Washington, D.C
Washington’s Folger Museum should stop making Shakespeare ‘woke’
Shakespeare is the great wordsmith of the English language, creator of “To be or not to be” and “Kiss me, Kate.”
He’s the most performed playwright in American history.
We call him “the Bard.”
But, we are told, we shouldn’t use that term.
“Bard” has racial undertones, Prof. Farah Karim-Cooper explains in her 2022 essay “Shakespeare through Decolonization.”
To raise Shakespeare so highly, she says, is to make him “an icon of white heritage and excellence: the conception of the man as Bard is, I argue, endemic to coloniality.”
If these allegations of supposed white guilt came from a professor of no distinction, we might ignore it.
But Karim-Cooper has been made head of the most renowned Shakespeare center in the world, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Opened in 1932, the Folger contains 200,000 items from the Renaissance period, including the largest collection of Shakespeare materials in existence.
The Folger’s announcement praises Karim-Cooper as “a field leader in examining Shakespearean plays through the lens of social justice.”
She leads the Antiracist Shakespeare Webinar, too — a set of videos showing scholars finding race matters in every play in the corpus.
She has labored to stop the Renaissance field from suppressing racial topics and ghettoizing scholars of color.
It’s a bizarre situation, but one we see often across academia.
Individuals take the reins of cultural institutions with the intent of denigrating their prized mission.
Karim-Cooper likes Shakespeare, but wants to pull him down a few pegs.
We must “Interrogate the canon and Shakespeare’s primacy within it,” she insists.
She also insists “the Bard has a race problem,” as a Washington Post profile of her put it.
Teach Othello, she says, but set it alongside Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor.
Stop making Shakespeare so special.
The founder of the Folger Library had other intentions.
Henry Folger idolized Shakespeare and believed America had a marvelous relationship with him.
His wife Emily stated that Henry saw Shakespeare as “one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith and our hope.”
That’s why he located the library just behind the U.S. Capitol.
The Library was not to be an Ivory Tower only. It was to bring Hamlet and Caesar to Americans of all kinds.
The race obsessions of the new director, however, are an elite matter.
People who saw Ralph Fiennes in Macbeth in DC this year aren’t interested in anti-racist catechisms. They want electric acting and eloquence for the ages.
Kids in DC schools who read Romeo and Juliet in 9th Grade and Hamlet in 10th won’t necessarily appreciate those masterpieces more if their teachers apply a “lens of social justice.”
That the stewards of Henry Folger’s creation believe antiracist Shakespeare will excite the public only shows how clueless they are about common tastes.
They want a scholar-activist who will propel the Folger into the multicultural 21st century, but their action illustrates something else: the divorce of elite institutions from the American people.
This withdrawal is especially regrettable at the present time.
In 1970, 1-in-13 bachelor’s degrees were in English.
Today, it’s less than 1-in-60.
The field is marginal, and with good reason.
Will an undergrad who enjoyed Henry IV in high school want to take a class with a teacher who trades in white guilt?
A few years ago, a pack of angry students at Penn pulled down a portrait of Shakespeare in the English department and replaced it with one of contemporary poet Audre Lorde.
Faculty didn’t stop them.
Why select a field that its own practitioners don’t respect?
Leisure habits are declining as well.
Twenty years ago the National Endowment for the Arts reported that 43% of 18-24-year-olds had not read a single poem, play, novel, or short story in the preceding 12 months.
Since then, with every successive iPhone, literary reading has diminished ever more.
This is a terrible loss.
We need the Folger and other institutions to maintain Shakespeare, Whitman etc. in the lives of ordinary Americans.
Make it fun and illuminating, not troubling and culpable.
The director of the Folger regrets that people consider Shakespeare a unique “source of wisdom and humanity,” but that faith is what keeps the legacy going.
People like Karim-Cooper who traffic in identity politics are righteous scolds.
They dislike our laughter at Falstaff’s raillery and fascination with Iago’s deviltry.
These leaders will pass away, just as the Puritans who closed the theaters did in the 17th century.
Unfortunately, the damage they do will outlive them.
WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — A Texas man accused of shooting at a United States Secret Service agent near the Washington Monument earlier this month has been indicted on federal charges, the Justice Department announced Friday.
A federal grand jury indicted 45-year-old Michael Marx with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon” and “using, carrying, possessing, brandishing, and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence,” in connection with the May 4 incident, in which a stray bullet struck a teenage bystander.
“Today’s indictment reflects the gravity of the defendant’s actions on one of the most heavily visited public spaces in the nation,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Friday, in part. “The evidence shows Marx not only carried an illegal firearm into DC, but he fired it at uniformed officers, wounding an innocent teenage bystander who was simply visiting the National Mall with his family on a spring afternoon.”
Authorities previously charged Marx with assaulting federal officers with a dangerous weapon, using and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence, and unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
According to court documents, an undercover Secret Service agent initially noticed Marx trying to conceal a gun on the right side of his body near 15th Street and Madison Drive NW shortly after 3:30 p.m. on the afternoon of the shooting.
At the same time, the motorcade for Vice President J.D. Vance was leaving the White House, passing through the area just up the street.
Uniformed Secret Service officers arrived to provide backup, finding Marx along the path of Vance’s motorcade. The attorney’s office said officers began to give the Texas man verbal commands, but he started running through a crosswalk and eventually fired at one of the agents as he reached the sidewalk.
The bullet struck the teenage bystander, who was walking behind the agent, in the leg, according to the DOJ.
Agents quickly returned fire, striking Marx in the hand, left arm, and upper body, according to court documents.
Court documents state that agents used Marx’s Texas driver’s license, which he was carrying, to identify him as the gunman. Investigators also identified various aliases Marx allegedly went by, including Patrick Michael and Michael Zavici.
While in the hospital, he allegedly made statements to officers, including ”F— the White House,” and “kill me, kill me, kill me,” the DOJ noted in a release.
Police found a Sig Sauer P365 handgun loaded with 9mm ammunition from the street where Marx fell.
4 things to know about the weather:
- Abundant sunshine
- Temps slightly cooler than average
- No rain in sight — again
- Mid-week warmup
May is drawing to a dry, comfortable close, in stunning contrast to the very soggy Memorial Day weather we saw last weekend.
That 10-day stretch of rain put a definite dent in our drought, according to the weekly national drought monitor, but it seems that was the end of the improvement for a while: There’s almost no clouds in sight for the DMV for several days.
Enjoy the many hours of sunshine on Saturday. The high pressure coming in from the Hudson Bay brings a stiff north wind, but the day will also be sunny and comfortable, with highs in the mid 70s.
Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.
The wind will die down after dark, and Sunday morning will be bordering on chilly. Expect widespread mid/upper 40s in most of the D.C. area, with urban centers and bayside communities staying just above 50°. Sunday afternoon will be just a bit warmer, in the mid 70s, but with far less of a breeze.
Highs will be back around 80° for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with overnight lows in the comfy 50s. It’ll be a perfect start to meteorological summer (June/July/August).
QuickCast
TODAY:
Sunshine Abounds, Breezy
Wind: North 10-15mph, Gust to 25 mph
Chance of Rain: 0%
HIGHS: 70° to 75°
TONIGHT:
Clear Skies
Winds Diminish
Wind: Northwest 10-15 mph
Chance Of Rain: 0%
LOWS: 46° to 54°
SUNDAY:
Mostly Sunny Skies
Pleasant Conditions
Light Breeze
Wind: NW 5 – 10 mph
Chance of Rain: 0%
HIGHS: 70° to 76°
MONDAY:
Partly Cloudy
Seasonable
Light Breeze
Wind: West/Northwest 10 mph
Chance of Rain: 0%
HIGHS: 76° to 82°
Sunrise: 5:45 Sunset: 8:26
Average High: 80° Average Low: 63°
Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.
WASHINGTON – A man is in critical condition after falling into the Anacostia River in Southwestern Washington, D.C., Friday night.
What we know:
D.C. Fire and EMS reported the rescue effort shortly after 10 p.m. at James Creek Marina in Buzzard Point.
Crews believe a man fell from the dock into the water.
By 10:30 p.m., crews were able to pull the man out of the water.
Paramedics took him to the hospital in critical condition.
What we don’t know:
Officials did not identify the man who was rescued. No other information was immediately available.
The Source: Information in this story is from the D.C. Fire and EMS Department.
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