Today is Shakespeare’s birthday. A time, traditionally, for celebrating the man who more or less invented us—the English, that is. Our phrases, our psychology, our emotional range. The man who gave us Hamlet’s hesitation, Macbeth’s ambition, Lear’s rage. The bard of Avon, the boy from Stratford.
Or was he?
Newer, more progressive whispers suggest he may not have been William at all. Perhaps—stay with me—Shakespeare was not only not the author, not only not from Stratford, but not even a man. Or English. Perhaps he was a Congolese woman named Shakwesiba, whose works were stolen by colonial traders and attributed centuries later to a balding white glove-maker. Perhaps that’s why the plays are so emotionally rich. Because only a woman of colour could have written them.
Sounds absurd? It is. And yet not that far removed from the cultural instinct currently gripping our ruling class: the relentless urge to repaint history in the colours of modern ideology, often with the subtlety of a toddler let loose on a Rembrandt.
We see it in schools. Museums. Biopics. Shakespeare is only the beginning. Anne Boleyn, played recently by a black actress, is “reimagined.” Roman Britain, according to BBC dramatists, had more melanin than modern Ghana. And every historical drama now comes with a diversity clause so rigid it makes Elizabethan sumptuary laws look relaxed.
This isn’t inclusion. It’s ideological cosplay.
Why is the BBC’s youth channel teaching kids that Eleanor of Aquitaine was a large black woman? pic.twitter.com/kHGrw6G3fd
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) April 22, 2025
There’s something oddly patronising about this. As if young Black Britons can only take pride in their place within British culture if Anne Boleyn looked like them. As if greatness is only valid if it can be projected onto the skin of the present. We are told it’s empowering. It smells a lot like insecurity.
The truth is, history doesn’t care about your feelings. It already happened. Shakespeare was a white man from Warwickshire, and trying to retrofit his identity to suit modern sensibilities doesn’t deepen our understanding—it flattens it. It replaces genuine engagement with hollow performance.
The irony, of course, is that Shakespeare’s genius transcends such tribalism. He wrote humanity, not heritage. He drew kings and clowns, women and men, saints and psychopaths—all bursting with such life they barely stay on the page.
To reduce that to a question of gender or race is not radical. It’s reductive.
So today, let’s celebrate Shakespeare. The man. The myth. The middle-class Midlands boy who somehow saw into the soul of the world. Not because he looked like us. But because he understood us.
Even now, four hundred years on.
