Roger Varley has been in the news business almost 40 years with The Canadian Press/Broadcast News, Uxbnridge Times-Journal, Richmond Hill Liberal and Uxbridge Cosmos. Co-winner with two others of CCNA national feature writing award. In Scout movement over 30 years, almost 25 as a leader. Took Uxbridge youths to World Jamboree in Holland. Involved in community theatre for 20 years as actor, director, playwright, stage manager etc. Born in England, came to Canada at 16, lived most of life north and east of Toronto with a five-year period in B.C.
You can't edit away the past
In OnStage Uxbridge's upcoming production of Kiss Me Kate, which tells the story of a theatre company's attempt to make a musical out of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the title character yells at another character: “Lucentio, thou meacock wretch.”
It's a sure bet that the majority of audience members will not know what the word “meacock” means. Indeed, I had to look up the word's meaning in my collected works of Shakespeare. It means cowardly.
There are a great number of words in Shakespeare's works whose meanings are now, generally, unknown. But the thought of rewriting Shakespeare in modern English is, to me and many others, unthinkable. Despite the numerous difficulties in discerning what is meant by his now antiquated dialogue, revising the Bard's words to fit modern sensibilities would take away their eloquence and magic and undermine our understanding of the times when they were written.
The same can be said of any classical literature and in that genre I include the works of Mark Twain. But now there is a move afoot by an American publishing company to issue a revised version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which will delete all uses of the word “nigger”.
Of course the word is offensive, just as a multitude of other words used to denote Jews, Asians, Europeans and many others are offensive. But when Mark Twain wrote his remarkable books, the term was common and widespread and, as an author accurately reflecting the times in which he lived, Twain would have been less than honest if he had substituted some other word. One thing for sure: he would not have replaced it with the word “slave”, which is what the American publisher plans to do.
Does this publisher believe that substituting the word with another will mean it never happened? If we rewrite literature to gloss over an uncomfortable time in our past, can we also rewrite history to assuage our guilt? Perhaps we should rewrite Shylock's lines in A Merchant of Venice to make the play seem less anti-Semitic. Instead of him saying “I am a Jew”, we could have him say: “I am a person of Middle East descent.”
Instead of trying to soothe certain sensibilities, I believe this publisher and Americans in general should confront the racial issue head on. Heaven knows, since Barack Obama was elected president of the U.S., the extent to which racial prejudice still exists in that country has come to the forefront.
If you hear or read any news reports of this attempt at political correctness, I can almost guarantee that many newscasters and/or editors will refer to the offending epithet as “the n-word” and bend themselves in knots to avoid using the word “nigger”. That is journalistic cowardice. Indeed, I would call them meacock journalists.
It seems to me that messing with the classics in a futile attempt to spread political correctness merely ends up with bastardized works that are no longer classics.
Tell me, am I wrong?
