A rumor is circulating. Someone in our inner circle – a figure we know and trust, a person we believe to be on our side — has cast suspicion over someone else that we know. A doubt has been put in our minds.
Truth be told, the doubt was always there, latent. We had always suspected, deep down, that we were being deceived – that we could be deceived. What we now demand is concrete proof, one way or the other.
“…give me the ocular proof…
…Make me to see’t; or, at the least, so prove it, That the probation bear no hinge nor loop To hang a doubt on” (Shakespeare, Othello 360-66)
Yesterday, President Barack Obama tried to oblige. His staff has posted “proof” – the proverbial missing handkerchief, we might say — on the White House webpage.
Given the personality-driven nature of American Presidential politics, it has always been tempting to see the fates and actions of Presidents (and other world leaders) through the lens of Shakespearean drama. After all, it’s Shakespeare who, as G.W.F. Hegel put it, gives us the finest examples of “characters who come to ruin because of [a] decisive adherence to themselves and their aims.”
For some, George W. Bush resembled the wayward Prince Hal of the Henriad – the man who later became known as the “warlike Harry,” once he took over his father’s position. For others, the Clintons seemed uncannily like the couple in the Scottish Play. In his new book, Shakespeare’s Freedom, the Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt even tells of an audience he had with Bill Clinton in 1998, just as the first rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, during which the President himself remarked, “Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”
Barack Obama has been thought by some to resemble Shakespeare’s “moor” Othello. Peter Sellars’ 2009 production of Othello, for instance, sought to reframe the play for what he called “the age of Obama.” . . .