Then wokeness came for Shakespeare Dan Hannan “Shakespeare’s works,” the School Library Journal tells us, “are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir.” There follows a litany of complaints from school teachers who have dropped the world’s greatest writer because, being white, he supposedly has nothing to say to black students. It is in the nature of Shakespeare that we each bring our own experiences to him. If you take a certain satisfaction in finding misogyny and racism everywhere, you will find them in Shakespeare. To be honest, I struggled a bit with “misogynoir,” or a dislike of black women. As far as I can make out, there are no black women in Shakespeare’s plays. There is a Dark Lady in his sonnets (her skin is said to be dun and her hair black), but she gets pretty good press. I can think of three black