Donald J. Trump and King Richard II: The Politician as Actor

CAUTION: Long, academic (hence, arguably elitist, starting with my using the word "hence") post.

I'm a bit less apprehensive than many about the almost inevitable upcoming election of Donald Trump (19 Dec. 2016, 6 Jan. 2017) in part because I see in him not only the standard historical precedents — Italy supplies two useful ones — but with England's King Richard II. As a youngster, the historical Richard rather heroically met with leaders of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt and lied his royal ass off promising freedom and redress of grievances. He soon suppressed the revolt and sent the serf contingent back to serfdom, promising them they'd be oppressed even more than before. 

Shakespeare deals with Richard later in Richard's life, as Richard moves to his fall. Not with disinterest (I'll note with a double negative), Shakespeare acknowledges and even stresses that kings must be actors. Richard, however, comes to live the part and starts to believe what had become by Shakespeare's time the standard royalist propaganda on the Divine Right of Kings. King Richard is into his own beautiful words — and he's good at language, unlike Mr. Trump — and gets lost in them. He loses out to a man of few words and a relatively early member of "the reality-based community": that man of facts and opportunist action, Henry Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV.

As king, Henry IV gives good but pretty standard Machiavellian advice to his son, who goes on to become Henry V and outdo his dad in more sophisticated Machiavellian kingship. Henry IV isn't into straightforward speech, but here's his analysis of Richard for his son's benefit, and I think ours.

My expectation is that Trump will undermine himself as a, ahem, bad actor with delusions of total power, and will be displaced by hard-facts people who can use Machiavelli et al. to ethical ends. 

Enjoy! (Or just delete; I did give that trigger caution above.)

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HENRY IV TO PRINCE HAL
The hope and expectation of thy time
Is ruin'd, and the soul of every man
Prophetically doth forethink thy fall.
Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company,
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wonder'd at;
That men would tell their children 'This is he;'
Others would say 'Where, which is Bolingbroke?'
And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dress'd myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths,
Even in the presence of the crowned king.
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new;
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wonder'd at: and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, showed like a feast
And won by rareness such solemnity.
The skipping king, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt; carded his state,
Mingled his royalty with capering fools,
Had his great name profaned with their scorns
And gave his countenance, against his name,
To laugh at gibing boys and stand the push
Of every beardless vain comparative,
Grew a companion to the common streets,
Enfeoff'd himself to popularity;
That, being daily swallow'd by men's eyes,
They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
So when he had occasion to be seen,
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded; seen, but with such eyes
As, sick and blunted with community,
Afford no extraordinary gaze,
Such as is bent on sun-like majesty
When it shines seldom in admiring eyes;
But rather drowzed and hung their eyelids down,
Slept in his face and render'd such aspect
As cloudy men use to their adversaries,
Being with his presence glutted, gorged and full.
(_1 Henry IV_, from MIT Shakspeare on line)

Unfriendlies on the Left (Background): Me and the MLA (8 Oct. 2014)

The invitation came as a surprise but a very welcome surprise: an offer to contribute an essay to a publication of The Modern Language Association, the publishers of PMLA, arguably the premiere journal in literary studies.

I was invited to submit an essay for consideration in the MLA volume on Teaching Hamlet, which was somewhat curious since I hadn't inquired about the volume nor asked to be invited — and my dissertation covered what I called "Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies," which meant for me the fours major tragedies after Hamlet and not including Hamlet.
Still, I thought I had something to say about Hamlet and a couple other Shakespeare tragedies and suggested an approach to the plays out of Bertolt Brecht and the structure of an Elizabethan playhouse like the Globe and borrowing from at least one more recent critic (probably Francis Fergusson).

Short form: a public playhouse was mostly a raised platform thrust into an audience, surrounded on three sides and a bit, with the players both definitely separated from, but near the audience. There was little scenery, and the effect was far from "illusionist." So you would know you were watching a play, and the usually pretty rhetorical style of acting — to say nothing of dialog in verse — would reinforce that knowledge.

Still, the audience was physically close, and within the space of a few lines — in the opening Chorus to Henry V, for a defining example — audience members could be alienated from the characters and invited to identify with them. That is, you could watch them objectively as speaking objects moving around the stage, and you could get sucked into their stories and identify with them as if they were real people.

This complex point of view is highly significant in a Romantic tragedy like Romeo and Juliet and still more so in a Romantic/Satiric tragedy like Antony and Cleopatra. At times we identify strongly with the lovers — or do with Romeo and Juliet, unless you're soul-dead; and at other times, or at the same time, we can look at them objectively and know that they're making mistakes that will lead to the tragedy we paid money to see and can never totally forget that we're seeing.

Hamlet is definitely presented from the point of view of Prince Hamlet, and we will him well and hope he succeeds in getting revenge. On the other hand, we know that Hamlet is in the star of a tragedy by  Shakespeare, so we know if he follows the course he wants to follow and we want him to follow because we like him and see things from his point of view — well, we know that if he proceeds as he wishes he'll end up featured among the litter of bodies that will end the play.

Also, Hamlet, viewed objectively — especially if you were a normal theatre-goer and hadn't read the script — Hamlet viewed objectively as the play moves along is a bit of a puritanical putz. He's also an intellectual who isn't thinking well. "To be or not to be" is always the question if Albert Camus is right, and Hamlet answers it every time he gets out of bed in the morning rather than turning his face to the wall, giving up, and dying. Or stabbing himself, or whatever. The Question, Hamlet, is whether or not to kill the king, and ethically it is a damn interesting question and should be on the minds of an audience in a Christian monarchy.

Kill the king, Hamlet, or don't. In either event shut up about it; you're annoying people — except that the poetry is really good. More important than annoying people, Hamlet is also killing people one way or another, and in the case of two of his friends he kills on the basis of partial evidence judged with prejudice. For a 30-year-old advanced student at the prestigious Wittenberg U, Hamlet commits some major intellectual, and ethical, errors.

Well, and so forth. It was a pretty good essay on teaching the play: looking at Hamlet in terms of theatre and ethics and the conditions of physical production — and not as "a long poem with speaking parts," as often done, and definitely not as an object of veneration. It was an approach that could spark class discussion.

And the essay was accepted, and I awaited the volume to come out and get reviewed and pretty much guarantee I'd get promoted.

Then the volume didn't come out as scheduled, and I didn't hear from the editors. And then it still didn't come out and still didn't, and I still heard nothing.

And then I was told very casually that the Teaching Hamlet volume hadn't come out because it would not come out. The MLA radical caucus had won the election at the last convention, and they cancelled the volume of old-fart essays and commissioned a volume more up to date.
Could they publish two volumes, for an interesting debate on a really wide range of approaches to Hamlet and literature more generally? Well, maybe, but it would be expensive, and, more important, the old approaches were imperialist, Eurocentric, sexist, (etc.), and wrong.

My Hamlet essay never did get published, and I soon completed my exit from Shakespeare scholarship and criticism into the brave new field of Science Fiction and Fantasy (and horror and eutopia and dystopia) — with an increasing interest in movies. And eventually I became a full professor, served out my thirty-five years and retired to a decent climate and work "on spec" in the movie industry.


Miami University in Oxford, OH, is fairly conservative — it's in John Boehner's Congressional District — and I was sufficiently unconservative to work with the group trying to organize a union. I would get my due from Miami, and for the most part did get my due,  but with delays. That's how the game is played, and that was okay with me. Having my Hamlet essay cancelled, though, was annoying. I should not take it personally, but I do: as an unfriendly gesture from my colleagues to my Left.