Robert Fisk: Offended by Shakespeare? Let's ban him

Into the bin must go TS Eliot, and I guess we’ll have to chuck out Winston Churchill

Saturday, 8 March 2008

When I first read of the nine 14-year-old students at the Jewish Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School in east London who refused to sit a Shakespeare test because they believed the Bard was anti-Semitic, I could well understand their feelings. Their protest against Shylock in The Merchant of Venice – reported in this newspaper last week – seemed well grounded.

However human moneylenders may be ("If you prick us, do we not bleed?"), demanding a pound of flesh from a debtor really does add to the anti-Semitic overtones of Elizabethan literature and – by implication – stokes up the racist fires of our contemporary world. But then – in paragraph four – I came across the killer line. The nine girls were not being tested on The Merchant of Venice at all – they were being examined on The Tempest. It was Shakespeare they were objecting to. If only I and my schoolboy chums had thought of such a wizard wheeze.

Texto completo pode ser encontrado aqui.

Cortesia onegoodmove