Shakespeare, Alastair Stewart and the right to be offended

It was only a matter of time before the woke brigades came for Shakespeare. His 20th sonnet, for example, has a worrying (from their point of view) transphobic undertone:

A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change as is false women’s fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,

Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created,

Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

Very pronoun-insensitive, I wrote, and I thought I was joking. Well I was, but I assumed people would get that I was.

Apparently not. Shakespeare’s transgressions against the human condition are so deeply embedded that it has taken a Twitter row to uncover the following horror (trigger warning, it’s from Measure for Measure, so please avert eyes if weak of disposition):

But man, proud man, dress’d in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,

His glassy essence- like an angry ape.

“Racist”, it turns out (me neither). “Not acceptable” (who to?). If the Bard had written that yesterday, he might expect what the police refer to as the “early morning knock”.

Shakespeare himself has, of course, been what the Mafia call “on the lam” for 400 years. I doubt they’ll ever catch him. But his associates are still peddling filth such as the above and one of them has been banged to rights: the television presenter Alastair Stewart, who has been forced out of his job on ITV News for posting the above quote in the middle of a Twitter confrontation with someone called Martin Shapland.

Martin Shapland decided Shakespeare was referring to him. Having been presented with a quote which, surely, cautions against the tendency of the human person to think they know everything, he chose to view it in a way which made himself the centre of attention and which ended the career of a journalist about whom nobody had ever had a bad word to say.

Martin Shapland chose to take offence — at a quotation from Shakespeare, of all people. And thereby did his own bit in the ratification of a culture in which the worst thing you can do is to give offence and the easiest thing you can do is to take it. I call that a pretty crappy culture.

But what’s wrong with giving offence and what’s wrong with you if you can’t take it? The two questions are really one and the same.

The offence-seekers have a deeply, well, offensive, view of the nature of the human person. They assume that the human mind is a recipient of what comes before it and reacts “accordingly”. You say something to me . . . I feel like this . . . I therefore behave like this.

In philosophical terms, this is a Lockean “Enlightenment” view. It is a conception of the person which assumes a passivity in our mental lives and overlooks what the Greek philosophers thought was an essential condition of human flourishing: that we can educate ourselves, not merely in terms of how we behave, but in terms of how we feel. We have obligations not merely of action but of emotion. Within every human life, moment-to-moment, obligations are generated not just to act well, but to feel things appropriately. The Greeks were always more ambitious in terms of their thoughts about moral psychology.

To announce that you are “offended”, without assessing whether or not that’s a good or bad thing, is to be in a state of arrested emotional, and moral, development. We are not functional machines of the Turing sort whose interior feelings are contingent, or wholly contingent, on what the input is. To be a fully alive adult is to take responsibility for that interiority and to shape it accordingly. The tools are there.

And to Martin Shapland I would say this: that to be offended by Shakespeare is to make a choice and that to make a choice implies the possibility of error. And in your case, the error is very clear: that you have not been offended enough. Being on Twitter might be sufficient, I guess; that can certainly be a learning curve. It might be argued, in fact, that Alastair Stewart’s real sin is that he introduced the Bard into the grubby social media market in the first place. 

None of this is intended as a defence of gratuitous insult. But in the properly ordered soul, habituated by how to deal with offence, when the offence is offered gratuitously, it can be politely declined. Martin Shapland, I suggest you start reading stuff. Beginning with Shakespeare.