{"id":31850,"date":"2016-03-18T20:16:17","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T09:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=31850"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:54:16","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:54:16","slug":"better-ban-the-bard-if-safeschools-scares-you-burgewords-comments-on-australias-neopuritans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/better-ban-the-bard-if-safeschools-scares-you-burgewords-comments-on-australias-neopuritans\/","title":{"rendered":"Better ban the Bard if #SafeSchools scares you: @burgewords comments on Australia’s #NeoPuritans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Gwyneth

Gwyneth Paltrow cross-dressing in ‘Shakespeare in Love’ (1998).<\/p><\/div>\n

Hated by the Puritans, the\u00a0complete works of William Shakespeare was\u00a0firmly entrenched in the Australian school syllabus decades ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WESTERNERS have lived through many periods in which extreme Christians distributed anti-gay propaganda and thereby got the ear of authorities, and\u00a0this month\u2019s spat from Australia\u2019s hard, religious right shows not much has changed in four hundred years.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old war<\/a>, that between conservatives wanting to put the brakes on equality, and progressives trying to touch the accelerator.<\/p>\n

During the reign of James I (1603-1625) in England, the fires of Puritanism were well on their way to blazing a lasting wound through societies in many continents, burning until well after the Salem Witch Trials in New England at the end of the century.<\/p>\n

The Puritans were antsy about anything showy. They railed against the Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses as much as they did the Roman Catholic church, with its theatre-like ceremonies and costumes.<\/p>\n

One of their main bugbears was gender. At its very core, Puritanism called for men to be men and women to be women. Any variation was seen as a threat to stable society.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s fascinating, and a little alarming, to see modern-day politicians using similar fear-mongering language.<\/p>\n

When Senator Cory Bernardi\u00a0complains about the very idea<\/a> that children role-play\u00a0in an attempt to teach them empathy for same sex-attracted teenagers in the Safe Schools program, he could be accused of overreacting.<\/p>\n

When columnists like News Corp\u2019s\u00a0Angela Shanahan labels Safe Schools<\/a> a \u201cradical form of sex education that promotes a fluid gender ideology,\u201d she\u2019s probably venting her spleen a bit much.<\/p>\n

But when these and others, like MP George Christensen and Lyle Shelton (MD of the Australian Christian Lobby) deliberately obfuscate the program<\/a>, muddying its concepts with pornography and what they label “disturbing”\u00a0behaviours like penis tucking and breast-binding, the\u00a0pack\u00a0invective calls to mind one of the great forefathers of postmodern gender panic, William Prynne (1600-1669).<\/p>\n

If the Safe Schools program is questionable to neo-Puritans like Bernardi et al., let\u2019s put Shakespeare to the test and see if he should stay on the syllabus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"prynn-sm\"

Cover of William Prynne’s anti-playhouse polemic.<\/p><\/div>\n

Prynne encapsulated every Puritan complaint of\u00a0the millennium in his polemic Histrio-mastix<\/a>: The Player’s Scourge<\/i>, published in 1633 as an argument to close the playhouses of Britain.<\/p>\n

\u201c…sundry common Actors do usually once a day, at leastwise twice or thrice a week, attire themselves in women\u2019s array to act their female parts; yea, they make a daily practice of it to put on women\u2019s attire, it being inseparably incident to their lewd profession,\u201d is just one\u00a0mild quote from this extremist manifesto.<\/p>\n

And it worked. By the English Civil War, the Puritans got their way and Britain\u2019s playhouses were closed in 1642.<\/p>\n

But one popular publication survived this century of censorship. First printed in 1623, and hated by the Puritans, the complete works of William Shakespeare\u00a0was\u00a0firmly entrenched in the Australian school syllabus decades ago.<\/p>\n

So if the Safe Schools program is questionable to neo-Puritans like Bernardi et al., let\u2019s put Shakespeare to the test and see if he should stay on the curriculum.<\/p>\n

Well, on gender fluidity, Shakespeare gets knocked out straight away. Cross-dressing takes place in one-fifth of his works<\/a>. Enduring crowd pleasers such as Twelfth Night<\/i>, As You Like It<\/i> and The Merchant of Venice<\/i> see the playwright\u2019s heroines in male attire\u00a0for the bulk of the play, masquerading as young men who find themselves in comic sticky situations with heroes who are fooled into homoerotic attractions to them.<\/p>\n

Viola, the protagonist of Twelfth Night<\/i>, even goes so far as to ask a sailor to\u00a0secretly loan her some clothes\u00a0and present her to the local Duke as a eunuch. Presumably this entails binding any breasts that might give her disguise away once Viola discards her “women’s weeds”.<\/p>\n

\"Lady

Lady Olivia falling for Viola in ‘Twelfth Night’.<\/p><\/div>\n

When learning about the early production of Shakespeare\u2019s plays, students will invariably come across a great reality: all the female roles were originally played by men.<\/p>\n

But the end of that tradition in the 1660s didn\u2019t end the fun. For centuries, whenever women played Viola, and\u00a0these actresses dressed as a young man and encountered Lady Olivia who falls for \u2018him\u2019, endless girl-on-girl innuendo has entertained many a theatre and classroom.<\/p>\n

Yet we do not hear the neo-Puritans within government crowing about these \u2018gender-bending\u2019 Shakespeare texts on the school curriculum, and no complaints about the 80,000 school students a year<\/a> exposed to Shakespeare at the hands of the Bell Shakespeare Company, in receipt of $1.28 million in federal funding<\/a> announced by George Brandis in the 2015 budget.<\/p>\n

The neo-Puritans had their chance to rid Australian schools of Shakespeare, as part of a searching and robust review into the national curriculum<\/a> by the Abbott government, reported under Turnbull in January, 2016.<\/p>\n

But the Bard survived: \u201c…drama, its different varieties, in tragedy, comedy, romance and historical plays, from Shakespeare (as a recurring presence) to the present will be represented,\u201d\u00a0the report confirmed.<\/p>\n

I found one submission that called for more Shakespeare<\/a>, but none that alerted the inquiry to the possibility that students might encounter all manner of sexual references in Shakespeare\u2019s plays.<\/p>\n

\"Mel

Mel Gibson and Glenn Close in Hamlet (1991).<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cTo live in the rank sweat of an enseam\u00e8d bed, stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty,\u201d says Hamlet to his mother, accusing her of adultery and not washing the sheets.<\/p>\n

\u201cCome, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty,\u201d prays Lady Macbeth to deities that are not the Christian God, explicitly requesting gender reassignment and a nasty streak.<\/p>\n

Like most of my generation, I studied Hamlet<\/i> and Macbeth<\/i> at school and was taken to many productions. We read and role-played\u00a0scenes from Shakespeare, but we were left to interpret the diversity for ourselves, probably out of prudishness more than any Puritanism.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll Australian students deserve access to a world-class curriculum that encourages diversity and which allows schools flexibility over how it is taught,\u201d the curriculum inquiry website<\/a> leads off with, like an over-arching mission statement.<\/p>\n

With Safe Schools now under serious attack<\/a>, it seems the very meaning of \u2018diversity\u2019 and \u2018flexibility\u2019 is also up for grabs.<\/p>\n

But William Shakespeare, creator of more than 1700 words in the English language, and many a figure of speech, left us with a saying that can be used when answering over-zealous critics of sexual diversity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a line from Hamlet<\/i>, perfect for when someone vehemently attempts to convince about something where\u00a0the opposite is true.<\/p>\n

About your\u00a0trashing of LGBTI dignity, Cory, George, Lyle and your chums, I say: \u201cThe lady doth protest too much, methinks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"9780994388759\"Michael Burge is an Australian journalist and writer who publishes at\u00a0<\/i>burgewords.com<\/i><\/a>. His literary non-fiction debut \u2018Merely Players: Acting like Shakespeare really matters\u2019 is available in paperback<\/a> and as an eBook from online booksellers, including\u00a0<\/i>Amazon UK<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/i>Amazon US<\/i><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/i>Amazon Australia<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a9 Michael Burge, all rights reserved.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hated by the Puritans, the\u00a0complete works of William Shakespeare was\u00a0firmly entrenched in the Australian school syllabus decades ago. WESTERNERS have lived through many periods in which extreme Christians distributed anti-gay propaganda and thereby got the ear of authorities, and\u00a0this month\u2019s spat from Australia\u2019s hard, religious right shows not much has changed in four hundred years. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":31852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,585,855,854],"tags":[2940,179,2932,2939,2941,2937,1654,2750,2933,2943,2935,2934,2914,2942,2936,2938],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/PALTROW.jpg?fit=799%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-8hI","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}