Monday
I attended an impressive student production of Hamlet yesterday—the lead, played by a female student, was magnificent—and was struck early on by Claudius’s insistence that everyone move on quickly from old Hamlet’s death. It reminded me of the GOP wanting to move on quickly from the January 6 insurrection.
The motives are even roughly the same. Just as the GOP wants us to forget Donald Trump’s attempted coup, so Claudius wants Hamlet to move on from his own successful one. In his opening speech he says essentially, “Well, it’s too bad that old Hamlet is dead but, what can you do, we have get back to business.”
Business, in this case, is marrying Hamlet Sr.’s queen and taking over the throne. Or as he puts it, when discretion (practicality) fights with nature (mourning the dead), go with discretion. Claudio gets squirrelly in his language since he knows that it looks bad marrying Gertrude two months after her husband’s death. He therefore advocates balancing “wise sorrow” with “remembrance of ourselves” (as if he ever stopped remembering himself). This new dispensation therefore finds “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage”:
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him,
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy,–
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,–
Taken to wife: nor have we herein barr’d
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along.
Gertrude enables the situation. Unlike the GOP, she is genuinely unaware of Claudius’s coup—Republicans can’t claim her innocence, having been in the Capitol when Trump stirred up a mob to pressure Mike Pence—but she sounds a lot like them. To a despondent Hamlet who is shocked at the turn of events, she claims that these things just naturally happen and must be accepted:
Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark (Claudius).
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity…
The self-interested Claudius says the same:
‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness…
In other words, stop thinking about the past and look forward—which is to say, look forward to me as king.
The GOP wants us to stop looking at the past insurrection so that they can plan for a future coup, one complete with voter suppression measures and Republican takeover of state election boards.
There’s one significant difference between Claudius and the GOP: he at least feels remorse for what has been done. Try to imagine Trump giving a speech like this, with murdering the Constitution substituted for murdering his brother:
O, my offense is rank it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will…
What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow?
Claudius finds that he can’t repent. After all, he is
still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain the offense?
He then makes a distinction between human law and God’s law. Human law can be corrupted by the rich and powerful (“gilded hand”):
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature…
In other words, there’s no shuffling when God is looking on. The GOP, by contrast, apparently believes it can, with impunity, shove by justice to seize “the wicked prize itself,” buying out the law in the process.
There’s one other political parallel I noted in the play. Just as Trump finds easily manipulable people to do his dirty work (including storming the Capitol), so Claudius finds Laertes. Stoking the young man’s rage, Claudius gets him to partake in a rigged sword fight, complete with a poisoned blade and poisoned refreshment. The ploy works but it also backfires so that, by the end of the play, all the principles are dead, and a foreign power stands ready to take over.
Message to Republicans: Trumpism make get you what you want in the short run, but in the end you will take down American democracy. Various foreign adversaries will applaud.