Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In a national capital known for its bureaucratic obtuseness – from prohibiting lemonade stands to banning sidewalk chalk — controversy takes strange forms, not least of which was an uproar in 2020 when City Bylaw officers shut down a children’s Shakespeare production. The Company of Adventurers is a much-loved young people’s theatre group composed of neighbourhood children that put on a Shakespeare play in a local back yard each summer. Bylaw objected to the activity on the basis that it was “unusual.” This echoes the broader attack on the humanities, which are often blamed for not contributing “useful” knowledge. Depicted as unusual and, by extension, not useful, the City came down hard on the group whose social and public value it dismissed. In the absence of a law that would ban activities merely for being unusual, the authorities found a legal run-around and charged the group by arguing that the neighbourhood was “not zoned for theatre.” This paper will explore not only the continued public thirst for the humanities, particularly in the form of local grassroots initiatives, but also the danger of over-regulation, which assesses anything outside of the “usual” as “useless.” Ironically, Shakespeare – and the humanities more generally – was faulted for being insufficiently mainstream. This paper asks what insights can be gained about the value of the humanities from this controversy and the overwhelming public response it inspired. What happens when artistic activity is policed by city regulators, and when the humanities are designated non-mainstream and consequently undesirable?