I FELL IN LOVE with Shakespeare’s Globe when I first moved from New York to London to take up a post as an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. Shakespeare debuted some of his greatest work at the original Globe – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, among others – before it burned down in a 1613 fire. The building was quickly repaired, then shuttered for good in 1642 when Puritanism swept England and playacting was banned. Two years later, it was torn down and all but forgotten.

Today’s reborn Globe was the brainchild of the American actor and director Sam Wanamaker. Wanamaker was born in Chicago in 1919 but lived most of his life in exile in Britain. Jewish and left-wing, he was a refugee from a different puritanical wave: the Joe McCarthy-instigated Red Scare of the 1950s that destroyed the careers of many American artists and intellectuals.

Wanamaker had heard the siren song of Marxism and joined the Communist Party during the Second World War. But he had also served his country honourably in the war, and when he discovered a decade later that he had been blacklisted in Hollywood, he was furious. Rather than be dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee to renounce his views and his friends, he resolved to stay in London, where he was working at the time. His US passport was revoked.

Wanamaker had first sought out the Globe site in 1949 and been astonished to find a dilapidated brewery with little more than a grimy plaque to remind visitors that it was the one-time home of Shakespeare’s own theatre. That had to change. Over the next four decades, Wanamaker dedicated his life to resurrecting the Globe. It was all he could do to ‘keep his sanity and dignity intact’, as a New York Times tribute put it.

He spent his own money, fundraised tirelessly, campaigned for permits and overcame the objections of the local council in London’s Southwark borough. He also dove headlong into history and archaeology to find out what the Globe looked like in Shakespeare’s time and what it would have felt like to act on the Bard’s stage.

When the new Globe finally opened, it proved a sensation. The thatched roof and plastered walls, the timber frame (made of green oak, the same material that would have been used in the original), the circular, open-air structure, the unfussy stage with standing room for rowdy ‘groundlings’ beneath – all combined to transport actors and audiences alike to Shakespeare’s creative milieu. Wanamaker had built a temple to Shakespeare and, by extension, the whole Western canon. The faithful flocked from around the world to worship.

The exiled American never got to see the finished Globe. Sam Wanamaker died in 1993, four years before Shakespeare’s Globe returned from a four-century hiatus.

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In 2014, the year I arrived in London, Dominic Dromgoole was nearing the end of his decade-long tenure as the Globe’s second artistic director. The productions the veteran British director oversaw showed a deep respect for the mission and spirit of Wanamaker’s revival. The hallmarks were minimal effects, natural lighting, textual fidelity and meticulous research into everything from costumes to music to historical context.

Call it dramatic originalism. Somewhat like the school of jurisprudence that urges judges to interpret laws as their original framers would have understood them, Dromgoole usually presented Shakespeare as the Bard’s own audience might have appreciated his work. Critics didn’t always hail these productions as ‘revolutionary’ or ‘groundbreaking’, and the Dromgoole regime became known for orthodoxy, stiffness and – worst of all in our cynical age – earnestness.

Yet originalism was precisely what made Dromgoole’s productions so delightful to me. I didn’t mind that his Globe had come to cater mostly to tourists and students – I wanted to be a student, to encounter Shakespeare with earnest eyes and ears. Dromgoole delivered. To watch his productions meant communing with Shakespeare in a space that was haunted by the Bard himself, and you could tell Dromgoole was in love with the material.

Thus when Mark Antony, played by Luke Thompson in Dromgoole’s 2014 production of Julius Caesar, howled, ‘Cry “Havoc!”, and let slip the dogs of war’, or declared that ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him’ – it sent shivers of awe and understanding down my spine. A 2015 production of The Merchant of Venice laid bare the play’s cruel anti-Semitism with minimal textual tinkering. Dromgoole and the directors who worked under him admirably resisted setting Richard II in, say, the contemporary Arab world or Merchant on Wall Street. Originalism wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but it was the general tendency of things, and any innovation occured at the margins, or where the texts invited it, such as the decision to have Jessica say a Hebrew prayer following Shylock’s forced baptism in Merchant.

Dromgoole’s productions brought to the foreground Shakespeare’s vast influence over Western culture and the English language. This required great humility on the artistic director’s part, as well as a sense of trust: trust in the power of Shakespeare’s language to move contemporary audiences, and trust in the capacity of audiences to be moved by that language, even if they – and I’m not ashamed to include myself here – didn’t understand every single word or pick up every single allusion right away.

Dromgoole’s successor had other ideas.

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‘I always let the work lead. I’m never going to lead with an idea, I’m always going to start with a story. There are no rules.’

So said the Globe’s next artistic director, Emma Rice, in an interview with the Arts Desk website in May 2016. Long before starting in her new role, Rice had proliferated the London press with such statements. Her interviews revealed a mind brimming with hippy-ish pabulum (‘I have a spirit full of joy and it bubbles through’) and a director who apparently saw it as her calling to rescue Shakespeare from dusty irrelevance.

‘I bring story, I bring humanity, I bring event and I bring wonder,’ she told The Guardian with a typical burst of first-person declaration. Mostly, however, Rice would bring Rice, which meant a heavy dose of trendy politics. Her claim that she would let the Bard’s work ‘lead’, that she would ‘never lead with an idea’, was simply untrue. Rice was a card-carrying identitarian, and identity politics would now be at the forefront of the Globe’s agenda.

There would be plenty of rules. For starters, all productions would have to strive for, and eventually achieve, 50/50 gender parity among actors onstage, regardless of the ramifications for storytelling, performance or meaning. ‘As somebody who has got custody of this canon for a while,’ Rice told The Guardian, ‘I think it is quite interesting to say, yes, it is a target. How can we get the female voices through? How can we change the mould?’

Elaborating on her gender dictum in a different interview, Rice blamed Shakespeare for the allegedly sexist ‘mould’ of Western theatre:

I just think it’s good to ask the question, what if? And that’s all I’ve asked my directors to do. Shakespeare was writing for entirely male casts, so it goes without saying that most of those are going to be male characters. I suppose my feeling as a female director is that that blueprint, because he was so brilliant, has gone through history. Four hundred years later we still write plays that have 70 per cent of men onstage and a woman who’s a wife and a woman who’s a lover. It still happens. And I just feel, what if…?

It’s the next stage for feminism and it’s the next stage for society to smash down the last pillars that are against us. Also, my generation have come of age and come into positions of power and we have to use it for good. That’s certainly what I intend to do.

Never mind the baselessness of her charge against Shakespeare, who, after all, created Portia, Rosalind and Lady Macbeth, hardly helpless stay-at-home wives. Note the ideological zeal ‘bubbling through’ here. For Rice, directing on Shakespeare’s stage would be a fundamentally political enterprise. It would be about winning and using ‘power’ to promote feminist ends and ‘smash down’ opponents, including the Bard himself.

Another rule: the plays would have to be made more ‘relevant’. The artistic director early on confessed that she finds the Bard tedious and inaccessible. As she told The Guardian, ‘I have tried to sit down with Shakespeare but it doesn’t work. I get very sleepy and then suddenly I want to listen to The Archers’, the long-running BBC radio soap. She added: ‘He was writing 400 years ago, there is no way in the world every line can still be relevant.’

The plays are too long, the language too archaic, and many of those who claim to enjoy Shakespeare are faking it, Rice concluded. ‘I think there’s a lot of Emperor’s New Clothes in theatre,’ she told the Telegraph. ‘Nobody wants to be the one who doesn’t understand it so nobody says they don’t. I feel that then becomes a conspiracy.’ A lot of theatre, ‘some of it Shakespeare, some of it not, feels like medicine’.

Rice’s debut production gave the Globe a good glimpse of how the new artistic director would make Shakespeare’s ‘medicine’ go down.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Shakespeare’s whimsical, joyous meditation on the nature of desire. First performed in 1605, the play is a perennial audience favourite, full of mischievous fairies, magic potions, competing lovers and raucous mishaps that finally resolve in blessed matrimony. It’s a light-hearted work that nevertheless pulsates with folkloric mystery and erotic energy.

In case you haven’t seen it, the text is freely available on dozens of websites, and you can also watch any number of film adaptations and theatrical productions online. The main plot revolves around two pairs of star-crossed lovers. Hermia and Lysander love each other, but to their misfortune, Hermia’s father, Egeus, wants her to marry Demetrius, who in turn is the object of Helena’s desire.

On the eve of Duke Theseus’s wedding to Hippolyta the Amazon, Egeus begs Theseus to uphold his paternal right to marry off Hermia as he pleases. The duke agrees, ruling that Hermia must obey her father or face execution – or else be doomed to a life of cloistered virginity. Hermia and Lysander escape to the enchanted forest outside Athens, and Demetrius and Helena follow. Meanwhile, an amateur theatre troop, the Rude Mechanicals, plan a play to be performed at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, and they take to the same forest to rehearse.

The fairies of the forest have their own disputes. Oberon, their king, wants Titania to surrender her ‘little changeling boy’ to be his ‘henchman’. Titania refuses, and Oberon and his feisty servant Puck set to work. They use the juice of a special flower (‘maidens call it love-in-idleness’) to first disorder, and then reorder, the young people’s desires. The flower juice also causes Titania to fall in love with Bottom, one of the Rude Mechanicals, a sexual mismatch that takes the play to its comedic zenith. When she snaps out of it, Titania surrenders custody of the changeling boy to Oberon.

Midsummer ends with a trio of weddings – Lysander takes Hermia; Demetrius Helena; the duke his Amazon – and the Mechanicals perform their play for the three couples. Puck sums up: ‘Jack shall have Jill; nought shall go ill; the man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.’

Emma Rice selected Midsummer for her debut production as the new artistic director at Shakespeare’s Globe. ‘I know how genuinely accessible it is,’ she said in an interview printed in the show’s handsome programme. ‘It’s got everything! It’s so romantic, and so much about the human struggle and it’s rooted in folklore and an imaginative world.’

Amen. Yet you would have been hard-pressed to find any of this charm in Rice’s Midsummer. Trying desperately to be ‘relevant’ in 2016, aesthetically and politically, meant the production lost sight completely of Shakespeare’s timeless genius. Watching it on press night in early May 2016, I couldn’t quite believe this was the same Globe.

Relevance meant rewriting the play – and not just rewriting, but bad rewriting. Athens became ‘Bankside’, and Lysander and Demetrius ‘Hoxton hipsters’, for no apparent purpose other than a cheap wink at a London audience. Worse was the vulgar contemporary slang marring the dialogue. In Act III, Scene i, Lysander, under influence of Puck’s flower juice, scorns his beloved Hermia: ‘Away, you Ethiope!’ Rice had this as: ‘Get away from me, you ugly bitch!’ To pre-empt objections to her rewrites, the director at one point had one of the Rude Mechanicals, dressed in a space suit, ejaculate: ‘Why this obsession with text?’

Relevance also meant punctuating scenes with song-and-dance routines. A Bollywood-style dance number set to Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’ came early on, and the audience was treated to a rendition of the late David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ during the Rude Mechanicals’ play-within-a-play. The entire action, moreover, was accompanied by Indian music. This last was the best evidence of Rice’s mistrust of both Shakespeare and her audience – for what could have been the point of a nonstop soundtrack other than to provide those mystified by the Bard’s archaisms something to nod along to?

The bhangra and Bollywood numbers, and actors of south Asian heritage in two leading parts, suggested an Indian sensibility. Now, a Midsummer with a well-developed south-Asian concept – juxtaposing or blending, say, the rich mythology of the subcontinent with English folklore – might have worked well. Such a concept would have required a sincere, rigorous encounter with these sources. Yet identitarian art is rarely capable of such engagement. The texture and weight of genuine difference elude art of this kind, with its ironic posturing and tendency toward the flattening pastiche. Identitarian art rarely manages to raise marginalised and ‘subaltern’ voices. Doing so successfully requires really listening to such voices in all their rich complexity – whereas identitarian art usually searches for subaltern props with which to bash the ‘dominant’ culture. Opposing the ‘oppressive’ mainstream is more important than examining the peripheral as it really is.

In Rice’s Midsummer, for example, the Indian influences were merely one flavour in a garish cultural and period mishmash: Theseus and Hippolyta were reimagined as vaguely 1970s-ish underworld types; the Rude Mechanicals as feckless Globe ushers bumbling their way into the realm of fairies and Athenian, er, Hoxtonian lords; the fairies as Versailles courtiers-turned-transvestite-zombies with nipple tassels and grotesquely elongated forehead masks.

Shakespeare’s text burns with erotic tension and innuendo (‘Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword, and won thy love, doing thee injuries…’). But much of Midsummer’s eroticism was buried under Rice’s puerile gags. Her Puck was a horny imp in light-up sneakers, spraying the flower juice with a plastic water pistol and thrusting the pistol barrel in Lysander’s backside like a – well, you get the idea. Rice broke the fourth wall by having Puck latch her legs around the neck of one of the poor groundlings, humping his face in mock cunnilingus.

Another obsession of today’s identitarians is the often hidden ‘rape culture’ that they claim undergirds relations between the sexes, justifying male sexual aggression while shaming its victims. The most extreme proponents of this concept, usually found among university faculties, define sexual violence so broadly as to render culpable almost any expression of male heterosexuality. The Western canon, they say, is also culpable: the Dead White Males who founded our culture sewed rape into its fabric.

You can perhaps guess where this is going. Discussing the fairy king’s use of the flower juice on Titania, Emma Rice told an interviewer, ‘Oberon drugs her with a “date rape” drug to make her fall in love with Bottom and there results a horribly humiliating situation that is filled with great comedy and also great darkness.’ Now, whatever your take on the prevalence of rape culture, it should be obvious that Shakespeare’s love potion isn’t fairyland Rohypnol, and it takes an especially narrow mind to project onto the Bard the sexual politics of 2016 in this way.

In doing so, Rice shrank Shakespeare’s big insights – into love’s power to radically change our perception – down to PC cant, fit for little more than a college-dorm sensitivity training. As early reviews pointed out, Rice’s framing of the flower juice as Shakespearean roofies also clashed with the rest of the production’s moral logic. Elsewhere, Rice invited us to celebrate the desire-shifting effects of the same flower juice. Oberon’s potion, after all, brings Demetrius and Helena together, when in ‘sobriety’ the former violently rejected the latter (Helena: ‘The more I love, the more he hateth me’).

Except, in Rice’s production, Helena was Helenus, a gay man. ‘When Helena and Demetrius get together at the end of the play we are supposed to be happy; relieved even,’ said Rice.

The sudden shift in Demetrius’s desire is indeed discomfiting. It is as irrational and mysterious as love itself, and that’s the point. Shakespeare is comfortable dwelling in the mystery, and the ambiguity invites us to fill in the psychological blanks and therefore learn to empathise with the characters. Is Demetrius settling for the girl he can get? Or is ‘fairy juice’ perhaps a mythic stand-in for the realisation that the person you really love is the one who has loved you all along, and whom you’ve been spurning out of spite?

But for Rice, the mystery was an invitation to simplistic, politicised answers. It is Rohypnol that drags Demetrius out of the closet, reconciling him with his homosexuality and his repressed love for Helenus. And again the identitarian art failed on its own terms: had Rice reimagined all four lovers as gay men, or all of them as lesbians, the gender-bending could have worked. In that case, the lovers would have recognised by the play’s dénouement their true desire within like kind. The same press of social circumstance combines with the mysterious push and pull of desire to alter the desires of gay people as much as straight ones. But Rice’s coming-out narrative short-circuited the Bard’s themes, themes that resonate with all of us, regardless of sexual orientation, because they are timeless and universal. In Rice’s hands, they indeed became just another ‘contemporary issue to explore’.

This last is identitarian art’s greatest injustice against the culture: since social power dynamics and collective identity are all that such art knows and cares about, its practitioners can’t grapple with individuality, with things of the soul, with the inner life – the very things that draw most of us to art in the first place.

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Rice’s debut, and subsequent efforts by her acolytes, made it clear that henceforth the Globe’s revival mission would come second to the politics of identity. This hostile takeover of a beloved institution was by no means a one-off event. It was an expression of one of the deepest cultural trends of our time. Identity politics now pervade every medium and mode of art, from architecture to dance to film to painting to theatre to video, from the highest avant-garde to the lowest schlock.

What unites the identitarians who lord over the art world is the belief that art is primarily, even solely, a political enterprise. That was also the premise of Socialist Realism, the theory and style of art promoted in the former Soviet Union. One could fairly contend that identitarian art is something like our era’s version of Socialist Realism.

The subjects, favoured art forms and styles have all changed, naturally. Today’s identitarian art puts a high premium on shock value and ironic subversion, for one thing. It holds no brief for the stultifying, propagandistic ‘realism’ of Socialist Realism, though it might use elements of communist art in a cut-and-paste fashion, much as Rice gave her Midsummer a vague Indian flavour. Yet the two schools share the same view on the purpose and larger meaning of art.

Both insist that certain protagonists should be presented in the cultural foreground, always in a noble frame. For Socialist art, it was workers, farmers and communist apparats joining hands to build a classless society. For identitarian art, the revered subjects are women, racial and sexual minorities victimised by and/or bravely resisting patriarchy, heteronormativity and other Western depredations (think of Demetrius in Emma Rice’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The trouble, then as now, is that this way of thinking about art denies individuality and agency to these groups. They become political types, stand-ins for ideological causes, almost always left wing, rather than individual souls, fallen like all of us but possessed of a free will and therefore responsible for their destinies.

And like Socialist Realism, identitarian art claims to be revolutionary but in fact rigidly adheres to a set of political dictates. Master its political grammar, and you can easily decode any piece of identitarian art. For all its claims to ‘transgressiveness’, identity art is drearily conformist.

Finally, identitarian art finds justification in the work of a new class of hyper-ideological critics, much as the old Soviet hatchet-men upheld Socialist Realism. Today it is a new generation of journalists, academics and social-media personalities who defend the primacy of group identity in art. Say what you will about the Soviet critics, at least they were erudite. Not so with today’s identitarian critics, who care little for art history and aesthetics. What they are blessed with is lots of opinions about everything – all of which invariably revolve around race, gender and class, power and privilege.

Call them the New Philistines.