Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | ‘We have to protect people’
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | ‘We have to protect people’ : “But more than one gay playwright is at a stake here. Allen claims he is acting to ‘encourage and protect our culture’. Does ‘our culture’ include Shakespeare? I ask Allen if he would insist that copies of Shakespeare’s sonnets be removed from all public libraries. I point out to him that Romeo and Juliet was originally performed by an all-male cast, and that in Shakespeare’s lifetime actors and audiences at the public theatres were all accused of being ‘sodomites’. When Romeo wished he ‘was a glove upon that hand’, the cheek that he fantasised about kissing was a male cheek. Next March the Alabama Shakespeare festival will be performing a new production of As You Like It, and its famous scene of a man wooing another man. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival is also the State Theatre of Alabama. Would Allen’s bill cut off state funding for Shakespeare?”
ignorant and uninformed legislators…. yes, it likely would ban shakespeare…. and reading the constitution would likely be next.
