Domestic violence, coercive control, teen suicide, the drugging and sexual exploitation of unconsenting women: all have been addressed in recent television dramas, praised for their courageous depiction of troubling contemporary issues.
The same themes occur in the plays of Shakespeare; yet in contrast with the critical obeisances offered to modern works, plays such as Othello, The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream attract a prudish determination to shield fragile sensibilities from the flawed aspects of human nature that the tragedies, histories and even comedies explore.
Last August, Shakespeare’s Globe warned that its production of Romeo and Juliet contained “depictions of suicide, moments of violence and references to drug use”, offering details of organisations offering support to anyone distressed by their experience.
Now Hailey Bachrach, an academic at the University of Roehampton, has launched the Shakespeare and Consent project, which aims to identify non-consensual sexual encounters in the canon, whose effect we might find disturbing. “No matter what Shakespeare intended, it is experienced by modern actors and modern audiences. It could potentially be triggering,” she explained.
The determination to adapt Shakespeare’s plays to make them conform to current taste has a long history, from Nahum Tate’s upbeat 1681 version of King Lear (Lear gets his throne back, Cordelia and Edgar get married), to Thomas Bowdler’s family-friendly 1807 edition of the plays, in which indelicacies are modified, Doll Tearsheet is cancelled and Ophelia’s watery end becomes an unfortunate accident.
The effects of such tinkering can certainly leave their mark on audiences, in the form of a truly awful night at the theatre (here, the dire memory of the Wooster Group’s Native American Troilus and Cressida at Stratford in 2012 rises unbidden). But I think we need not worry unduly about the affront to Shakespeare’s texts: again, and again, they emerge unscathed by what Dr Johnson, in the introduction to his edition of the Plays, called “the petty cavils of petty minds”.
An unwelcome fashion
Our move earlier this year from an open-plan London flat to a rambling old pile in Kent left us with a quandary. Even if the London furniture hadn’t been wrong for the new house, there wasn’t enough of it to fill the place. By chance, a friend had the opposite problem: his late mother’s house was crammed with stuff for which he had no use. And so we became the recipients of a quantity of brown furniture, including a dining table expansive enough to host the most Dickensian of Christmas dinners.
Our new collection of slightly battered mahogany has precipitated us into the vanguard of chic. Formerly so despised that even charity shops wouldn’t accept it, brown furniture is back in vogue among twenty-somethings, who have noticed that you can pick up a piece of antique oak for less than the price of a shoddy bit of flat-pack furniture, and have taken to Instagram to celebrate their elegant and sustainable finds.
Charming though it is to learn that the dusty chiffoniers of our great-aunts are cherished once again, there is a piece of my heart – the piece that loved haunting old curiosity shops in search of brown bargains – that hopes the restless searchlight of fashion will swiftly move elsewhere, before every old commode and plant stand attracts a three-figure price tag.
