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https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/03/the-assault-on-shakespeare-impoverishes-the-world/

Apparently, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is to ‘decolonise’ its Shakespeare heritage sites in Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust wants to use these museum sites to explore ‘the continued impact of empire’ on its collections. This was prompted by research into the supposed role Shakespeare’s work has played in promoting ‘white supremacy’. It should be embarrassing to even consider such drivel, but as George Orwell so presciently observed, ‘there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them’.

And, as if on cue, enter said intellectual, stage left: Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at Birmingham City University, who collaborated on a 2022 project with the trust. As the Telegraph reported last month, Hopkins’s research claimed that the idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’. It presents European culture as the world standard for high art and promotes it through ‘colonial inculcation’, turning Shakespeare into a symbol of ‘British cultural superiority’ and ‘Anglo-cultural supremacy’. The ongoing veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of the ‘white Anglocentric, Eurocentric and increasingly “Westcentric” worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today’.

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