On Jane Anger, Shakespeare, apostasy, and blasphemy

Bardolatry has been a cornerstone of Quintessence of Dust since I conceived it. I love the plays, sure, but there's always been something else going on.

"Jane Anger"

Shakespeare is one of those extraordinary phenomena that tempts us to seek extraordinary explanations. Like Harold Bloom, I think of the mystery as essentially unsolvable — Shakespeare is impossible. Complex conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's identity are to me mere acknowledgements that the mystery can't be solved. For me, to attribute Shakespeare to (say) Francis Bacon is to simply rename the mystery. I don't need an answer to "Who was Shakespeare?" It doesn't actually matter to me, because my Bardolatry was never based on facts about the Bard's life.

For a few decades of my life, I was also a Christian. I was comfortable with mystery — about the metaphysical nature of the god I was confessing, stuff like that. Most of my fellow travelers were worried about how to "reconcile" their religious story (about sin and "the fall" and the bible all that) with plain facts about the natural world. I wasn't. One key example: I didn't need an answer to "Who was Adam?" It didn't matter to me, because my willingness to believe in the Christian god had nothing to do with facts about his "life" or about Adam's life. What I did care about was my mistaken belief that this god is worthy of my admiration and worthy of my attention. When I realized he is an insecure loudmouth bully with no capacity for moral responsibility, I ended the toxic relationship almost ten years ago. I won't explore deconversion here; suffice it to say that I concluded that the Christian god is a deviously complex and largely harmful human creation. In religious parlance, this is called apostasy.

One consequence of apostasy is a healthy disrespect toward the god character and his offshoots. Gods should be mocked and laughed at (even Elijah agreed with that), in proportion to their influence on real people. In other words, apostasy leads immediately to blasphemy. And that brings me back to Shakespeare and to Jane Anger.

On a recent holiday trip to Washington, DC, we went to the Shakespeare Theater Company to see a "feminist revenge comedy" called "Jane Anger." The play is now running in New York off-off-Broadway and was just reviewed in the New York Times.

How the play came about is an interesting story itself — the action occurs during a plague (of course) and the constant COVID-related jokes make themselves. I assumed that the pandemic theme was just a reasonable attempt to be timely, but I was wrong: the work was conceived and developed as an act of "pandemic exasperation."

The play is outrageous, unhinged, frankly batshit crazy. It's hilarious. It's NSFW. It's thoroughly brilliant. And to my theme in this post: it's an utterly slanderous, way-WAY-beyond-disrespectful depiction of Shakespeare. He's a casual plagiarist, a Trumpian narcissistic creep, a puffed-up genius in his own shriveled mind. He has no apparent native talent and is oblivious to the presence of other humans. The play doesn't merely skewer him — it... well, I can't say any more than that.

This brazen blasphemy occurred on hallowed ground. It wasn't some long dirty joke on a corrupt social media site: it was staged at the Klein Theater of The Shakespeare Theater Company after a big production of "Much Ado About Nothing" and before a production of "King Lear". (Fun fact: Lear is the play that Shakespeare is "writing" during "Jane Anger.") Wrote the Washington Post:

Its portrayal of Shakespeare himself, stricken with writer’s block and a severe case of narcissism, plays as particularly irreverent at a company adorned with his name.

And the director, Jess Chayes, said this:

“I’m completely tickled and excited by the fact that this play comes between two incredibly detailed, amazing Shakespeare interpretations,” Chayes says. “To have sandwiched between those a play where we can gleefully skewer Shakespeare and the patriarchy, it’s just the best programming choice I could imagine.”

I felt the blasphemy while enjoying the play. I was just a bit uncomfortable. A little voice somewhere in my soul muttered, "Whoa, hey, you can't do that, not here." Why? Maybe I still retain some residue of my decades of exposure to a religion with a history of barbarically murdering people for such things. Or maybe it's normal to cringe when sacred cows get made into hamburger.

Ultimately, I know it's incredibly important to roast the gods, to blaspheme with vigor. The gods, after all, are our own creations or, in the case of Shakespeare, they are us. Here's to apostasy, blasphemy, the Bard, and the glorious Jane Anger. See it if you can!