By Stanely Mushava for The Herald, 16 February 2015
William Shakespeare is not new to posthumous conspiracy. Latter-day men of letters such as G.B Shaw and Leo Tolstoy have questioned the universal acclamation with which Shakespeare is read.
For them, the world is too generous in its estimation of the man whose work Swinburne calls “the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry.”
Tolstoy, whose scruples are rich ground for controversy, claims to have found in Shakespeare no delight, but revulsion and boredom.
The same work Tolstoy acknowledges to be universally subscribed as “the summit of perfection,” he dismisses as “trivial and positively bad.”
Other sacrileges against Shakespeare’s estate include charges levelled to question the authorship of his masterpieces and to impugn his personality.
More contemporary objections to Shakespeare rest on his alleged irrelevance to or incompatibility with certain classes and cultures.
The most recent of such is the appeal to our parliamentarians by Zimbabwe’s former ambassador to Mozambique, ex-combatant and writer, Retired Brigadier-General Agrippa Mutambara, to scrap Shakespeare out of our school curriculum and make way for liberation war chronicles.
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