Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy

Burrows, professor of dramatic literature at Cambridge, takes a lively and nuanced foray into the culture wars, inspired by both theatrical scholarship and personal experience. The starting point is a 2017 incident in which a trigger warning appended to a course listing of his, involving the representation of trauma by Shakespeare and contemporary playwright Sarah Kane, made international headlines as an example of modern academe enabling overly sheltered, “snowflake” students ill-prepared for life’s realities. In response, Burrows draws on his literary theories of how slapstick techniques can be used to manipulate and complicate an audience’s capacity for sympathy toward a character, as done by both Shakespeare and Kane (for instance in King Lear, when the blind Gloucester tries to throw himself off a cliff and instead falls flat on his face). Burrows sees the same strategy being applied, though far less thoughtfully, to real people in public statements about “snowflake” culture, such as in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, which he sees as denying the authenticity of people’s reactions to upsetting material. This brisk consideration of the power of words to suppress or awaken empathy strikes a timely note in the context of today’s debates about free speech and tolerance. (Oct.)