Trigger Warning: Contains Trigger Warnings

When my kids were young, I quickly learned about the Parents’ Guide section of IMDB. For any given movie or TV show, you can find out exactly what kind of sex and violence is in it and decide as a parent whether you want to watch it with your kids or have your kids watch it. Everybody’s got their own rules for that kind of thing. Kids come in all different ages and sensibilities.

I was mainly looking to rule out too much sex and violence. But that’s just my house. I wasn’t crazy about salty language, but I wouldn’t ban a movie from the house because of it. I used to laugh at how people would count the number of times that “g_ddamn” was used or “the lord’s name.” But I suppose fair’s fair, that’s important to some people, too. Then they started counting things like whether the bad guy smoked.

I never really thought of these as trigger warnings, but I guess that’s what they were. The difference is that the movie didn’t lead with them. I, as a parent, chose to seek them out. They don’t pop up in front of me before my movie starts like some EULA disclaimer when I’m installing software. “This movie contains people smoking. Check here to confirm that you’re not offended by this.”

You perhaps see where I’m going with this. The Globe has doubled down hard on trigger warnings lately, including:

•  ‘depictions of war, self-harm and suicide, stage blood and weapons including knives.’
• ‘language of violence, sexual references, misogyny, and racism’.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13642267/globe-theatre-trigger-warning-shakespeare-antony-cleopatra.html

I’m with Gregory Doran, who hates them, and Ralph Fiennes, who thinks audiences have become “too soft.” If somebody doesn’t already know the content of a Shakespeare play, and worries about these things, it takes no time to search online for the information. Maybe we should put an AI in charge of answering precisely this kind of question.

There’s an irony here that kills me (trigger warning). Shakespeare is supposed to portray what it means to be human. I often tell people variations on the idea that “the whole of human emotion is at one point or another depicted in the complete works of Shakespeare.” And in real life, there’s violence, hatred, and people dying. Thinking that you can avoid these things by being alerted about every optional fictional situation that contains them, you’re surely missing the bigger problem. Shakespeare also shows us how to deal with those things. It doesn’t glorify the violence and the hatred. It holds a mirror up to nature so we can see how horrible it is for ourselves and gives us time to think about it instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist.

Shakespeare makes life better. You may have heard me say that once or twice. It’s sad to believe people think they’re doing the right thing by coming up with reasons to have less Shakespeare.