Is Shakespeare Too White For College? | We the Internet TV

After a petition calls for Yale’s English department to “decolonize" the curriculum and include fewer white male authors like Shakespeare, an actor takes the stage and delivers a soliloquy on the topic.

The petition claims “a year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of colour, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity”, and that the course “creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color” and calls on the department to “to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity”.

Yale created a comparative literature department in response to similar complaints in the 1970s which offers many courses in diverse perspectives. However, this petition focused on the required “Major English Poets” class which primarily studies 8 white male authors - Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donn, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot.

What do you think - Is the petition an admirable effort to include new voices, or turning away from the genre's most influential ones? Is it nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous privilege, or take arms against it? Better to endure a sea of troubling literature, or to just get a C in literature for your troubles? Or is this all more boring than Shakespeare?

Let us know in the footnotes (or comments, rather).

Credits

Shakespearen Actor - Guy Balotine
Director and editor - Greg Burke
Writer - Lou Perez
DP - Will Gordh
Sound - Ed Spangler
Grip - Phillip Hancock
Makeup - Megan Williams

Executive Producers: Maurice Black, Lou Perez, Erin O’Connor, & Rob Pfaltzgraff
Creative Director: Erin O'Connor
Head Writer: Lou Perez
Creative Producer, Marketing: Lana Link
Marketing: Toby Muresianu, Carter Fowler
Associate Producer: Adam Guillette