Shakespeare on Pussy-Grabbing Politics

            My scriptwriting class, Shakespeare in Performance, began in early January 2017.  The objective of the class was to write four one-act plays that use Shakespeare to explore the politics of modern relationships through the question, “what do we fight for?”  In the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump—a day many students skipped class and stayed home—we were deep into our first play, which happened to be Richard III.  The famously deformed, Richard, seeks the crown to find acceptance and love which his mother has not provided and which he despairs of finding in a lady’s lap:  “Since I cannot prove a lover … I am determined to prove a villain.”  He smiles (and murders) his way into power, driving his brother Edward, the king, to an early grave, drowning brother Clarence in a butt of wine, and ordering the assassination of his two young nephews.  Richard is a sociopath, who describes himself as a Machiavel and consummate actor.  But as he rises to power, is crowned and quickly implodes, a veritable chorus of women—putative losers watching from the margins—jeer at and insult him.  “Thou lump of foul deformity!,” “Abortive rooting hog!,” “Poisonous, bunch-backed toad!,” they yell.  While the women have no political power, their speech undermines Richard’s confident self-fashioning with metaphors that capture the truth of his deformed body and soul. 

            Shakespeare uses Richard’s war with women to give psychological depth to his political rise.  He blames his deformities on his mother and makes a bid for the crown, presumably to sublimate an erotic drive he expects will never be satisfied.  But in the second scene of the play—as if to test his seductive power, he woos and wins Lady Anne (whose husband Richard killed in battle).  He doesn’t love her and doesn’t intend to keep her; he goes after her, it seems, to showcase his powers of seduction:  if he can win her, “all the world to nothing.”  He knows women are his chief enemy, and though he seems to defeat them, Shakespeare shows that it is women (not any highly placed politicos) who bring Richard down.  The truths they speak when they have nothing left to lose finally cause him to crack. 

            The parallels between American politics and the play were obvious enough to beg comment:  Trump defeated Hillary (painted as some kind of crone) despite (or because of) his outrageous bragging about grabbing pussy and the small regiment of women who came forward to accuse him of verbal violence, harassment, and even rape.  Women retaliated and came out in record numbers for the Women’s March on Washington two days after small crowds watched Trump take the oath of office—“on a Bible,” one of my students sneered.  The new president needed to exaggerate the size of the inauguration crowd and diminish the crowds of women, but everyone could see that he was rattled.  There were so many comparisons to be made between Richard and Trump but the most obvious one was their war with women.  However, as soon as I gestured carefully to the elephant in the classroom, I kicked off a quiet war with a right-wing male student that ended with a three-page attack email, accusing me of being a liberal college professor and feminist.

            Similar dynamic on a much larger scale:  Delta Airlines and Bank of America withdrew their sponsorship of the Public Theater just weeks ago (July 2017) because a Trump-esque Julius Caesar—with shock of hair, overlong red tie, and Slovenian accented wife—in the free Central Park production caused offense.  But “Trump is way too dumb to be a credible real-world analogue” for any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, writes Grace Tiffany (fiction writer and English professor at Western Michigan).  “Despite their huge flaws, Shakespeare’s heroes are highly intelligent, well-versed in their countries’ histories, and, at least in the long run, painfully and astutely self-reflective and morally aware.  They have the capacity to learn”  (shakespearefiction.blogspot.com).  To find a Shakespearean personage who resembles Trump, Tiffany turns from tragedy to comedy and scans a list of buffoons to settle on Jack Cade—a clown in the Henry VI subplot who is also dangerous.”  Although I’m sure literary critics and political commentators have done it for generations, I question the usefulness of matching modern political leaders with Shakespearean characters.  I remember the first time I heard this done.  It was in the run-up to the Iraq War: I was watching Chris Matthews’ talk show, Hardball, and heard him compare Bush Junior to Henry V.  I laughed aloud at the mismatch:  W can’t even properly pronounce “nuclear,” how is he comparable to the fictional leader who gives the greatest ever motivational speech—“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”  Clearly, Shakespeare was being used to somehow knight or right the figurehead of the neo-con hawks.  

            We seem to lean on Shakespeare in troubled political times when we know we need help thinking about messy political situations, and this has never been more true than at this moment in time when the news outlets are waging a sectarian war, and the public needs more thinking and less shouting, but it is questionable whether analogue hunting, exchanging toga for a red tie, or even making blatantly political remarks in class is helpful.  Censorship forced Shakespeare to think and write subtly and deeply, and perhaps we must follow his lead.  There’s no doubt that intellectual freedom is being compromised by the caricature of the liberal college professor, but my comment lost me the opportunity to explore the relation between misogyny and sham politics that Richard III invites, which could have helped students understand how to read Trump’s war with women, which, judging by the latest skirmish with morning news anchor, Mika Brzezinski, shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

            I see now, with the benefit of hindsight, that what merited exploration is the similar placement of Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne and Trump’s brag about “grab[bing]” women “by the pussy” at the beginning of both character’s and candidate’s political wins.  Is misogyny a harbinger of political seduction?  If politicians are permitted to “do anything” to women (as Trump claimed he could), does that mean that they will be able to grab the body politic by the pussy as well?  So it seems.  The value of Shakespeare in general and Richard III in particular is that we get to train our analytical eyes on minds on a case study:  if we read the playbook of operators like Richard and Trump, perhaps we will be less vulnerable to being taken in by them.  Let’s take a look.

            Before we get to the main issue—politics as seduction, it is worth noting a powerful stylistic similarity between Richard and Trump.  Richard is always speaking directly to the audience, confiding his nefarious schemes and making us complicitous.  Trump’s incessant tweeting works in a similar way.  They are midnight confidences, shared off hours and offhand—the Public Theater had him tweeting in a golden bathtub—but we participate in their vitality by listening, reacting, re-tweeting, and endlessly rehashing them.  I think we have minimized the power of these tweets.  We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that these tweets are irrelevant; they are slyly seductive, and America is hooked on them.  We need to turn him off and demand official press conferences which would, hopefully, raise the level of public discourse in America.

            Shifting back to blatant seduction, let’s see how Shakespeare’s Richard does it.  Before coming onto Lady Anne, he tells the audience exactly what he’s up to: it’s almost like he sets up the blazing hoop so we can marvel as he effortlessly jumps through.  “What though I killed her husband and her father?  The readiest way to make the wench amends is to become her husband and her father.”  Watch me, he directs: we do.  He does it, and then he gloats:  “Was ever woman in this humor woo’d?  Was ever woman in this humor won?  I’ll have her but I will not keep her long.”  How does he do it?  Well, it’s a long scene of verbal dueling with much graceful cut and thrust, and Lady Anne is sharp-witted and disarmed with some difficulty.  Basically, Richard turns her into a pussy and grabs her.  She begins as a proper Lancastrian noblewoman, following the dead King Henry’s hearse.  He was her father-in-law; she was married to his son, Prince Edward.  Richard is her arch-enemy, and she has every reason to want revenge.  When he appears, she calls him all kinds of names, spits at him, returns his parries of wit with sarcasm and mockery.  She doesn’t budge … until he makes a lewd remark, suggesting that he will not rest until he does so in her bed.  He hints that she has or is a pussy.  Then, he grabs her:  her beauty was the cause that made him kill her kinsmen, beauty that haunted him in his sleep and made him undertake the death of all the world.  He’s shed tears, despairing to possess her.  Finally, he gives her his sword, and tells her to kill him or accept him as her lover.  Very brilliantly he gives her power—sexual power—over him, and she caves … turns into a pussy before our eyes … not overtly sexual but pious, believing that somehow she has or will have the ability to convert him.  She accepts his ring and agrees to meet him later.  “Hah!, exclaims Richard to the audience and proceeds to assess her weakness and his strength.

                        What?  I, that kill’d her husband and his father,

                        To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,

                        With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

                        The bleeding witness of my hatred by,

                        Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,

                        And I no friends to back my suit at all

                        But the plain devil and dissembling looks?

                        And yet to win her!  All the world to nothing.

Richard has two targets:  Anne and the audience.  He’s won her, and he’s working hard to win us.  Shakespeare connects the dots and suggests that because politics is seduction, sex scandals don’t hurt and may even help.  We may be shocked by Anne’s capitulation, but we are even more taken with Richard’s charisma or whatever it was and is that let’s Richard and guys like him get away with vulgarity and misogyny.  Trump knows that sex sells.  He said in the 1990s that it did not matter what the media said about him “as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” and his attitude did not change during his bid for the Oval Office.  There was the attack on Fox News anchor, Megyn Kelly, who grilled him over previous accusations of sexism.  Trump called her a “bimbo” who was incapable of objectivity when there was “blood coming out of her whatever.”  Just weeks before the election, an audio tape was leaked in which Trump bragged about not only kissing women but grabbing them by the pussy.  Several brave women came forward with accusations of harassment and abuse by Trump, and he was still elected.  “All the world to nothing” indeed!  America was and is as fascinated with the vulgar Trump as the audience is with Richard.  But in Shakespeare’s play, the honeymoon doesn’t last, the audience wakes up, puts on their critical spectacles, and begins to side with vocal women against Trump (oh, I mean Richard).

            Within the very first act, Shakespeare puts the breaks on Richard’s momentum by giving him a worthy female opponent in the woman who was once a queen and army general and is now a powerful crone figure:  Margaret.  Hillary could play her role.  Margaret was exiled after the Lancasters were defeated in the War of the Roses, but instead of disappearing, she sticks around to say everything others are too scared or too self-interested to say to Richard.  She curses Richard and everyone who colludes with him, and her curses come true, forcing the admission that “Margaret was a prophetess.” A woman who has nothing to lose takes a stand.  By the end of Act 1, a commoner—one of the thugs Richard has hired to kill his brother—has a qualm of conscience.  Although he really needs the money, he realizes that he must answer to a higher god than Richard.  Although the other hired gun kills Clarence, he really dies as a result of his own gullibility.  He wanted to believe that Richard loved him, despite so much evidence to the contrary, including a bone-chilling nightmare in which Richard pushed him off a ship to drown.  The message is clear:  don’t be fooled by surface charm, listen to your heart, wake up, do what is right.  Later in the play, citizens talk to one another.  They know the score, but they dare not speak too publicly.  But nobles begin to turn against Richard, and Margaret talks to the surviving women, including Richard’s mother, and teaches them how to curse.  They confront Richard, smother him with the breath of bitter words; and in the day of battle, their words do, in fact, weigh heavier on him that his armor.  He dies fighting on foot; even his horse famously abandons him.

            We rarely think about the relationship between love and politics, but I think only love will motivate masses of people to be engaged citizens.  Remember the Bernie movement?  But what kind of love is needed?  That is the question.  Love of country?  Love of her laws and institutions?  Love of her peoples’ histories and struggles?  Love of a father figure—a king or dictator?  Love of self?  In Richard III Shakespeare gives us a study of a politician wearing the mask of smooth seducer which covers self-loathing; and in Trump we have a crude seducer who loves only himself.  Just think about that fake Time Magazine cover with the flattering headlines that Trump plastered all over his properties.  Cult of personality isn’t just for North Korea or Turkmenistan.  But what will wake up America?  We have no popular theater as they did in Elizabethan England.  We have no common culture that encourages individual critical thinking as did Reformation England.  We are in the middle of an ideological war zone, and we need art desperately because reporting alone will not enable the psychological examination of the president and the electorate that badly needs doing.  When America elected a self-confessed pussy-grabber they were asking to be fucked by Trump, and until that happens—until Trump voters with existing conditions die because Trump Care won’t cover them or until their sons and daughters have to go to war with Iran or North Korea—I think they’ll continue to let Sean Hannity and all the right-wing pundits stroke their persecuted egos and dismiss the very bad deal Trump made with the Russians.  What I’d like to say to all those “poorly educated” rubes is this:  he doesn’t love you, he doesn’t care about you, he used you.  Doesn’t that make you the biggest pussy of all?