You imagine that Shakespeare might have had some fun with Ronald Dion DeSantis. The Florida governor is attempting to win the Republican nomination for the US presidency by first stoking nasty and divisive “culture wars”. His campaign would no doubt have been fertile ground for a writer who delighted in dramatising the self-destructive fallout of “vaulting ambition” and in ruthlessly exposing the “smile and smile and be a villain” strategies of grinning populists.
The latest application of the governor’s homophobic 2022 “Parental Rights in Education Act” – widely known as the “don’t say gay” law because it prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms – has led some Florida school boards to remove Shakespeare plays from the curriculum and the library, in order to avoid anything “racy or sexual”. Romeo and Juliet has been deemed beyond the pale in this regard (and don’t get the governor and his book-banning minions started on the non-binary shenanigans in Twelfth Night and As You Like It). Floridian students will therefore no longer be free to spend enlightening afternoons pondering the textual notes to Mercutio’s various pieces of amorous advice to his pal, Romeo: “If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking and you beat love down”; or, that favourite of school students down the ages: “If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark. /Now will he sit under a medlar tree,/ And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit/ as maids call medlars when they laugh alone./ Romeo that she were, O, that she were/ An open-arse, or thou a popp’rin pear.”
The nicely named Joseph Cool, an English teacher at Gaither high school in Florida, was among those to speak out against the ban, telling the Tampa Bay Times: “I think the rest of the nation – no, the world – is laughing at us. Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.” Attempts to sanitise or censor Shakespeare are as old as the plays themselves, of course (and they have always required the equivalents of Mr Cool to shout them down). Preachers and puritans sermonised and wrote pamphlets against the corrupting power of theatre and the homoeroticism of boys playing girls on the stage throughout the Elizabethan period. In that same spirit, Dr Thomas Bowdler produced his infamous 12-volume The Family Shakespeare in 1807, edited to ensure that “those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family” (not a medlar or a popp’rin pear in sight). Shakespeare would no doubt have enjoyed the fact that his self-appointed censor’s name became synonymous with botched and heavy-handed intervention for the ages.
The political bowdlerisation sanctioned by Governor DeSantis has an even blunter edge than those 19th-century efforts. It has resulted in the removal from some school libraries not only of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream but also of Paradise Lost and The Invisible Man and The Handmaid’s Tale, among hundreds of other titles. It is surely only a matter of time before some savvy parents in Florida follow the lead of those in Utah, who earlier this year – successfully – demanded the removal of the Bible from school shelves on the grounds that it contains page upon page of pornographic content such as “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution”.
DeSantis does not need to be much of a history student to recognise that in the age-old standoff between expansive, challenging, life-loving literature and narrow, reactionary, embittered politics, ultimately there is only ever one winner – because only one side is speaking the truth. Ever since its implementation, DeSantis’s law has been shown to be an ass, which, as his censors will know, was one of Shakespeare’s very favourite words, used 88 times in the plays, and generally with several layers of joyous irony.
