As we bid farewell to President Trump, why is no one arguing about Timon?
I don’t mean the tan meerkat from “The Lion King”, although he might want to. Instead, I refer to the title character of “Timão de Atenas”, the Shakespeare tragedy in which a bankrupt businessman, abandoned by his sycophants and deprived of power, renounces society with wild curses (“Matronas, stay incontinent! “) To assume a miserable life by the sea in Mar-a-Lago.
Wait, sorry, wrong sea – Timon is “outside the walls of Athens”.
Confusion is natural; Shakespeare is currently doing a double task. While maintaining his career as the most produced playwright in the world, he is also the most cited metaphor provider for the Trump era – and particularly his outcome. A shocking political analysis hardly passes without mentioning one of the 37 canonical pieces, however limited or far-fetched the comparison may be.
Not that Shakespeare is new to the free allusion game. For decades, if not centuries, it has been the preferred brand of instant gravitas. (More than one U.S. politician was referred to as the “American Macbeth.”) But something about the Trump presidency, which comes to an end on Wednesday, has sent writers on a treasure hunt from the beginning through the First Folio.
It is not with Timão that they usually return. (The play, around 1605, is among Shakespeare’s least loved.) Academic references in popular culture only work if the reference is popular. Searching for the terms “Trump” and “Timon of Athens” on Google returned less than 150,000 hits, almost as many as “Trump” and, say, “The Lucy Show”.
But when I joined “Trump” and “King Lear”, more than 2.8 million links appeared. Many of them led to a show actually called “Trump Lear”, a scathing comparison of the two leaders who ran Off Broadway in the summer of 2017.
The comparison is not entirely inadequate. Both the king and the president are known for their loyalty games: Lear with his daughters, Trump with his minions. (Is Mike Pence Regan or Cordelia?) Both were, shall we say, ambivalent about handing over the power of office. Both are divisors – in Lear’s case, literally slicing his kingdom like a pizza.
But you can make that kind of comparison between any two products of human culture, as long as you narrow your scope enough. (Like Lucy, Trump is always getting into trouble.) If Shakespeare’s plays are so often the first choice of scholars who seek to add greatness to their accounts of the uses and abuses of power, it is less because they are apt than because they are omnipresent, overflowing with rulers of all tragic types. .
Not that recent coverage has been restricted to tragedies. Trump was spotted in the deluded and pretentious Malvolio of “Twelfth Night” and the overconfidence and penchant for malaprop Nick Bottom of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – the one who turned into an ass.
Mainly, however, are the tragedies and stories – conducted in my informal research by “Julius Caesar”, “King Lear”, “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “Macbeth”, “Coriolanus”, “Ricardo III” and “Henrique V “- who were quoted to get to the heart of Trumpism. But do they really know?
Here are just a few of the matches:
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The 2017 Public Theater production of “Julio Cesar,”Featuring a blond Caesar and his grumpy Slavic wife, he led critics to consider the limits of dissent when a leader leans towards authoritarianism.
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Sampling “King Lear”As a touchstone for the incoherent rage of a deteriorating personality, it has become almost de rigueur in the chaotic last few months of Trump’s presidency.
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Inside “Village, ”The vengeful prince is crazy only“ north-northwest ”, but on the other hand he knows“ a hawk with a saw ”. Journalists quote the piece to suggest that Trump deliberately agitates chaos and confusion like a curtain behind which he cunningly pursues his goals.
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“Don’t ask me for anything: what you know, you know,” says Iago when he is finally arrested for being the mastermind of a seditious plot in “Othello. “Iago’s moral nullity reminded the writers of the president, who said similarly, when discarding the death toll of Covid-19:” It is what it is. “
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For some, “Macbeth”It describes the psychosexual pathology behind an unrelenting search for power; for others, the devastated pandemic-like land has left its trail.
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The rarely seen “Coriolanus”, About a leader who despises ordinary people he claims to serve, was also cited as a way of thinking about the president’s response to the coronavirus.
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How a man of “unfathomable, cruel and treacherous cynicism” reaches power is the subject of “Ricardo III”- and many editorials warning about the 2016 election.
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And no less expert than Timothée Chalamet, who portrayed Henry V in the 2019 film “The King”, he observed that Henry, “like Trump”, is “insulted by anything”.
So there you have it: Trump is practically the entire canon of Shakespeare’s tragedies – even “Romeo and Juliet” – brought together in one. However, this mania for comparison depends on a tenuous analysis of the president and the pieces.
On the one hand, experts are ignoring characteristics that do not match. Richard was born disabled; Hamlet was avenging a murder. Most of the others were victorious warriors; The “Bone Spurs” president was not.
Furthermore, the pieces, with all their defects, have a deep and noble goal that Trump does not have: to provide a view of life. Comedies offer a vision of love; the rest, in the corruption of power. But there are no clear lines: the genres are confused – as well as the moral status of the characters. Shakespeare rarely presents someone as totally bad; perhaps only Iago, who does not deny it. All the others are made up of patches of good and bad, revealed and partially justified in the sparkling light of language.
But like most real people, just more because of his psychological and political makeup, Trump cannot be captured that way. He does not open his heart openly in public, and our time does not require him to make himself understood through words. (Twitter doesn’t count.) Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln come to life in their letters, diaries and brochures. Hamlet has about 1,500 lines to explain. But Trump remains forever impenetrable in explosions of 280 characters, which is why commentators were so extreme in digging up precedents that they are easier to understand.
I admit that I do that too. I look in “Júlio César” for a guide to demagogy. And “King Lear” to understand how a man who “never knew himself, but vaguely” could know others well enough to rule them.
But even those comparisons are reductive – in both directions. Shakespeare’s characters are much richer and more readable than someone as expressionless as Trump. At the same time, we would be lucky if he were only Shakespearean; no invented villain, even Iago, is as alarming as someone for whom the whole world is really a stage.
Still, there is something to be said for the comparison with Iago. His final line, when dragged to justice, is “From this moment on, I will never say a word again” – a devoutly desired consummation.