Do you like Shakespeare? Me too. But I don’t need to go “all in” and lose sight you can just “enjoy” the stuff. This essay mounts a post-structuralist assault on Shakespearean canon-worship, arguing that four centuries of criticism function less as interpretation than as institutional maintenance. It interrogates why Shakespeare must always matter, why scholars struggle to like the plays without theory, and why universality is retroactively imposed. By stripping away reverence, the essay asks an obscene but clarifying question: “What if they are just entertainment for Elizabethan wankers?” and insists on Shakespeare’s mortality as a condition of honest criticism.

Contents

Introduction

I wrote this because my son Bill is doing a Masters in English literature and has to put up with a lot of Shakespeare classicists who treat the plays like holy relics, spend their time sucking each other’s arses, and get genuinely upset if you so much as look at Shakespeare sideways: and because we’re working-class and punk as fuck, the correct response to that kind of reverence is to question everything and piss on anything that claims to be unquestionable.

I. Preface: Against the Pious Industry

Shakespeare studies has long been less a field of criticism than a ritual economy. The plays circulate not merely as texts but as objects of faith, their value assumed in advance and criticism functioning primarily as a justificatory apparatus. One does not, in most Shakespearean scholarship, ask whether the plays are good, but how they are good; not why they matter, but how they already do. The interpretive labour is therefore downstream of a prior commitment: Shakespeare must be great, because Shakespeare has been declared great.

This essay proposes an obscene but clarifying question: what if Shakespeare’s plays are not profound, not philosophically exceptional, not culturally redemptive — but merely competent, occasionally brilliant, often clumsy entertainment for Elizabethan men with disposable time and limited alternatives?

This is not a claim of inferiority so much as a refusal of transcendence. To treat Shakespeare as “just entertainment” is not to insult him; it is to insult the critical machinery that has required him to be more.

What this essay ultimately resists is the attempt to use Shakespeare as a base on which that a structuralist literary history can be built: a master framework through which everything else must pass. Hence the proliferation of projects that promise Shakespeare and whatever the fuck needs cultural validation this week. This is not engagement but annexation: an effort to make Shakespeare the macro-lens through which reality is rendered legible. The assumption is always the same: that Shakespeare must be present for meaning to occur. But this collapses on contact with history.

Shakespeare was a working writer, producing commercial entertainment for a specific audience, in a specific moment, under specific constraints, primarily to amuse his contemporaries and avoid professional ruin or literal death. To force the present to speak through him is not to break new ground but to preserve an old hierarchy. The mould breaks only when Shakespeare is returned to his contingency: not as a universal solvent of meaning, but as a product of his time, uneven, opportunistic, and occasionally brilliant, rather than the master key to all literary reality.

II. Post-Structuralism and the Death of Shakespeare (Again)

Post-structuralism famously killed the Author, but Shakespeare studies has spent the last half-century quietly resurrecting him in committee. Barthes’ Death of the Author is ritually cited, then ignored; Foucault’s “author-function” is acknowledged, then re-installed with tenure.

Shakespeare survives because he is structurally useful. He functions as:

• a guarantor of disciplinary seriousness
• a shared object stabilising curricular coherence
• a prestige anchor for English departments anxious about relevance

In this sense, “Shakespeare” is not a writer but a signifier of value itself. To question his depth is to threaten the symbolic economy of literary studies. Hence the endless ingenuity of interpretive rescue missions: if the plays appear sexist, they are secretly proto-feminist; if racist, then ironically so; if incoherent, then fragmentary by design; if boring, then deliberately resisting bourgeois pleasure.

Post-structuralism teaches us that meaning is produced, not discovered. Shakespeare criticism demonstrates this with embarrassing clarity.

III. The Anxiety of Enjoyment

A curious feature of Shakespeare scholarship is how rarely scholars admit to liking the plays. Enjoyment is displaced by reverence; pleasure is replaced by obligation. When admiration is expressed, it is typically abstract (“the language,” “the complexity”), never visceral or personal.

This should raise suspicion.

If Shakespeare were genuinely pleasurable in the ordinary sense, he would not require four centuries of interpretive scaffolding to remain alive. The compulsive production of criticism suggests not vitality but maintenance. The plays must be continually explained because their pleasures are historically thin and culturally specific. What survives is not enjoyment but investment.

Hence the paradox: Shakespeare scholars struggle to articulate a reason to like the plays that is not itself a critical manoeuvre. One does not hear: this is funny, this is moving, this is exciting — unless immediately hedged by theory.

Post-structuralism would diagnose this as a disavowed desire: the scholar wants Shakespeare to matter because their own institutional position depends upon it.

IV. Elizabethan Wankers and the Myth of Universality

The claim that Shakespeare “speaks to all humanity” is among the most durable fictions in Western literary culture. It collapses under minimal scrutiny. The plays presume:

• patriarchal inheritance structures
• rigid class hierarchies
• casual misogyny
• ethnic caricature
• a theatrical literacy no longer common

Their emotional stakes — honour, legitimacy, dynastic anxiety — are not timeless but historically local. What feels “universal” is often merely over-familiar, rendered invisible by repetition.

To say Shakespeare wrote for “Elizabethan wankers” is not crude reduction but sociological precision. The plays were commercial products for a specific audience: male, urban, relatively literate, hungry for sex jokes, violence, and moral reassurance. That they sometimes exceed this brief is to Shakespeare’s credit. That they are treated as metaphysical scripture is not.

Post-structuralism reminds us that universality is retroactive — a function of canonisation, not of intrinsic scope.

V. The Classicalist as Straw God

The classical Shakespeare — balanced, humanist, ethically profound — is a construction, assembled through selective quotation and pedagogical repetition. This Shakespeare exists primarily to be defended. He is a straw god erected so that criticism may repeatedly sacrifice itself upon the altar of his greatness.

Hence the title of this essay: Shakespeare is my meat; I sup upon a Classicalist. The classical image of Shakespeare is not the object of reverence but of consumption. It exists to be dismantled, metabolised, and discarded.

What remains after this consumption is not nihilism but freedom: the freedom to read Shakespeare without obligation, to find him uneven, occasionally embarrassing, sometimes thrilling, often dull — in short, human.

VI. Toward an Anti-Shakespearean Shakespeare

The most genuinely post-structuralist response to Shakespeare is neither worship nor dismissal, but demystification. To read him as contingent, opportunistic, market-driven, occasionally lazy, sometimes inspired — a working writer, not a secular prophet.

This approach does not destroy Shakespeare. It destroys the need for Shakespeare to justify us.

Perhaps the most radical claim, then, is this: Shakespeare does not need to be defended. If the plays survive casual reading, they deserve survival. If they do not, no amount of criticism will save them — and no discipline should depend on their immortality.

To ask whether Shakespeare is “just entertainment” is to return criticism to its proper task: not preservation, but judgment.

VII. Conclusion: Let Him Be Mortal

Post-structuralism teaches us that meaning decays, authority fractures, and texts do not love us back. Shakespeare has been exempted from this lesson for too long.

Let him be mortal. Let him fail. Let him bore. Let him occasionally astonish. And above all, let us stop pretending that the inability to dislike Shakespeare is anything other than an institutional neurosis.

If Shakespeare is meat, then let us eat him — not worship him.