How to equalize Shakespeare’s plays

Mark Richardson writes that the British lesbian movie director Phyllida Lloyd has

hit the news after complaining that there are more roles for men than women in Shakespeare’s plays. Her solution is to have the European Union pass laws requiring that theatre companies employ exactly equal numbers of men and women, which would then require “gender blind” casting for roles (i.e. gender wouldn’t be taken into account when casting for plays, so that you might end up with a male Juliet and a female Romeo).

Why not? Think of any phenomenon in the human world; eventually a liberal will complain that it’s not equal and that it needs to be equalized by the force of law. Anyone who dismisses Lloyd’s proposal as absurd and a non-starter hasn’t been paying attention to the escalating evolution of liberalism over the last several decades and especially the last several years. I believe that liberalism will not be rejected by the West until it has worked out its logic—and its monstrously perverted and destructive potentialities—to the very end.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 11, 2012 10:28 AM | Send