We’ve been
The idea is that the Superdelegates are having trouble making up their mind.
What Shakespeare characters are the various candidates and other players?
HT: Jackquelyn
More Shakespeare parallels
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Christianity, Culture, Vocation
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Lucas Cranach, self portrait c.1530.
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Hillary = Lady Macbeth
Yes! Which neatly accounts for her (their) husband too!
I love this topic, but I’m drawing blanks. I think maybe I could see the press as Iago, but that begs the question about who Othello is.
I just hope that McCain doesn’t turn out to be King Lear.
Considering his effect on women…
Obama=Romeo
The possibilities are endless.
Depending on whether you like them, Ron Paul/Mike Gravel/Dennis Kucinich/Alan Keyes as Polonius (source of tedious windbaggery), Lear’s Fool (loyal truthteller), Captain Fluellen (a likeable firebrand who tends to be wrong on the facts yet loves a good argument) or Yorick (that “mad rogue” we remember fondly from so long ago in the campaign cycle).
Depending on how the election turns out: Hillary/Obama as Rosencrantz/Guildenstern (insignificant characters to McCain), Goneril/Regan (scheming powermongers who ultimately destroy themselves), or Kate/Petruchio (whose feuding proves to be only a prelude to marriage/a joint ticket).
Ralph Nader/Mayor Bloomberg as Prince Fortinbras, who waits for everyone else to murder themselves and then sweeps in from Poland/New York to take the throne.
Mike Huckabee as Launcelot Gobbo?
Obama as Prince Hal, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright as the Falstaff whom Obama must outgrow in order to become a proper heir to the throne.
John Kerry as Rambures (from Henry V), a minor French lord who appears on the scene only briefly.
Finally, I am starting a petition urging Hillary to get herself to a nunnery as soon as possible.
Methinks ticketext has brushed up on your Shakespeare!
One of the many hidden benefits of being an English major: putting modern day politicians through the allusive ringer! (I will admit having to look up Rambures, however.)
While I’m at it, I would also like to observe that in King Lear (I.ii), Edmund describes quite nicely the rhetoric of victimization which pervades so much of contemporary politics:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,–often the surfeit
of our own behavior,–we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon’s tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar–
tickletext, you get an A from this English professor!
Humm! I thought I was the first one clever enough to see the Obama as Prince Hal, Reverend Wright as Falstaff analogy but tickletext beat me to it!
Oh, well, it’s a very valid analogy, and here’s my take on it:
Obama as Prince Hal, Reverend Wright as Falstaff, and The Price of Leadership.