William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III
Monday’s New York Times ran an interesting article comparing the Rupert Murdoch scandal to a Shakespearean tragedy. Stephen Marche, author of How Shakespeare Changed Everything, argues that the connection that one finds in Shakespeare’s tragedies between family drama and nationwide politics has also been operating in the hacking, police bribery, and influence peddling scandal which is threatening to bring down the Murdoch media empire.
It sounds like Marche got the idea for his article from the Scotland Yard commissioner quoting Macbeth as he resigned: “If ’twere best it were done, ’twere well it were done quickly.” (Actual quote: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well/It were done quickly.”) Macbeth says the words to Banquo’s assassins.
Marche sets up his case for the Murdoch affair being Shakespearean by first spelling out the connection between family and politics in Shakespeare’s tragedies:
The great Shakespeare tragedies fuse crises in families and in states, connecting the most significant historical events with the most delicate psychological realities. In “King Lear,” a family squabble about a retiree can be rectified only by a full-scale invasion by France. In “Antony and Cleopatra,” the fate of the Roman Empire hinges on a man who likes his Egyptian mistress more than his family.
In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare makes it clear that Claudius is a capable ruler, but because he has killed his brother and married his brother’s wife, the state must fall. The corruption within a family matters more to the health or disease of government than any policy matter.
Marche’s argument that the Murdoch children have been involved in the family business and that he has a wife that defends him isn’t particularly deep or Shakespearean. His article is on to something interesting, however, when he describes Britain as having come to resemble a Shakespearean family in the affair. Marche writes,
Hacking into a murdered girl’s voice mail is grotesque, but the coziness of everyone involved is the bigger danger to society. Perhaps the most damaging revelation about Prime Minister David Cameron is that he had dinner over the Christmas holiday last year at the home of the former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks (often described as another Murdoch daughter) along with Mr. Murdoch’s son James.
The corrupting power of such connections is one of the core anxieties in Shakespeare’s great tragedies. Lear shows a king dividing his kingdom on the basis of his daughters’ love. Goneril and Regan are happy to play the game, but Cordelia refuses to exaggerate her love for her father in order to procure power. Later, the bastard Edmund, after betraying his father in an attempt to take his title, seduces both Goneril and Regan — the ultimate incestuous political order. Family should not act like politicians, and vice versa.
Marche claims that we who are watching the Murdoch affair desire his complete annihilation because that is why we watch tragedies, including Shakespeare’s. We want to see someone taken down for flaws we ourselves have. The flaw in this case is “common ambition — an outsider’s desire to force his way into the establishment,” and Marche says that Murdoch “has been singled out because his flaw is so ordinary, so widespread.”
Although Marche doesn’t exactly put it this way, it sounds as though he is saying that the tragic heroes must go down to purge the rest of us of our sins. Or maybe it’s to inoculate ourselves against the consequences of our flaws, as in “if it happens to Macbeth or Lear, it won’t happen to me.” Here’s Marche:
We go to tragedy to watch a man be destroyed. Macbeth must be destroyed for his lust for power, Othello for his jealousy, Antony for his passion, Lear for the incompleteness of his renunciation.
Given that many of us envy and resent the rich and powerful and that we turn to Murdoch’s tabloids to see them torn down, there’s something to be said for Marche’s argument. We punish the man who has been catering to our lascivious pleasures. I wrote last Friday about how resentment towards those above him appears to drive Murdoch, and what could be more delicious than to see Murdoch the target of that selfsame resentment?
Which Shakespeare tragedy fits this situation best? Marche gives us a choice of two history plays:
We do not yet know how far Mr. Murdoch is implicated in the crimes of his company, so we do not know which of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes he resembles most. If he didn’t know the extent of the phone hacking, then he’s most like the bungling Richard II, who fails to spot the decay within his kingdom. If he did know, then he’s more like the conniving Richard III, whose love of the machinations of power eventually grinds him into the machinery he’s created.
If I had to choose, I’d say he’s closer to Richard III because I don’t think for a moment that Murdoch was unaware of what was transpiring, nor that he has he been as inept as Richard II. Richard III’s slippery tongue and his ability to seduce virtually anyone, including the widow of a man he has murdered, fit Murdoch well. (Think of his befriending Hillary Clinton after having spent years savaging Bill.) Let’s say that his newspaper’s violations of the most basic human decency, hacking into the voicemail of girl who has been kidnapped and revealing to the world the prime minister’s secret that his infant son suffers from cystic fibrosis, is the journalistic equivalent of killing the two princes in the tower. How appropriate that he would now be cornered on Bosworth Field with his enemies bearing down upon him.
Speaking of Richard III, Marche quotes a twitter he found that applies the play’s most well-known line to the Murdoch affair: “Remorse, remorse, my kingdom for remorse.”
Not that Murdoch is showing any remorse. Rather, as Colbert King of the Washington Post points out, he’s busy blaming his subordinates. By contrast, Shakespeare’s tragic heroes in the end reveal some redeeming quality, some grandeur.
So which Shakespearean hero is Murdoch? None of them. To quote Prufrock, he’s not Prince Hamlet but an attendant lord. Given his general lack of integrity and his resentment of those in power, including the black president of the United States, I peg him as Iago.
Unfortunately, Iago doesn’t go down until after first having inflicted a lot of damage on some fine people.
Addendum
When I wrote on Murdoch and Citizen Kane last Friday, I didn’t mention how the film itself commits a very Murdochian violation. As I discuss in another post about the film, Welles and scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz had gotten hold of a very private piece of information on William Randolph Hearst, the model for Kane: “rosebud” was the nickname Hearst bestowed on the private parts of his mistress Marion Davies. When the movie came out, Hearst, whose yellow journalism had shamelessly gone after others, suddenly saw the tables turned on him.
To be sure, Hearst got a modicum of revenge. Citizen Kane did not do as well at the box office as it should have (Hearst’s papers refused to run advertising for it), and Hollywood never likes it when one of its directors takes on powerful men. Welles was reined in on his never project and never again was given the freedom he enjoyed with his masterpiece.
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