Washington’s Folger Museum should stop making Shakespeare ‘woke’

Shakespeare is the great wordsmith of the English language, creator of “To be or not to be” and “Kiss me, Kate.”

He’s the most performed playwright in American history. 

We call him “the Bard.”

But, we are told, we shouldn’t use that term. 

“Bard” has racial undertones, Prof. Farah Karim-Cooper explains in her 2022 essay “Shakespeare through Decolonization.” 

To raise Shakespeare so highly, she says, is to make him “an icon of white heritage and excellence: the conception of the man as Bard is, I argue, endemic to coloniality.”