A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about some academics being concerned about the content of Shakespeare’s plays and how theatre goers should be warned about scenes involving matters that they could find upsetting: colonialism / antisemitism / racism / sexism / misogyny / suicide / depression (the list goes on …).
Other academics, such as Carol Chillington Rutter, disagree robustly – Shakespeare, she argues, offers many layers of interpretation in his plays – that is why most of his plays are still performed regularly. It is up to the director and actors to explore the issues he raises, including interpreting them with twenty-first century sensibilities. The audiences have come to be entertained as well as educated and should leave a theatre with plenty to talk about.
Plays, poems and novels will almost invariably reflect the era they were written in, and few will pass the ‘decade two of the twenty-first century sensibility test.’ But they can still be thoroughly absorbing. Should they automatically have ‘trigger warnings’ to alert the reader that the language or themes may cause them distress? I am very squeamish – I know some plays / films / books are not for me as pure entertainment, and I am prepared to leave early, or stop reading if I’ve misread the blurb and it all gets too much. But sometimes I realise it is important to persevere as the topic is important (slavery for example) and I should be prepared to know more, however upsetting.
I count myself among those who would say that ‘trigger warnings’ are unhelpful and infantilising and I suspect Laura Freeman, a young Times journalist, would agree. She noted recently how much she had enjoyed reading two books by a mid-twentieth century writer, Barbara Comyns. Both reflected the attitudes of the time, but the text was left exactly as the author had first written it, and there was a note at the beginning of each novel stating:
This book was originally published in 19XX. It is a historical text and for this reason we have not made any changes to the language.
This, Laura believes, is a neat justification for re-publishing, unaltered, the potentially ‘triggering’ issues raised by an arguably problematic text. After all, wasn’t it another writer in the mid-twentieth century, LP Hartley, whose opening line for The Go Between (1953) is ‘The past is a different country, they do things differently there’?
And if we start to re-write the way people thought and wrote in the past, we lose key parts of our history, and what we have learnt (or failed to learn) from it.
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