Douglas Mercer
April 8 2024
In the old days when you read about Shakespeare you got it straight from the Oxford Don in tweeds casually smoking a pipe, and it was all about Bardolatry, the poet as a secular god, and the blinding light of his verse. But those were the old days when Shakespeare represented a pure kind of Englishness sprung from the mother earth, and invented the human soul, human consciousness, and the English language itself on the hoof. As such he was highly and rightly regarded by that Oxford Don and his like.
But now you can’t get a book on Shakespeare and simply feel the thrill of communing with his master spirit, now you have to be met with Politically Correct nonsense about the hard luck of the darkies; now you have to have shoved in your face the fictional sins of the White past and have them shoved down your throat as well. Case in point is a book called Shakespeare’s Book by a toady named Chris Laoutaris in which he calls Shakespeare a “global phenomenon.” He is that in that he is a planetary phenomenon, and he is also a Cosmic phenomenon; but he is a quintessentially English one. But what the author means by that is something quite different. In the wind up to beginning to tell us about the history of the publication of the First Folio (1623) he goes on a long detour in which he earns his stripes in the Jew Academy. To one who just wants to saturate in an appreciation of the World Poet it is jarring; and about as welcome as the proverbial skunk at the garden party.
“Countless countries, nationalities, and local regions have not only made Shakespeare their own but made their own “Shakespeares” often as part of wider cultural projects of cultural reclamation, self-actualization, and self-empowerment, sometimes with the intention of challenging the very regimes of social oppression and colonial subjugation that the playwright’s works have historically been used to shore up.”
What the actual? This is gibberish by way of gobbledygook and cut-rate gibberish and gobbledygook at that. The idea that some voodoo worshipping nigger could make Shakespeare “his” is downright preposterous. For the swamp dwelling scum is no more like Shakespeare than a satyr is to Hercules. What is he to Shakespeare or Shakespeare to him? Nothing, that’s what. But that won’t stop him from using his pidgin voice to say that Prospero was a White racist who kept Caliban down; or that it was the hatred of the nigger which caused Othello to strangle Desdemona. Social oppression is very fashionable after all and colonial subjugation in not far behind. And everyone knows that when the White man rolled into the nigger backwaters they had their thick volumes of Shakespeare in tow and hit the fuzzy headed savages over the head with them. Closer to the truth is that the language that Shakespeare speaks is so supbremly and serenely sublime that a grinning tar monster has to scratch that aforementioned fuzzy head in a vain attempt to puzzle it out. In the end of course he just gives up and goes back to drinking himself silly with the White man’s rot gut. Of course that won’t stop some slick niggers dressed up a bit who got them some ed-u-macation and can decipher at least “to be or not to be” to get up at podiums and say that the Swan Of Avon is personally responsible for the slum dwelling plight of the negros all across the Caribbean, is the primary cause of their destruction and dereliction, is the prime mover behind them eating one another. And then the tricked-out nigger gets his hat in hand and asks for a bit of remuneration from the gulls who believe in that rot. And if it’s more complex than that I’ll have them eat their own hats, as greasy as they are with Jerry Curl.
“Indeed a number of the Folios, including those now in Texas, Australia, New Zeeland and South Africa, were originally owned by influential figureheads and governors attached to colonizing missions to impose the values of the British Empire on indigenous populations. The same volumes, which originally served as symbols of the supposed virtues of English and Western civilizing projects, have more recently become sites of resistance through post-colonial scholarship.”
One thing you don’t have to guess is that post colonial scholarship is no great shakes; that is no one of any intelligence upon reading it has felt compelled to write home to mother to relay the information to her. Indeed, post-colonial scholarship (such as it is), at least from what I can glean, consists largely of listening to Bob Marley warble off key about “buffalo soldiers”, smoke a spleef in the rutting beast’s memory, take the White man to task for his innate superiority and high spirits, extol the non-laudable Audre Lorde as a “great” poet, bitch about the condition niggers found themselves in when having to work on sugar plantation in the midday sun (they say when a nigger fell they tossed him straightway on the lime pit without a pang hitting the heart), positing the Haitian revolution as the paradigm of the future (along with a never ending series of Nuremberg like trials which will put the White man in the dock with an always preordained verdict of guilty as hell), alluding to the fact that spearchuckers who jump up and down with painted faces grunting out nonsensical syllables in a foul rite are just as culturally significant as having said “in the high and palmy sate of Rome”, and generally bitching, moaning and whining that the White man defeated their ancestors like they were blowing over a feather. You see they say the “supposed virtues” of those White civilizing projects; and one can only nod in an oblique agreement: the White man should never have wasted his precious time trying to bring culture to the cultureless or civilizing to the uncivilizable; they should have just killed them upon first sight and made the Americas our own pristine nature reserve. You can say it’s hard hearted or brutal but what you can’t say is that it’s not true that had we done it we would be waking up in paradise every day.
“It is sobering to think that after Nelson Mandela was arrested for his activist resistance to apartheid and incarcerated on Robben Island in South Africa, among the plays that and other prisoner secretly read and annotated while imprisoned, in the copy of Shakespeare’s complete works acquired by fellow inmate Sonny Venkatrathnam, were those preserved thanks to the First Folio. Thus old Shakespeares have been, and continue to be, replaced by new.”
No, what is sobering is that this tripe is allowed to see the light of day. The idea of that low grade moron Nelson Mandela being able to puzzle much out of the master spirit William Shakespeare is plainly preposterous. For there are no new Williams Shakespeare’s only the original, the one and only; and that one was not for his age but for eternity. And the juxtaposition of this putrid paean to the dark scum to the nobility of the story of the book of all books shakes one to the core. The story is simple and beautiful: a group of friends are given a ring by a dying man to set his word aright. And these hard-working actors, these diligent entrepreneurs, these loyal cousins and kinsmen, work round the clock to compile the most important book ever published, none other is even close. There are scores of them that still exist and they are deposited in safes and museums and they are in temperature-controlled rooms so that they are not subject to the ravages and the worms of time; and if you had gold that weighed the same as those books the book would be worth far more; that is they are worth far more than their weight in gold. And if one were to compare its worth to millions of dead niggers the choice would be clear and easy; you’d let the niggers hang and sup long at that fountain of brilliance. They would have done so in the high and palmy state of Rome had they been able, and I don't see why we shouldn't all the time.
