Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[BullNBear52]

From Hamlet.

The play’s the thing to uncover the conscience of the king.

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_132.html

The Trumpiest Roman of Them All
Ross Douthat JUNE 14, 2017

The problem with staging a “Julius Caesar” in which Caesar clearly resembles Donald Trump, the culture-war controversy du jour thanks to Shakespeare in the Park, isn’t that doing so encourages the president’s assassination. The rough-and-tumble of democratic politics has always been rife with classical call-outs and far more egregious forms of lèse-majesté. The theatergoers who show up to watch a Shakespeare play in Central Park are — I hope — not high on the Secret Service’s watch list. And the play’s tragic arc does not exactly make tyrannicide look like the wisest of strategies, even if the director is crude and on-the-nose enough to dress his Cassius for the Women’s March.

No, the problem with a Trumpified Caesar is that the conceit fails to illuminate our moment the way a good classical allusion should.

The decadent years of the Roman Republic are as good a comparison point for our late-republican discontents as any in the history books, and a creeping Caesarism in the executive has been a feature of our politics for many years. But between his military prowess, his reforming energy and his immense (if fluctuating) popularity, old murdered Julius himself is a relatively poor analogue for Trump. Our president is a different sort of character, in need of a different sort of script.

Suppose you exhumed Shakespeare and ordered him to write a Roman play for our times. Since the bard was reasonably skilled at flattering his patrons, the first question he would ask is where you get your news.

If you answered Breitbart and Sean Hannity, he would disappear for a few weeks and re-emerge with “The Brothers Gracchi,” a tale for the times about Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, two aristocrats who decided to Make Rome Great Again by rallying the common people and taking on the Acela Corridor — er, the privileged of Rome.

In this story, the displaced peasants and unpaid veterans of the Gracchis’ second century B.C. would look a lot like the steelworkers and coal miners who voted Trump, while the brothers themselves would preach populism and give orations about draining the Capitoline swamp. The senatorial elites who conspired to bring them down would sound and talk a lot like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, Chuck Schumer and John McCain, with a few TV hosts and Hollywood celebrities worked in for good measure. And the arguments among elites for assassinating the brothers would bear a strong resemblance to the case for pursuing impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump.

“The Brothers Gracchi” would play to sold-out halls in Trump country. But what about the people who get their news from the liberal media, who think that Trump’s Gracchish rhetoric is just sound and fury, that he’s playing his working-class supporters for fools even as he plots to subvert the constitution?

Under their patronage, Shakespeare would produce “Catiline,” an account of Lucius Sergius Catilina’s conspiracy against the Roman Senate in 62 B.C., with an antihero driven by Trumpian vices — “a vicious and depraved disposition,” per Sallust, “pursuing objects extravagant, romantic and unattainable” — and by resentment at an establishment that scorned him.

Catiline’s Roman allies, men of similarly thwarted ambition, would be cast to resemble Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Mike Pence. There would be an ahistoric subplot involving Parthian interference in the consular elections. And the character of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the unmasker of the conspiracy and the rhetorical savager of Catiline, would be given dialogue that was one part Jim Comey, one part Evan McMullin and one part John Oliver.

Does this sound a little silly? Then consider a third possibility: “Crassus,” the story of how a sordid real-estate speculator made a vast fortune as a Roman slumlord, rode both slave labor and the fear of slave rebellions to political influence, and leveraged his wealth to a share of power alongside his more dashing frenemies, Pompey and Caesar.

Look long at the heavy face of Marcus Licinius Crassus: Do you not see a certain resemblance to our president? Ponder his record, from the wall (!) that he attempted to build across an Italian peninsula to seal in Spartacus’s slave revolt, to the creepy and illicit pursuit of a Vestal Virgin relative (though he probably just wanted her property). Is it not, by Roman standards, rather Trumpian?

Sadly I fear that Shakespeare’s “Crassus,” now showing in the theater of my imagination, might be just as controversial as the new “Julius Caesar” were it staged as an evocation of the Trump era, since it would end with its slain-by-Parthians Crassus having molten gold, a symbol of his avarice, poured into his open mouth.

Happily our political world is somewhat more humane than Rome’s, and no fate so vile and vivid awaits any of our sagging republic’s leaders.

But when the full story of our era is written, I would bet on Trump being remembered more like a Crassus than like a Caesar — as an important but not decisive player in our march toward an ever-more-imperial executive, notable for his greed and pride and folly, but eclipsed by even more dangerous figures yet to come.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/opinion/the-trumpiest-roman-of-them-all.html?ref=opinion