Counter-Currents
1,149 words 
“I have wasted time and now doth time waste me.”
The most revered playwright in the history of the English language is being reassessed because recognition of his literary genius apparently suggests “white European supremacy” according to the coterie of radicals on the board of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT). The Trust, which is ostensibly a charity dedicated to preserving and promoting the legacy of William Shakespeare, including his family homes, collections and museums has decided to “decolonize” by making The Bard more diverse and inclusive with fresh condemnation of his “racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful” language and an analysis of how Shakespeare’s works have “played a part in (colonialism).”
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”
The Board, which is currently, chaired by Penelope, Viscountess Cobham CBE, the first female to hold that position, has shifted direction thanks to the PhD thesis of White Boomer intellectual Dr. Helen Hopkins entitled, “Gifts of the World”?: Creating and Contextualizing the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s International Collection. Hopkins argues that depictions of Shakespeare as a “universal genius” have been a tool of white supremacy. Dr. Hopkins, however, neglects to inform us about which works of differently-abled Bantu tribesmen and trans Pakistan feminist authors we should be reading to dispel our notion of Shakespearean and European exceptionalism.
Viscountess Cobham
A characteristic flavor of her thesis can be found in her quotation of Huang Long, an academic from Nanjing University in China.
The pity is, perhaps, more that the Premodern Critical Race Theorists had not yet produced the epoch-altering body of work that expounds the many ways in which Shakespeare’s poetry and prose helped to construct racist ideas of whiteness and its ‘racial Others’ that not only served the ideology of colonial oppression but maintains white supremacy through today.
Despite all Hopkins’ talk of imprinting “whiteness” and “otherizing” nonwhites through European appreciation of Shakespeare, the same critical lense isn’t applied to Mrs. Long’s “otherization” of “whiteness” from her Chinese supremacist orientation.
“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
Besides two Arab men: Ayub Khan and AJ Leon, the 12 members of the Board of Trustees are apparently white, non-Jewish upper class intellectual elites. Its much easier when we find a Jewish radical spearheading these anti-white cultural projects than to come face to face with the enemies within our own race who constitute so much of the institutional subjugation of Western pride. The two Vice Chairs, for example, are Lena Cowen Orlin, a professor at uber-liberal elitist Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and Nick Abell, a retired lawyer who’s lived right in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon for 30 years.
Notably, this smack in the face occurs during a time of sweeping right-wing electoral victories across the globe. Throughout the European diaspora this is driven largely by reaction against woke authoritarianism, particularly anti-whitism. In America, which just re-elected Donald Trump to the presidency, DEI and critical race theory programs are being erased from the federal government, school rooms and even multinational corporations. In Germany, the nationalistic, anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AFD) captured 20.8% of votes in the 2025 election to become the second largest party in the Bundestag. The election of the right-wing nationalist Calin Georgescu to the Romanian presidency was only thwarted by the courts throwing out the verdict and banning him from office. The same shifts have even been noted in South America and Africa. One notable exception is in Great Britain, which elected the center-left Labour Party candidate Keir Starmer Prime Minister in 2024. Conservatives faced heavy headwinds in England after years of economic stagnation and appointing foreign standard-bearers of “conservatism” like the Indian man, Rishi Sunak.
The populist rightward shift has been largely driven by young men, who have largely refused to go along with the Woke Revolution championed disproportionately by women. Therein lies the rub for England. Its one of the exceedingly rare countries in which men have also shifted to the left. Not as much as the women, but enough to tip the scales.
“Tell truth and shame the devil.”
Prior to Viscountess Cobham, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust was chaired by Anub Mysoor, a dark-skinned man from Bangalore, India. One might wonder why such an individual was given commanding power over the legacy of Europe’s cultural heritage, and yet it wasn’t until the first White woman, a British noble no less, was appointed to the position that the “decolonization” program began. Despite its pretenses to represent the “underprivileged,” Wokeism’s intellectual roots lie in academic and cultural institutions dominated by elites and attended by those with the time, money, and social capital to spend on abstractions. Wokeism relies on elite-controlled platforms and networks, like Hollywood, corporate media, and snooty nonprofits like the SBT. Wokeism’s moral framework often presupposes a level of privilege that insulates its adherents from the trade-offs faced by the less affluent. Cancel culture, for instance, thrives among those who can afford to lose a job or social standing over a misstep. The political alignment of Wokeism reinforces its elite character, drawing its support from college-educated, high-income urbanites.
One might claim that only elites read Shakespeare anyway, and there is some truth to that. But the plays were originally created for the diversion of all people, from royalty down to the lowest pauper who could afford a ticket to the Globe Theater. It is part of a literary tradition that permeates all of our modern storytelling, from the culturally sophisticated to the accessibly lowbrow. And any aspirational young reader can pick them up, no matter their background, for an unprecedented look into the inspiration for many of their favorite modern stories.
“Thou camest on Earth to make the Earth my hell!”
This is not the first or last attempt to undermine Shakespeare’s exceptionalism in the assault on so-called “white supremacy.” As VDARE noted in 2024 the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. appointed Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, a woman of Pakistani descent as director. Her book, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race, is part of the movement to associate Shakespearean exceptionalism with “white supremacy” and her appointment is an implicit approval of the “decolonization” agenda. From her book: “I note that the construction of Shakespeare as the ‘Bard’ was itself instrumentalized within the British colonial project, as a national poet and as an icon of white heritage and excellence: the conception of the man as Bard is, I argue, endemic to coloniality.”
UK Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has promised a “decolonized, anti-racist” curriculum and, last year, the UK government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the “Before Shakespeare” project at the University of Roehampton which spent £800,000 in order to find that Shakespeare is too “white, male, heterosexual and cisgender.”
Jason Kessler is the author of Charlottesville and the Death of Free Speech, available now from Dissident Press. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter,Youtube, Odysee, and Gab. Also follow Dissident Press on Twitter/X.
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53 comments
“The worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst'”
King Lear, Act 4
Older readers will remember that the “dead white male” Shakespeare featured prominently in the curriculum wars of the 1980s and -90s. Before that, he was denounced as an “establishment white dude” by some of the radicals in the 1960s.
I remember watching the movie Dead Poet Society with my school-teacher mom in ’89. It was very popular the time. The movie is set in 1959 Vermont with Robin Williams playing an unconventional teacher of high school English poetry.
Oh, I remember well when this was a big craze on my campus with the pinko professors and the bleating radicalinskis. I found it quite repulsive even then.
Shakespeare has always seemed beyond reproach in my education. I guess this is one of those things about the wisdom of age: you get to see how these changes happen in waves.
Obviously, the revolutionary cultural engineering happening now has to be beyond the pale of anything that’s happened before.
It’s at least partly our fault for continuing to take the abuse. Why shouldn’t they keep pushing if we don’t try to stop them? Thankfully with Shakespeare, unlike museums, statues, murals, and memorials, there’s no physical artifact at the center of it that they can control or destroy, but only texts, which we can copy and adapt and propagate without their permission.
The black Shakespeare nonsense does remind me of another resource if things really get crazy.
Graham Holderness wrote an interesting book called “Samurai Shakespeare” about how the Bard’s work has taken hold in Japan. They have many translations of his works.
Logically Holderness pays great attention to Kurosawa’s adaptions. For whatever reason, Shakespeare has always gotten a good reception in the land of the rising sun.
If England should be dumb enough to drop him, Japan will keep his memory safe. This world is getting weird.
I have a minor fear that high Western culture such as classical music and painting and literature will live on, in a somewhat stale, pantomime form, only in East Asia, where they at least recognize the quality of the work and have no reason to hide it away out of guilt.
I suppose that is better than our heritage disappearing entirely, but it’s weak consolation…
Shakespeare is going to be particularly vulnerable since its enjoyed by the most highly educated and affluent members of society.
The populist reaction where our numbers lie probably has little time for Elizabethan literature.
I wish there was more I could do but this article is about it. Most of us have no way of swaying nobles managing a trust in a foreign country.
We should ask the question, ‘It is working?’. Do educated, literate people really want to hear this stuff ? Do they really agree with it ? Do they really want to watch a cast of indignant black lesbians putting on A Midsummer Night’s Dream ? That kind of bullshit has been going for years, but the truly enthusiastic audience for that is probably very limited.
Which is interesting, if they ‘now’ want to decolonize Shakespeare, obviously the last two decades of this crap hasn’t worked.
Seems to me all these people trying to tear down Shakespeare and the like simply draw attention to the inferiority of others literature. There was some old Chinese poems but they were hardly accessible to the rest of the world based on the impregnable culture of China. The Bard was brilliant yet accessible. The current British leadership cringes and must try anything they can to drag down western brilliance. Fortunately, more people than ever can see through the fake claims of racism or white superiority. We are and have been superior culturally and we do enjoy association with our own kind. Is that so wrong?
Just for grins–
Black Hebrew Israelite in UK, visiting Shakespeare’s grave site, + the home of the famous playwright’s daughter, is thoroughly convinced by what he sees, that William Shakespeare was African.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU4bC0PwzA0&t=131s
Just as speculation – wouldn’t it be interesting if he succeeds in promoting that vision? Then the usual suspects now trashing The Bard would have to start celebrating him.
All wrong, Shakespeare was a Frenchman.
You mean the French origins of the De Vere name?
No, it was only a joke referring to that black man appropriating Shakespeare (I’m French).
I don’t believe in the “De Vere” theory, but there might be something in Shapeare being of a remote French origin.
It’s most likely true. The evidence is right in front of you. Shakes – Spear.
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
These are desecrations and these people are a disgrace. Every time this is done, they fan the flames of a more recent poem by one of Shakespeare’s heirs to English literature and poetry. That poem is alive and burning in the hearts of young Englishmen everywhere.
The grinning dingbat Viscountess Cobham knows very well that she’s literally privileged. She’s part of an Old Money family that probably was living high on the hog since the day that Vortigern first stepped off his longboat. Now that “privilege” has such a bad connotation thanks to metric tons of weaponzied cultural Marxism, she throws in her lot with the “good guys” by trashing a very notable part of her nation’s cultural heritage. I bet she’s proud of herself, too.
These scum are granted enormous privilege and attack the civilization that made it possible.
Imagine all the blood shed to defend England through the centuries and then one generation gives it all away chasing fashion.
Shakespeare was a massive queer.
Top, or bottom?
I’d ask Mr. Kessler, the Shakespearean exceptionalist.
Why so angry?
It’s disingenuous appropriating Shakespeare for any kind of right-wing authoritarian project which this website and associated movements espouse. Shakespeare’s work examined the lives of social and sexual minorities and the negative impact of various conservative do-gooding and binds of social expectations. I.e. it’s opposed in sentiment to everything that this article, CC and the wider right stands for.
Basically you’re trying to claim someone as your own who isn’t and never was, and in a lowbrow article that goes on about “Wokeism” (shorthand for right wing strawmen), incorrectly capitalises “White” (sic) in “White women”, against the CC style guide (did you even read it?) no less. You do the usual right wing made up hyperbole:
“. . . Dr. Hopkins, however, neglects to inform us about which works of differently-abled Bantu tribesmen and trans Pakistan feminist authors . . .”
What tribespeople’s work? Where? Which Pakistani feminist authors? Can you name even one?
And this is meant to be taken seriously as an article about Shakespeare?
Your complaint is that these people are trying to associate “Shakespearean exceptionalism” (not merely Shakespeare) with white supremacy. But you yourself are a white supremacist (hence the capital-W “White”) trying to associate Shakespeare with white, cis-male heterosexual patriarchal supremacism, when he was a massive queer that was never about any of that.
The excerpt you post of the book about how the construct of the “Bard” is part of a colonialist project is totally correct. You’re even doing the same right now by pushing this article talking about Shakespeare as if this construct was real and not an inaccurate and ahistorical portrayal of someone who was a sexually liberal weirdo in their own right, who would be hated and completely shunned by today’s contemporary Right wing, CC included.
I don’t see it as disingenuous. Even if Shakespeare was massively queer – which I’m not sure has been proven – it doesn’t show in his work. His plays and poems aren’t full of gay relationships and unusual sexualities. He doesn’t denigrate normal relationships or family structures. We can appreciate his work without enjoying any queerness he may or may not have had in his personal life, like we can praise the achievements of Alan Turing without praising his gayness.
Now I will grant two things. First, it’s incongruous (though not impossible) to have gay heroes to the extent that a right-wing movement wants to outright ban or punish homosexuality. Second, to the extent that queerness is inseparable from the work, said queerness should be recognized in appreciating the work. But I don’t see either as applying in this case, at least for the great majority of Counter-Currents readers.
Apparently you are a “bronie”: a grown man who watches ‘My Little Pony.’
I think I’ll disregard what you think about Shakespeare, freak.
Unclear where he’s getting these claims anyway. Shakespeare was married to a woman (Anne Hathaway) and fathered multiple children. He also wrote more than two dozen love sonnets about an unknown woman (the “Dark Lady”). More to the point, regardless of Shakespeare’s political or personal values, he was white and his work is explicitly being subverted because of that. The actual man’s life hardly even matters, because the only relevant factor to both sides in the debate is that he was white.
That’s right, I was published by Counter-Currents.
Aww, c’mon, isn’t that a good thing these days?
“these days”?
During Victorian times, Oscar Wilde got in a ton of hot water.
A few decades back, Queen, David Bowie, Boy George, and so forth were fashionably edgy, as well as quite a few female pop musicians who were switch-hitters.
Presently, you can carry a huge placard of William Shakespeare in the next gay pride parade, if you don’t mind getting confetti in your hair.
So yeah, these days. Isn’t it something to be happy about?
It’s a freedom we’re lucky to have that’s under siege from the right wing, yes.
Takes one to know one?
Source? Other than your own ass, that is.
Also, even if he was, so what? People in Shakespeare’s time didn’t define their entire existence by where they put their pee-pees. His work certainly can’t be argued to be gay themed, at least not without some really impressive (not to mention futile) mental gymnastics.
Right wingers define their entire lives around sexual expectations and taboos.
For those inclined, don’t forget about Project Gutenberg for free downloadable ebooks of ye olde colonizer’s works.
Good suggestion!
I would recommend those who haven’t gotten into Shakespeare yet to check out the BBC series The Hollow Crown. It does have some stupid casting of black people in some episodes but the performances are so natural. You have amazingly talented actors like Benedict Cumberpatch playing Richard III.
Folks have to check out the 1953 production of Julius Caesar to see that star-making performance by Brando as Mark Antony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=101sKhH-lMQ
Archive.org is also a good place to watch old BBC versions of Shakespeare productions (from the 70s/80s). I like them very much, and they are free of diversity casting.
Did you ever see Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989)?
I sure did. That one is good too. The only reason I didn’t mention it is that I don’t think it did as much as Hollow Crown to adapt Shakespeare for the screen. It looks more low budget than HC and the performances don’t do as a good a job blending the artifice of Shakespeare’s dialogue into an authentic looking performance.
It also does more single shot long takes like they are filming a play. HC uses every modern camera trick to really make it come alive specifically for the film medium.
This stuff has been going on for years now. Shakespeare is a truly massive cultural target of subversion and deconstruction, and this dumping comes from every conceivable angle. They never remember the prior dumps they have taken on this or others have taken, and so they just take new ones all the time.
It’s case of ‘always do/think the opposite of what the Jews (or whoever) says’.
I can’t reply to the comment, too many comments deep, but Shakespeare became a hook to attach anything to, which is the point, for every identity claim and every grievance. To homosexuals, to feminists, to blacks, to junkies, to not existing at all or being someone else, because only someone else could have written this stuff. I think Freud even speculated the famous portrait was a Jew, although he didn’t believe Shakespeare wrote any of it.
You can find any claim you want about Shakespeare going in that direction.
None of them are facts. They are political claims made hundreds of later to advance the perspective of the person making them.
It would be interesting to see when that started.
All these kinds of claims in this case come down to Shakespeare’s standing. If he had no standing no one would care.
Shakespeare belongs to a tradition of white arts and literature.
Not African arts, or Jewish arts, or Asian arts.
And this is apparently a difficult problem for the political direction in Europe, so they periodically make an effort to ‘decolonize’ it with some statement or some new diversity program.
The reason these leftists are so adamant about subverting Shakespeare is because he ACTUALLY DOES exemplify European exceptionalism.
As I said in the article, if we aren’t so great why don’t they provide examples of “diverse” authors who are better?
“Imagine all the blood shed to defend England through the centuries and then one generation gives it all away”
Oh, no Mr Kessler, you got it completely wrong.
The blood was not shed ‘to defend England’. Most was shed (in Boer wars and on the beaches of Normandy, for example) to destroy England and the rest of the White Race, but your grandfathers didn’t get it.
You have been told some 90 years ago what’s going on, but you didn’t believe it and it’s only recently that some British start to understand what’s happening.
Mr. Kessler is not wrong; much blood was shed to defend England, even if you correctly point out that some wars moved England in the direction of her own destruction.
Infuriating.
Its much easier when we find a Jewish radical spearheading these anti-white cultural projects than to come face to face with the enemies within our own race who constitute so much of the institutional subjugation of Western pride.
That is an excellent point and a bitter pill to swallow. Despite Jewish power and influence, it is the race traitor enemies within who enable them. I am loathe to say this, because I am elitist and pro-aristocrat, but these elites need to be purged and dispossessed. They have become parasitic, and their cleansing is an essential ingredient for the rebirth of Western civilization and the formation of healthy white ethnostates.
Indeed. It’s true that Zionists have been up to metric tons of nasty stuff. Still, they wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far with it if not for a lot of collaborators. I have to wonder – what’s their problem? Even if the Viscountess here is (as I suspect) a spoiled, virtue-signaling airhead with too much money, she should’ve learned from her parents about the responsibilities going along with her title.
She’s a typical lowlife piece of turncoat garbage. Anti-White traitors are the worst of the worst. Rounding out the final four of the hate list are jews, muslims, and chinese.
“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” One of my favourites. Great piece. I knew they would come for the Swan of Avon eventually, just like Albanian immigrants come for actual swans.
It’s interesting that these types have equal animus for “mediocre white men” (one of their famous stock phrases) as well as exceptional white men like Shakespeare. To a provincial, uneducated mind like my own, it would appear that they simply hate white men in general.
O England, model to thy inward greatness,
Like little body with a mighty heart,
What might’st thou do, that honor would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural!
henry v
it’s the sad lot of our people now. The problem isn’t outsiders, aliens, but our own people are traitors and not kind and natural. What couldnt we accomplish if we were all on the same team!
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