U-Penn Students Take Down Shakespeare Portrait Because He’s Too White And Straight

U-Penn Students Take Down Shakespeare Portrait Because He’s Too White And Straight

The Federalist - Wednesday December 14, 2016

by Joy Pullmann

“[A]fter an English Department town hall meeting discussing the election,” English students at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania replaced a hallway portrait of William Shakespeare with a photograph of lesbian activist Audre Lorde, reports The Daily Pennsylvanian, a campus paper. Such bugs and goblins in this life!

“We invite everyone to join us in the task of critical thinking about the changing nature of authorship, the history of language, and the political life of symbols,” Penn English professor and Department Chair Jed Esty wrote in a statement about the changes. 

A pack of jarring, hell-hated lewdsters decided to take action on the department’s open shift from works with high literary and historic value to those that have more race, sexuality, and gender points. Apparently, attempts to demonstrate William Shakespeare was a gay man despite his fruitful marriage to the female-bodied Anne Hathaway just hasn’t been enough to purge his guilt for being born white, male, and a peerless literary genius. Sense sure they have, else could they not have motion; but sure that sense is apoplex’d.

Speaking like a fool, a coward, one all of luxury, an ass, a madman, Penn English major Katherine Kvellestad told the Pennsylvanian “the change reflects the values of the department and its students. ‘It’s always more symbolic with English majors.'” Yes, symbolic of the utter mental and moral degradation of American “elite” “higher” education, which used to be the glory of the world. Have all our forbearers’ conquests, glories, triumphs, achievements, come to so little? Their descendants’ way is not to assume a virtue if they have it not, but to admit all virtue has left and good riddance to it.

Lorde is known for her iconic, riveting, world-altering “poetry” — er, not really. Hast thou never an eye in thy head? Here’s a sampling of her work and Shakespeare’s. I’ll let you guess which is which. Draw your own conclusions about their respective contributions to the world, and whether there might be other reasons besides Lorde’s gayness and blackness that she hasn’t achieved Shakespeare’s prominence.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment.

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