The Royal Shakespeare Company has placed a trigger warning on its website noting that an upcoming performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor contains “bullying in the form of body-shaming.”
The warning states that the play could “trigger distressing emotions,” and that it also contains “Manipulative and domineering behaviour.”
Oh no, how terrible. A story with some antagonists in it. Why can’t they all just be nice and friendly and live happily ever after with no issues?
The body shaming part of the warning refers to the character of Falstaff, who is ridiculed for being fat by two female characters who he is trying to bed.
Mistress Page refers to Falstaff as “the fat knight” and “this old fat fellow”, while Mistress Ford compares the character to a whale “with so many tuns of oil in his belly” and “a gross watery pumpion [pumpkin].”
Bigots.
Veteran Shakespearean actor Dame Janet Suzman remarked that “This fashion for ‘trigger’ warnings, as if an audience were as helpless as a tiny child, is both insulting and silly”
“Theatre is a place where the extremities of human existence, both comic and tragic, are acted out in play. Who is such an idiot that they would pay good money to go to a Shakespeare play (repeat, play!) and expect to be left unmoved?” Suzanne added.
Professor Jeremy Black, author of England in the Age of Shakespeare urged that “The warning notes for The Merry Wives Of Windsor are demeaning, insulting and a proof that money on the arts is not being stretched sufficiently.”
Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon jokingly suggests “the producers should simply rewrite the offending passages of dialogue, to promote a healthier, more modern view of body image.”
“First, Mistress Page should declare that she finds Falstaff irresistibly attractive, no matter how fat he is,” Deacon further quips, adding “In reply, Mistress Ford should accuse Mistress Page of fatphobia, because actually Falstaff is a perfectly normal size, and only someone with unrealistic body standards would call him fat.”
“In turn, Mistress Page should accuse Mistress Ford of fatphobia, because, by refusing to acknowledge that Falstaff is fat, she is guilty of fat erasure,” he concludes.
As we have previously highlighted, productions of Shakespeare plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar in the UK have increasingly had “content guidance” trigger warnings placed on them, prompting a backlash.
The warnings have prepared audiences to expect “misogynoir references,” a made up mashed together term for misogyny and discrimination against black people.
In addition, a study funded by the British government to the tune of almost a million pounds has claimed that Shakespeare, has been disproportionately represented as one of foremost the literary icons in history, and has in fact enabled “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives” to dominate theatre.
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Why stop there? Many plays make disparaging references to drunks, which is clearly other-conscious-shaming. Any drunks in the audience should be given a trigger warning.
If folks don’t buy tickets it will stop
Satan laughs!
His Children celebrate!
Humans have no balls to fight
so they just keep licking the
Kosher bottoms of their “gods”,
shaming the One who created them!
The best way to deal with this crap is like Tim Allen deals with his stand-up audience. Bar anyone under 25 from attending.