Two columnists, both alike in indignity: Allison Pearson and Charles Moore on Shakespeare — a culture war comedy of errors...
"Heard of Shakespeare? Didn't think so. He's been cancelled."
Previously: The Telegraph’s Taliban: The paranoid style in British newspaper commentary...
In their perpetual search for people and things that have been ‘cancelled’ by the imagined cultural commissars that stalk their port-stained dreams, it was inevitable that The Daily Telegraph’s unmerry band of constantly angry columnists would alight on Shakespeare in the end.
But it speaks to the shallowness of the intellects at that newspaper — a fanzine for tweedy racists and the perpetually outraged about invented outrage — that it has published two columns claiming that the immortal bard has been mortally wounded by the ‘woke’ in the space of two days.
It will also come as no surprise to anyone paying attention that the writers behind the latest expressions of idiocy are Sam Eagle’s desiccated British cousin, Charles Moore, and the ancient byline picture-wielding conspiracy theory enthusiast Allison Pearson.
While The Daily Telegraph’s stable is packed with ghouls, Pearson and Moore are so reliably awful they could be two little wooden figures emerging from a clock once an hour to scream about the decadence of modern Britain before returning to the comfort of darkness.
Pearson was first out of the gate with her column and its excruciatingly clunky and unfunny headline (Imagine if all of Shakespeare’s plays went ‘Wokeo’). The catalyst was a story about the Globe Theatre including a content warning on the booking page for its current production of Romeo & Juliet; it’s two lines that read:
This production contains depictions of suicide, moments of violence and references to drug use.
It contains gunshot sound effects and the use of stage blood.
This seems like a sensible bit of information for people considering seeing the show. While the themes of Romeo & Juliet are hardly unknown, the way in which different productions treat them varies widely and it’s worth warning an audience when suicide is depicted, blood is shown, and gunshot sound effects1 are used.
But I’m not a British newspaper editor scrabbling around for culture war stories or a columnist whose output is so relentlessly bad faith it’s like they scrawl cock and balls graffiti in every Gideon Bible they have ever seen.
The Globe story was fired up by a story in The Sun on 19 August. It took the two sentences and the fact that numbers for the Samaritans and The Listening Place are made available for anyone who might have been affected by the play’s themes — suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 50 — and extrapolated that out to a screaming headline that read:
WOKEO & JULIET Theatre fans warned about ‘upsetting’ Romeo & Juliet themes and given Samaritans number in incredible act of wokery
It’s a lot of fuss over two sentences and a helpline number. But Sun readers were given the impression that the theatre is plastered in warnings and performances begin with flashing red lights and a voice booming: “You may be triggered! Flee now if you fear you may be triggered!” The story began:
Theatre fans are being warned about upsetting themes in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet — and given a number for the Samaritans if they need emotional support.
In an amazing act of wokery, London’s Globe Theatre alerts the audience that suicide, drug use and fake blood features in its performance.
… Audience members at the Globe Theatre in London are given a Samaritans helpline number in case they require emotional support after watching its modern version of the tragic love story.
The “amazing act of wokery” is a tiny warning on a web page and the provision of a number for anyone who might have been affected by suicide which is a huge issue in the UK. And as a statement from The Globe, stuck late in the story, says:
As we’ve chosen to focus on mental health, and utilise direct techniques that may be affecting to some audience members, we wanted to provide information to those who may need it.
So it’s not simply that The Globe thinks audiences can’t handle the themes of Romeo & Juliet but that it wants theatregoers to be aware of how this particular production is staged. If it hadn’t offered a warning, I can well imagine The Sun finding a story in “Globe’s gruesome production shocks theatre fans”.
But while The Globe had perfectly sensible reasons for its proportionate and subtle content warning, The Sun has no interest in sensible or proportionate. And that’s why it sought quotes from Tory MPs and… uh… Christopher Biggins.
The tame Tories and publicity-hungry panto mainstay Biggins were fired up to offer outraged quotes and they delivered:
Ex-Tory minister Ann Widdecombe said tonight: “This is barmy.”
Veteran actor Christopher Biggins tonight blasted theatre chiefs for warning that Romeo and Juliet contains upsetting themes, saying: “It’s wokeness gone mad.”
… Conservative MP Pauline Latham said: “This is absolutely ridiculous. How have we come to this after so many years of Shakespeare?”
All of these quotes would be less effective if The Sun were required to write how they were obtained:
“We needed some unbalanced invective from some famous idiots who’ll say anything if you ring them up and Biggins, Latham and Widdecombe can be relied upon to get angry about anything. I reckon we could persuade them that millennials are shunning teaspoons as unacceptable relics of the British Empire if we tried…”
Once The Sun had started the ‘row’, The Daily Mail — which aggregates other paper’s stories with a malevolent hunger — immediately picked up on the claims, reproducing the quotes from Biggins, Latham and Widdecombe and sticking an overheated headline on top: Bard news as snowflakes take on Shakespeare.
The Times, which is no less insidious than The Sun but simply has access to a more expensive thesaurus, did one of its common tricks — lifting the story from its tabloid sibling and running it the next day. Like The Mail, it ran the quotes from Biggins, Latham and Widdecombe in the first half of the piece before adding its own from Terence Collins, a trustee of The Listening Place, and Ian Burrows, an English lecturer at Cambridge University, supporting The Globe.
But the framing of the story and the inclusion of more negative quotes than positive ones set Times readers off in the comments section:
MitorTheBold
21 AUGUST, 2021
People in Afghanistan are confronting the Taliban, people in England are confronting Romeo & Juliet.Will Hambling
20 AUGUST, 2021
Absolutely pathetic. If one needs such warnings, one should perhaps rethink ever leaving one's house.DavidGTD
20 AUGUST, 2021
I should have had a trigger warning before reading this article! What has happened to us? How could our society have become so dysfunctional and pathetic?
Perhaps these men need a warning affixed at the top of every Times story that reads: “Caution! This report could contain culture war rhetoric and you may need to exercise critical thinking to separate fact from invective.”
The Sun, Times, and Daily Mail were so joined in their outrage by The Daily Express, The Daily Mirror, LBC’s Nick ‘Austin Allegro’ Ferrari, The Express & Star, The Herald and, of course, The Daily Telegraph.
The Daily Telegraph story was published on 20 August and includes a statement from The Globe that says, in part, that:
… the suicide moment is detailed and ‘real’ looking and feeling. Less stylistic, it’s quite stark. The audience gets a real sense of the loss of life of two you people who thought suicide was the only way out.
But, of course, that calm and sensible explanation of the content of this particular production of Romeo & Juliet was not enough for Pearson, whose column was published a full five days after her paper first ran the story.
Pearson opens her piece with a classic columnist technique: The rapid rush away from facts and towards not simply a strawman or even strawmen but an entire alternate straw reality in which readers are driven towards anger by imagined wokery which exists only in the writer’s fevered imagination. She writes:
Romeo, Romeo, wherefore hast thou not read the trigger warning before thou leap’t upon mine balcony in manner both hasty and potentially a bit rapey and problematic for a modern audience?
As you may know, the Globe Theatre has caused a stir by alerting audiences before performances of Romeo and Juliet to things which might upset them. Surely, it’s only a matter of time before Shakespeare’s characters are allocated new lines to show that, although they were created in times less enlightened than our own, they have finally got with the programme?
Notice how she avoids how the warning is given — text on a web page — and what it covers (depictions of blood and suicide, violence, drug use, gunshot effects) and opts instead to talk of “things that might upset them”, before suggesting that shock! horror! Shakespeare’s lines might be rewritten as if a) that’s likely to happen in this case (it’s not) and b) it’s never happened before (it has, many, many, many times).
Pearson then goes on to remind us that she went to Cambridge2 and attempts to flex what passes for her own academic assessment of the play:
Look, it’s been a while since I did the Tragedy paper at Cambridge, under the clammy-handed instruction of a famous professor who should have come with his own trigger warning, but I seem to remember that the point of Romeo and Juliet was that it was supposed to be distressing. The original idea was that, as you watched the harrowing love story you would experience pity and fear, but the redeeming and shaping power of Shakespeare’s art would deal with those strong emotions. No counsellor necessary.
Again, this is hyperbole for distorting rhetorical effect. The Globe was not and is not suggesting that audiences that see its production of Romeo & Juliet will need counselling but simply that vivid depictions of suicide can be traumatic for people who have dealt with others taking their own lives/have contemplated or are contemplating doing that themselves.
But again, Pearson is not in the business of being reasonable or dealing with the facts as they stand. She makes other bad faith columnists seem like slouches; she’s never met a fact she can’t distort, an intention she can’t misinterpret, and a situation where she cannot conjure up an enemy without or within.
She dedicates the rest of her column to utterly cack-handed parodies of famous Shakespeare speeches. She rewrites Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach…” rallying cry to make it a whine about health and safety (tediously conflating health and safety with political correctness like Stewart Lee’s imaginary nan).
She makes Hamlet’s “O that this too, too solid flesh would melt…” about fat-shaming for reasons known only to herself, and turns Macbeth’s witches vegan because not consuming animal products is the very worst wokery imaginable. Of course, Allison Pearson wrote her column while eating raw mince in a misguided effort to own the libs, slathering the blood across her face before shouting out of the window at passersby: “I bet this offends you, doesn’t it?”3
Last night, Charles Moore’s latest Telegraph column dropped4 and despite Pearson having ‘covered’ — I use that word in the very loosest of senses — the story two days previously he decided the world5 desperately needs his thoughts on Shakespeare.
With even less regard for the facts than Pearson — yes, that’s actually possible — Moore begins his column by claiming:
Attempts are being made to “cancel” Shakespeare. The usual reasons — he being dead, white and male — are cited. He also held “colonial” views, apparently, although he was born 150 years before anything that could be called the British Empire existed.
He doesn’t feel the need to quote any of these strident strawpeople who are demanding Shakespeare’s canon be burned in huge pyres just outside the front of Maison Moore. He just needs an opening to get his readers outraged and this is the kind of thing that they, being in the main (nearly) dead, white and male, are sure to get antsy about.
Linking to yet another Telegraph op-ed (this one by the paper’s sketchwriter Michael Deacon) that claimed “In the culture wars, not even Shakespeare is safe...”,6 Moore decides not to bother going into the Globe story particularly, preferring instead to stick to the territory of handwaving, exaggeration and lies:
I do not want, especially over a Bank Holiday weekend, to retrace well-trodden polemical ground, except to say that anything which impedes anyone, at any stage of life, reading, studying, watching and enjoying any of Shakespeare’s plays is to be deplored.
As Matthew Arnold wrote of him: “Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask – Thou smilest and art still.” Instead, I shall write about a prolonged encounter with the works which I am currently enjoying.
Charles has, along with his sister Charlotte (his parents were clearly not very creative in the naming states), been participating in a group discussing the works of Shakespeare via Zoom over the pandemic. And he’s decided that he wants to tell you all about it:
Each play is treated in a one-hour weekly session – except for Hamlet and King Lear, which are so rich that they get two. First up (though, as so often with Shakespeare, there is some dispute about this) was The Taming of the Shrew. Last – we are not there yet – will come Two Noble Kinsmen (which Shakespeare only part-wrote).
The whole journey will have taken nearly a year.
That all sounds very jolly and I only wish it took up more of Charles’ time so he was unable to write any more columns.
Sadly, the group has instead inspired Moore to give us his insights on the Bard, which include the rather incredible claim that Shakespeare’s plays are utterly devoid of any opinions and anyone who says otherwise is a dunderhead:
One of Charlotte’s basic rules is that one must not ask for Shakespeare’s opinion. With most great novelists – Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens – an authorial view intrudes. With Shakespeare’s plays, every single word – even those spoken by the occasional chorus – is spoken in character. It is never the playwright saying it, always the persons on stage.
It seems that the Moores don’t see any opinion in Shakespear’s prologues or present via implication in the way he presents characters, structures stories or decides their fates. Presumably, in Charles’ mind, Macbeth is merely a play about a murderous king rather than a dissection of the vain pursuit of power and the emptiness of the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’. And I guess Hamlet is just a ghost story with a bit too much talking.
Moore pushes the old canard that people are rejecting Shakespeare for being “too difficult” despite his plays remaining on school curriculums and university reading lists, before writing about “his characters of every sort and condition”:
… old and young, male and female, and every class from top to Bottom. You get everything – mother and son, father and daughter, star-crossed lovers, madmen, fools, the gender-fluid young, tragically brave men like Brutus and the gigantic comic poltroon that is Falstaff.
And you get every subject – love, death, war, money, envy, revenge, nationhood, race, colour, mercy, grace, honour, shame, rage, history, law, food, drink, nature, weather, science, music, magic, ghosts, brothels.
It seems almost impossible that the Moore who wrote that section is the same man who claims earlier in the article that Shakespeare’s plays are empty of his own opinions. The way he writes those characters and the inclusion of figures from across the social spectrum is a reflection of opinions.
You don’t need to be directly didactic — though that is present in Shakespeare’s works — to present opinions as a writer. They run through the work like the words in Brighton rock.
It’s outrageous to read Moore — a clumsy, self-satisfied writer — decrying ours as “an age which has forgotten the rhythm, depth and beauty which verse brings.” He should listen to Akala speaking about Shakespeare some time. He’d definitely learn something.
Shakespeare is not being cancelled. The Globe is not catering to ‘snowflakes’. But the plays have lessons for us when it comes to Pearson, Moore and the whole rotten edifice of the modern Daily Telegraph.
Claudius could have been reading their columns when he said, “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” And Falstaff offers us an excellently succinct review of their paper:
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
But the best response of all to the columnists’ distortions, half-truths and full-lies comes from the mouth of Macbeth: “… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Hear that line in your head whenever you encounter cruel clowns who have Telegraph columns.
I suppose you could say that’s a literal trigger warning.
People who went to Cambridge have a horrible habit of doing that and as someone who went to Cambridge, I abhor it… oh shit.
For legal reasons I’m required to say that I don’t know for sure that this happened.
I like the idea of talking about Moore’s output like a series of truly malignant mixtapes.
Or rather the tiny portion of the world that subjects itself to The Daily Telegraph.
I’m not even going to bother unpicking that one as it’s too boring.