Bard barred from schools as Florida takes aim at ‘obscene’ Shakespeare

Education officials in Florida believe that some parts of the Bard’s classics are so obscene that pupils should not read them.

Students in Tampa’s Hillsborough county public schools district will not be allowed to read classics such as Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet at school.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” Hamlet remarks in the second act of Shakespeare’s play.

Education officials in Florida beg to differ, suggesting that some parts of the Bard’s works are so obscene that pupils should not read them.

The Hillsborough county public schools district, based in Tampa, will continue to teach excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays in class, but students will not be allowed to read classics such as Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet in their entirety at school.

The edict follows legislation introduced in Florida limiting classroom materials that “contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct”.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain suggestive puns and innuendo. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, some suggest it is implied that the hero and heroine have had premarital sex.

The school district said that the idea was to encourage students to read a wide variety of books for new state exams. “It was also in consideration of the law,” Tanya Arja, a spokeswoman, told The Tampa Bay Times, referring to legislation passed by Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature and backed by Ron DeSantis, the governor, who is running for president.

Republican politicians say that the legislation is intended to shield children from sexualised content but critics were unconvinced.

“There’s some raunchiness in Shakespeare because that’s what sold tickets during his time,” Joseph Cool, a reading teacher at a high school, said. “The rest of the nation – no, the world – is laughing at us. Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.”

Recent laws passed in Florida include one given the name “Don’t Say Gay” by critics. It prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in lower grades.

A second law extended the prohibition on gender and sexual orientation discussion to other grades. It also prevents students and teachers being required to use pronouns that do not correspond to a person’s biological sex and strengthens the system for lodging challenges against school books and teaching materials.

Confusion over the interpretation of the laws was heightened on Tuesday after Manny Diaz, the state’s education commissioner, put Romeo and Juliet on a list of books he recommended that students read in August – contradicting the Hillsborough county advice.

“This month’s book recommendations provide a variety of reading materials that students will find uplifting and will spark a love for literacy,” he said.

This is not the first time Shakespeare has been caught up in the censorship war in US schools. A stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love was cancelled at a private boys’ school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, because it contained cross-dressing or gay characters.

Other school drama departments in Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Iowa have had to abandon productions this year over concerns about their content.

In London, The Globe theatre has started listing trigger warnings for potentially sensitive themes, including for a recent performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which it said contained “language of violence, sexual references, misogyny and racism”.

The Times