You might have thought that some of Britain’s most sacred cultural items might be sacrosanct and immune from the wave of ‘decolonising’ hysteria and self-loathing that has seeped across the nation like mustard gas, asphyxiating everyone and everything in its path.
Think again. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has joined in the fun, according to the Telegraph:
Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust owns buildings linked to the Bard in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust also owns archival material including parish records of the playwright’s birth and baptism.
It is now “decolonising” its vast collection to “create a more inclusive museum experience”.
This process includes exploring “the continued impact of Empire” on the collection, the “impact of colonialism” on world history, and how “Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this”.
The trust has stated that some items in its collections and archives may contain “language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful”.
The process of “decolonising”, which typically means moving away from Western perspectives, comes after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s genius was used to advance ideas about “white supremacy”.
The claims were made in a 2022 collaborative research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham.
The research took issue with the trust’s quaint Stratford attractions, comprising the supposed childhood homes and shared family home of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, his wife, because the Bard was presented as a “universal” genius.
This idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy”, it was claimed.
This is because it presents European culture as the world standard for high art, a standard which was pushed through “colonial inculcation” and the use of Shakespeare as a symbol of “British cultural superiority” and “Anglo-cultural supremacy”.
Veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of a “white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly ‘West-centric’ worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today”.
Belonging to a wider phenomenon of the talentless woke trying to make themselves relevant and important by slagging off those who are – or were – far more able than themselves, this latest development has some precedents:
The Globe Theatre in London ran a series of seminars titled ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare’ which promoted scholarship focused on the idea of race in his plays.
Academies taking part in the series made a number of claims, including that King Lear was about “whiteness”, and that the character of Prince Hamlet holds “racist” views of black people.
According to one book (Don Jordan’s The King’s City, Abacus 2017), Shakespeare was responsible for coining or providing the first ever recorded use of 1,582 English words. The Birthplace Trust puts the total at over 1,700. Perhaps those should all be on a decolonising list so we can stop using them too. They include ‘worthless’ – no price for guessing what that could be applied to here – and ‘we have seen better days’, which we certainly have.
Worth reading in full. You can also read about the story here.
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The phrase “white supremacy” is the complement that the anti-whitists and anti-Westerners pay to the people who created the greatest civilisation in history.
The phrase is a byproduct of the inferiority complex that so many of these cultures have in spades. This inferiority complex arises from their inability to organise themselves due to cultural failings. Interestingly, the East Asians do not suffer from this inferiority mentality and they rarely go on about these victimhood narratives. The results and differences in outcomes are clear to see.
And all while being the “global minority”!
The term derives from jealousy and resentment because white culture is more successful.
I really, really do wish these horrible, horrible, shit-stirring arse wipes would firk off and DIE and preferably of a 16th century disease such as the Black Death.
England and St George !!!
‘The Science’ from these idiots will declare that Shaking the Speare was a Black Transgendered Muslim who self identified as a Korean-Ecuadorean.
The trouble is that the anti-whitists hope that by screaming “white supremacy” and “decolonisation” then it will be the white minority they hate so much that will DIE.
I didn’t realise sadomasochism was so prevalent.
Wouldn’t you think that at some stage a kind of primal ‘survival of the species’-type urge would kick in and they’d quit with this and the ‘suicidal empathy’ nonsense? But nope. It’s like these dodos would happily go extinct and they’d do so feeling virtuous and noble.
They should take the initiative and lead by example, AND in doing so would relieve the world of around 1 Kg of CO2 per day – surely they must see the benefit (to Climate Zealots) in doing that!
They’re decadent in the sense that they choose the thing that will destroy them. You’re right, though, it’s a very odd phenomenon.
These people are really busy streaming taxpayer money to themselves with firehoses and they’re going to make whatever public noises serve to distract from that. In this respect, this practical-joke style trolling seems to work very well so far.
I don’t get the impression the woke mind virus is receding at all in the UK. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. Too many deluded people hate their race, country, history, culture and customs, so they’d gladly lay down in submission and enable their erasure and the simultaneous take-over by foreigners from incompatible and hostile ideologies. People like this are shameful;
https://x.com/alexharmstrong/status/1901212073201140194
They are very vocal, and have the MSM onside.
Hopefully, most rational people are seeing through this BS, and are ignoring it as they get more and more shrill.
A lot of it is humanity graduates finding their way into organisational and political power but knowing precious little about the history and philosophy of science and technology. Mix in vested interests from representatives of other (failed) cultures also finding their way into positions of power and trying to skew the narrative into ways that suit their agenda. As mentioned in earlier comments, you’ll rarely see East Asians doing this as they do not have to, given that their capable cultures can organise themselves.
FFS. These people make me sick. Is there nothing good about British, and Western cultural heritage? I despise these jealous and bitter academic types, who propagate this bollocks. And I have complete contempt for those guardians of our culture, who buy into this poisonous clap trap.
I wish I knew some of these people personally, so that I could tell them to their faces, what I think of them.
I’m not a psychologist but this whole anti-whiteness stuff seems to me like overcompensatation for inferiority complex.
Coming from Eastern Europe, I must admit that in comparison to Shakespeare anything we did around the same time is insignificant.
Denying it won’t make any difference.
I could delude myself that I’m as strong as Tyson Fury but ultimately if I got into a ring with him, he could kill me with a single blow within five seconds and he wouldn’t even need to make an effort.
100% correct. The clue is in the cultures who push the anti white narrative and who are vocal about it. Many cultures that are themselves successful do not push the same nonsensical narrative. I usually kill the conversations on anti whiteness by referring to the relative success of Japan or China or Singapore or… (examples abound). The odd thing are those from our own culture who push this anti white nonsense but I usually find that they have spent little time living and working around the world within different cultures so are, essentially, clueless.
I work in a multi-national team and I have to say nobody I have ever come across buys this anti-white, post-colonial bollox.
We all rub along pretty well, nobody seems to suffer from imaginary grievances or inferiority complex.
I too work in a multinational team with few apparent issues at team level but this anti white nonsense operates at a higher, societal, level, akin to geopolitical forces. These forces have consequences, including at the level of the individual.
Behind this is the tragic story of all successful organizations dedicated to achieving some socially positive outcome: They eventually succeed and would thus have rendered themselves superfluous. But established organizations obviously don’t want to become superfluous. Hence, they shift focus towards re-establishing the problems the originally meant to overcome. That’s how feminism turned into a movement supporting everlasting mutual hatred of men and women and that’s also what happened to the UN organizations for decolonization. After the planet was decolonized (except the French parts of it as the French don’t bother with such nonsense), it became badly necessary for something else which still looked English to be stripped of all traces of it. What could be a better target for this than England itself?
The author of the plays and poems was a highly-educated man familiar with the English court and Europe, yet the corn merchant of Stratford with a similar name could barely write his own signature.
“Two things are outstanding in the creation of the English system of canals, and they characterise all the Industrial Revolution. One is that the men who made the revolution were practical men. …they often had little education, and in fact school education as it then was could only dull an inventive mind. The grammar schools legally could only teach the classical subjects for which they had been founded. The universities also (there were only two, at Oxford and Cambridge) took little interest in modern or scientific studies; and they were closed to those who did not conform to the Church of England.”
Jacob Bronowski
“Too much of what is called ’education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”
Thomas Sowell
“The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn”
Cicero
“A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education”
G. B .Shaw
“What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.”
Buckminster Fuller
So what is to be done?
These are the real Fascists!
Did England have any colonies when Shakespeare was alive?
And so what? All peoples, flora and fauna colonize. Life has colonized this earth.
There was the Virginia colony.
These supposed academics who devote their miserable careers essentially prostituting themselves attempting to denigrate geniuses like Shakespeare Newton and the rest remind me (trigger warning) of fag hags at uni who were for whatever reason unable to get laid by sporty lads and spent time hanging out with the gay boys trying to convince themselves they weren’t bothered.
Missing from all of this historical revisionism are a few realities:
– The European nations, over a few hundred years, developed science and technology much faster than any culture in history. The value of this freely distributed intellectual property is now, globally, tens of trillions of dollars per annum.
– Relative to this, the natural resources ‘taken’ are minimal for two key reasons. The first is that the global population prior to 1800 was well under 1Bn and not the 8Bn it is now; and the second is that transportation pre about 1900 was incapable of carrying much goods and resources.
Netting the two above against each other quickly reveals a massive gain for the globe.
The real issue that requires answering is why so many countries have proven to be unable to organise themselves to copy the IP and thus build their economies. Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, China, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam have, to quite some extent, managed it. The remainder of the developing world have not and they have only themselves to blame for this. Rewriting history to cover up their own inability to mobilise and organise is in nobody’s interests and least of all their own. As with most shortcomings, the reasons reside within and the developed world owes them little other than to point out this reality which, sadly, few historians or politicians ever do.
Excellent points.
“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Well said, Polonius.
Being a Nosy Parker, I thought I’d look up more about this Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to see who was in charge of this Communist “Decolonisation Agenda”. To my surprise, all the Trust members are extremely well-heeled, well-qualified, experienced, respected members of their professions, with only one Third World Ethnic: Muslim, of course.
The Trust is led by Lady Penelope, Vicountess Cobham, CBE, who managed and opened her former husband’s stately home Hagley Hall to the public for decades. She and her current partner, the former well-known Tory minister David Mellor, both decided to divorce their previous spouses in 1995, so I’m not sure how she ended up with her ex-husband’s stately home and title, but as a peasant, I’m not familiar with these things.
The point is that it is not your rabid Arthur Scargill Communist working class types that are leading this Communist Decolonisation Agenda, but the upper classes, sometimes termed “elites”. That is the thing that is hard to understand, at least for me.
There is also this:
Stratford-upon-Avon locals fear William Shakespeare’s hometown is in ‘terminal decline’ – Mirror Online
…and this:
Iraqi Muslim and YouGov founder Nadhim Zahawi was the MP for Stratford-upon-Avon for 14 years, from 2010-2024.
The organisation funding this is
https://esmeefairbairn.org.uk
among other things, committed to improving Our Natural World by ensuring that there’s more diversity and inclusivity in the environment sector (I didn’t read any further after I found the first bit confirming what I had strongly suspected from the start). If someone who’s Lady Penelope, Vicountess Cobham, CBE, is involved in this illiterate¹ attack on English culture, this suggests that something’s very rotten in the state of Blairmark wrt “the honors system.”
¹ Universal genius doesn’t mean something like global arts superhero but refers to someone who was considered accomplished in all arts and sciences of his day.
It’s just another way of bashing the oiks.
Ode to a tray of frozen steak:
“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a stew!”
– © The Housewive’s Shakespearean Companion, Oxbridge Diversity Press, 2025
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is classed as an ‘independent charity’ so receives various grants through various ways. Any of its buildings or associated businesses (shops, cafes etc) will receive huge tax concessions. Unlike other charities, because it is classed as independent it should not receive direct aid from the govt (from my understanding). However, read on as to how they get round this. The Arts Council (another ‘charity’ which receives half a billion a year from our stupid government) gave the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust over 600K in 2022 (Leamington News). There will be very little oversight as to how this money is spent. I’m given to think projects are invented in order to justify receiving this money. Think of a termite structure: lots of tunnels and add ons. That is our modern charity industrial complex – and we are being forced to fund it. And pay for the self-important thickos who run these so called ‘charities’.