Tuesday
I’m teaching Richard II in my Ljubljana Shakespeare class today and boy does it look different than when I taught it two years ago. Then, of course, Joe Biden was president, so when I looked at the play, the passages about corruption landed differently. They hit home now.
In the play, Shakespeare addresses an impossible situation: an incompetent monarch is destabilizing a country that relies on a hereditary monarchy for social stability. As bad as Richard II is—I’ll get to his screw-ups in the moment–overthrowing him has consequences that last for generations.
Democracies are superior to monarchies (and autocracies) because the institutions are more important than the ruler: impeaching a leader does not harm the institution because provisions for impeachment are written into the Constitution. That document, affirmed by the original colonies and amended since, is essentially our monarchy. Our own dire consequences occur when the Constitution is assaulted.
I therefore found myself thinking of Trump as a mixture of Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke/ Henry IV. On the one hand, Trump, like Richard, is incompetent, narcissistic, sadistic, and corrupt. But like Henry, his assaults on the fundamental social contract—the Constitution in Trump’s case, the divine right of kings in Henry’s—threatens to unleash social upheaval.
In the course of the play Richard proves to be
—incompetent: he botches a quarrel between two noblemen;
—corrupt: he confiscates Henry Bolingbroke’s land to pay for his Irish war;
—susceptible to impulsive actions and wild mood swings;
—arrogant and deaf to good advice;
—enabling of corruption in others: : Bushy, Bagot, and Green are characterized as “caterpillars of the commonwealth,” feeding off its green foliage.
As this last image indicates, Shakespeare uses gardening analogies to capture corruption’s effect on England. The image begins with the gardener’s assistant asking why he must keep working with the country in turmoil. His account describes what Trump and his grifters are doing to the nation:
Servant: Why should we in the compass of a pale
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin’d,
Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?
The gardener sounds like Democrats predicting corruption investigations. The king that allowed “this disordered spring,” he says, “hath now himself met with the fall of leaf.” As a result, the grifters are no longer protected:
The weeds which his broad-spreading leaves did shelter,
That seem’d in eating him to hold him up,
Are pluck’d up root and all by Bolingbroke,
I mean the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green.
Trump has been promising the shelter of leafy-green pardons for all his fellow grifters. We will see.
I feel the gardener’s subsequent lament in my bones. What could America have accomplished if it lopped away this corrupt conman rather than electing him twice to the presidency?
Gardener: O, what pity is it
That he [Richard] had not so trimm’d and dress’d his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself:
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty: superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.
Instead we got a sadist in chief, who takes the same delight in cruelty that Richard does when he visits John of Gaunt on his deathbed. Having exiled Henry, Richard plans to seize his father’s wealth the instant he dies:
Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind
To help him to his grave immediately!
The lining of his coffers shall make coats
To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.
Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him:
Pray God we may make haste, and come too late!
Tyranny expert Tim Snyder talks about those law firms, universities, and others who have “bent the knee” to Trump. Richard is all about people bending knees. Here he is addressing rebellious Henry:
We are amazed; and thus long have we stood
To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?
As we watch DJT despoil the nation, John of Gaunt’s deathbed lament could be ours:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry…
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out…
England may stand strong against foreign enemies, Gaunt goes on to say, but now it is conquering itself:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!
I said that Trump is a combination of Richard and Henry so let’s now switch hats. Richard becomes poetic once he is being deposed, and I imagine America suffering the fate he predicts for England were the Constitution to be overthrown:
That every stride he makes upon my land
Is dangerous treason: he is come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war;
But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons
Shall ill become the flower of England’s face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation and bedew
Her pastures’ grass with faithful English blood.
Richard talking to the men who have come to arrest him could be Democrats talking to Attorney General Todd Blanche. Once a president can order the Department of Justice to go after his enemies, what’s to keep a Democratic president from sending governmental attorneys after you? For that matter, why wait for a Democratic president? If you fall out of favor with Trump, as Northumberland will with Henry, then you could be the next victim. That’s what you get when you disregard the rule of law:
And he shall think that thou, which know’st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne’er so little urged, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.
The love of wicked men converts to fear;
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deserved death.
Richard can predict confidently here because Shakespeare knew historically that Northumberland and his son Hotspur would rebel against Henry in Henry IV, Part I. Put expediency over the law and this is what you get. Our rightwing Supreme Court needs to hear this speech.
To sum up, Trump attempted a Bolingbroke-like coup on January 6, and more recently his caterpillars have been eating away at the commonwealth, with him the hungriest caterpillar of them all. It’s time for Democratic gardeners to start pulling weeds.
