New Zealand ends funding for school Shakespeare festival: ‘canon of imperialism’

The literary canon is terrible, and students know it. They keep wondering why they're reading the same books people were assigned a century ago. It does the opposite of encouraging reading. It tells students that only a very narrow set of voices are "great" and everything else is trash.

It's even worse that these voices are almost all male and almost all white, and come from a time when casual racism and casual sexism were just par for the course. Even students whose heritage is represented are bored by this material. It's even worse for the rest.

As I said, I adore Shakespeare. I've performed every Shakespeare play. I'm about to direct Midsummer for the third time. I find Shakespeare fascinating because it can be reinvented so many ways -- it was intended to be performed in a wide variety of venues for many different audiences.

But that doesn't mean it has to be forced on everybody. It's important enough that everybody should be exposed to it -- one play, heavily interpreted to show off that flexibility. They don't need every line of it and they don't need a lot of different plays. Certainly not the same four tragedies that get taught in most schools. It kills interest in Shakespeare. I killed it for me, until I rediscovered it a decade later.

I would much rather students get exposed to far more works by living writers -- people whose works they might actually want to read. The "canon" really is the books that rich people liked to read a century ago and therefore must be great. Pick one or two of these per year, because they do have merit, but ditch the notion that they are the only books with merit.

If that means less Shakespeare, that's okey-dokey with me. I'm sorry to see schools lose any funding for anything, and there's lots more stuff I'd rather see go than a theater festival. But if they're channeling the money into books that actually mean something, and expose more students to books that they can engage with rather than forget the instant class ends, I'm all for it.

While Hyland may be part Maori, New Zealand is majority of European descent [1]. To them, Shakespeare is "their own stories". Should they abandon their own history and culture because they changed locale?

[1] As at the 2018 census, the majority of New Zealand's population is of European descent (70 percent) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Demographics