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.”
