Shylock, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan Ethnostate: The Original Cancel Culture

But a pro-Jew play wouldn't have put bums in the seats.

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Let’s begin by torching the quaint modern fantasy that William Shakespeare was some sort of Renaissance Robin DiAngelo, quietly deconstructing bigotry between quill strokes.

The Bard was not scribbling blank verse from a position of enlightened inclusivity. He was, in fact, a man of his time—and what a time it was. A time when Jews weren’t just marginalised; they were gone. Banished. Booted. Legally evicted under the Edict of Expulsion of 1290 by King Edward I, because—why not?—nothing says national renewal like expelling a few thousand of your most economically usef…