces” is said once for a conspirator, but repeated four times for a poet. The rather abstract, unbodily verb “tear” is transformed when the men proclaim “pluck but his name out of his heart and turn him going”. Cinna’s crime is not just that he has the same name as the conspirator but that, as a poet, he is engaged with the manipulation of words and names. His intangible profession deserves, according to the mob, a tangible, violent, and bloody response. If, in his hands, words become things then the mob believe they can do the same: they can rip his “name” from his chest as if it were an organ.

In the past weeks and months, much has been made of the fact that governments are failing to support the cultural and entertainment industries. There is no way of avoiding the fact that entertainment – from Netflix, to the #Hamilfilm, to National Theatre streamed performances here in the UK – has kept many of us going throughout months of isolation. In one early week of lockdown, James Corden in One Man, Two Guvnors was probably the only thing that made me smile.

Just this week, the UK culture secretary Oliver Dowden promised an emergency fund of £1.57 billion for the arts and entertainment sectors, but recognised that this will not be able to save every job, theatre, and cinema. The French emergency package for the arts is larger, but in the US there appears to be no central federal funding and a patchwork of individual grants is having to pick up the slack. We are not in a world where poets are torn apart simply for their profession, but there is no way of avoiding the fact that, when we emerge from this pandemic, it will be into a world which is far poorer economically and culturally.

In writing a scene where a poet is hounded off stage simply for his name and profession, Shakespeare was – and is – giving his audience a wry, self-conscious, nod. But it is also a tacit plea for moderation: “if you hate my play, write about it, speak about it, but don’t attack me – you are not this mob”. Modern, political productions – and a dramatised political realm – have eroded this ability to separate fact and fiction. We all too easily identify Shakespeare’s hyper-stylised mob action with very real political anger in our own day and age, and some politicians could do with remembering that neither Caesar nor Brutus is an ideal model to follow. The only thing we can hope for is that, in a few months, we will still have plays, poems, and television programmes to remind us of the reality we inhabit.