>Apparently various education groups are advocating for dropping Shakespeare from school/university curriculums as his work “is full of misogyny, racism, homophobia, class discrimination, anti-Semitism”. I'm sure Chaucer and Dickens must be on the firing line. Homer and the Iliad also looking to be cancelled amongst many more. no doubt.
I tried to read Shakespeare a couple of times but was lost and found his plays very difficult to read. Of course, English is not even my second language. This could be a reason.
And yet I grew up really enjoying the works of Shakespeare; reading, going to the theater plays, listening. All thanks to a wonderful translator, Samuil Marshak, who translated many works of Shakespeare into the Russian language. He - Marshak - made the works of Shakespeare very poetic, rhyming and the language that an average person could really follow and enjoy.
Sorry, I didn't mean to hijack your thread that has a different purpose.
Getting back to the purpose of the thread. I always knew that his play The Merchant of Venice had an anti-Semitic theme. And I am Jewish. But it didn't bother me at all because I knew that that was the culture back then.
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham