Jessica Barksdale Inclan
4 min readFeb 17, 2021

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As a teacher, I’ve had some rough times figuring out when to stop or start teaching various texts. Some clearly and with force reared as offensive or racist or untenable. Suddenly, at some point, I realized I could no longer handle the omnipresent white male voice that had been passed down semester after semester like a secret key fob to academic success.

As a student, it was very clear who should be read. Don’t know your Virgil? Alas! Can’t read Chaucer in the original Middle English? Be damned. But class after class, we were given a mixture of Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Pope, Byron, down through the romantic poets and up to the 1800s when finally women started publishing, under their names or some white male name. But at least they arrived. Seemed to not matter sometimes. Once a female professor presented a Women’s Literature syllabus with a Shakespeare play on the reading list, I believe The Tempest. “Well, it has women in it,” she explained. Old habits die hard.

A couple of years ago, I had to examine a beautifully written collection of short stories I had been teaching for a few years. The writer was Latino, popular, often profound, always timely. His stories dug into lives my students related to. In fact, they loved these stories, and their enthusiasm showed in their papers. And then, yes, suddenly, the writer’s proclivities and issues and problems reared their ugly heads. He’d spoke to female writers badly and maybe more. What had happened was hard to parse in the media, but one day I found myself in conversation with a male Latino colleague, and both of us were on the cusp of cancelling (before that was actually a used term) this writer.

We spent a couple of informal hallway gab sessions on this topic. I went as far as calling the bookstore and cancelling (literally) my order. I didn’t feel good about it, but did I want to be the one teaching this person no one wanted to speak to anymore? He’d done bad things, and I didn’t want to reward him for it by supporting his work.

But then, around July, I changed my mind. My students loved his stories. The stories exposed the hard lives that women had. The men were horrible and awful, and sometimes, the women were as well, but they were real. I could present the issues in the writer’s life in a frank and honest way, and then we could move on. I would teach the work and not the writer.

Almost under the cover of night, I wrote my email to the bookstore: Please reorder the book.

When I saw my colleague avoiding me in the hallway at the start of the semester, I caught up to him and he admitted he’d ordered the book too. We never spoke of it again.

Recently, after having written a novel with Shakespeare as a main character, I’ve read that The Bard is up for cancellation, Xd out of existence. He has been found to be a racist, genderist, homophobe. English departments everywhere are deciding if they should be teaching him at all.

But here is the difference between Shakespeare and the writer I agonized over: Shakespeare was writing in England circa 1598 and was flat-out a racist, homophobe, anti-Semitic (don’t forget that one), genderist white man of his time. The only thing he wasn’t was rich. He was in his time doing what people did: and yet, he was actually able to show the beating hearts of humans “despite” all the cultural norms around him. Shakespeare actually exposed genderism (look at Portia in The Merchant of Venice, the smartest of them all). He examined anti-Semitism in the same play. And look at all the gender-bending everywhere, people falling in love with those they should not. Men dressing up as women who were dressing up as men. He examined so many social ills, including the monarchy. He examined life itself, in all its existential terrors. Hamlet asks the desperate, existential questions we all do.

And here’s the difference between the writer I anguished over and Shakespeare. The writer who wrote in the 20th and 21st centuries knew better. He had no excuse to not see that his behavior was morally, socially and ethically incorrect. Shakespeare? Let’s give him a four-hundred-year break. The dude was transgressive, he who wrote dozens of love poems to a man. He was in his time but beyond it.

The next semester after talking with my colleague and unordering and reordering the book, I dropped the short story collection from my syllabus. I could not argue away what I knew to be true — this writer (despite his artistry and relevant themes) was untenable. When presenting the articles about his behavior to my students, they let me know that the stories couldn’t wipe out the writer’s behavior. They, as so often is the case, taught me.

Shakespeare, despite the trappings of his terrible time, is tenable. More than. He’s trenchant, timely, and truthful. We still need him to teach us. As Kathleen Parker states in her essay, “If Shakespeare is thought to be offensive by today’s standards, then what of it? He was writing for 1594, not 2021. By all means, talk about that.” She goes on to state, “[s]uch a discussion might lead to learning — about politics, manners, religions, and history — which wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen lately in an American classroom.”

Shakespeare? He brings so much to us still, as long as we can remember he lived when he lived. We have to consider the context and yet admire the beauty of his words, the elasticity of his mind. We really don’t want to cancel him.

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Jessica Barksdale Inclan

Jessica Barksdale Inclán's novel What The Moon Did was published in 2023. Her third poetry collection, Let's End This Now, is forthcoming in 2024.