Much has been made recently about Ted Cruz going Marc Antony – the Roman general, not the singer – on The Donald at the Republican National Convention in a speech in which he congratulated the Trumpster but declined to endorse him. This sent some political and literary experts alike scurrying to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” in which Antony – a Caesar ally who is waylaid by the conspirators on the day of Caesar’s assassination – turns the tables on the assassins in his famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” eulogy.
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” he says, but praise him he does, however subtly, sealing the murderers’ fates.
The analogy here is to Cruz’s call to “vote your conscience,” thereby undermining Trump’s bid for party unity. ...
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Read MoreIt’s a story worthy of the Bard and, like all great narratives, it has many juicy plotlines to unravel.
Shall we begin with the rudderless winners or the heartsick losers, the aggrieved Continent looking for payback or the partner nations forced into a choice not of their making?
Or should we consider how the land of Shakespeare and Shelley, Charles Dickens and Winston Churchill could be so shortsighted?
Why not begin with England’s leaders – Labour and Conservative Party members alike – who showed an appalling lack of Alexandrian leadership, by which I mean leadership from the frigging front, including a definite plan B (the need for which Alexander the Great learned from his teacher Aristotle). The Brexit brigade not only didn’t have plan B. It didn’t have plan A.1. It’s like the hapless title characters in “The Producers,” who never actually anticipated the outcome they strove for. Indeed, neither the Leave nor the Remain leaders thought a leave-taking was really in the offing. Each side was just hoping to use the referendum on whether or not the United Kingdom should exit the European Union to its political advantage. And that never works. ...
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Read MoreRecently, a trio of screen stars has taken to the London stage to portray three of Shakepeare’s greatest characters – David Tennant (“Dr. Who”), Richard II; Jude Law, Henry V; and Tom Hiddleston (“Thor”), Coriolanus. Together they offer a kind of round robin of Shakespearean performance. On PBS, Tennant was a febrile Hamlet, a role that was played with lucent rationality on Broadway by Law, whose Henry V follows hard upon Hiddleston’s charismatic interpretation in PBS’ “The Hollow Crown.”
The three also offer lessons in leadership undone at a time in our history when the systemic failure of Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the front – continues to haunt us. What, for example, would the Bard make of New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrisite? Would he cast him as his blustery Roman general Coriolanus, a man whose skills are undermined – no, doomed – by his own arrogance and blindness to the will of the people? Read more
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