New York’s summertime staple “Shakespeare in the Park” is performing the bard’s great tragedy Julius Caesar. The production is in modern dress, and someone had the bright idea to portray the Roman strongman in a blonde wig, so that he looks like Donald Trump. And (spoiler alert, as if anyone didn’t know) Caesar gets assassinated. So it looks as if Donald Trump is getting assassinated.
This has caused a big furor, with corporate sponsors dropping out and the public bitterly divided. Some people apparently like to fantasize about Trump getting killed. Trump supporters, of course, are outraged.
I would like to add a different perspective, though it means my coming out of retirement as a literature professor with a specialty in the age of Shakespeare.
The play Julius Caesar is pro-Caesar! Shakespeare, being a monarchist, creates sympathy for the usurper of the Roman Republic. The assassins are portrayed, though with Shakespeare’s usual empathy, as the bad guys. They all get killed at the end.
So a production of the play depicting Caesar as Donald Trump, unless it is completely rewritten, is going to support Donald Trump!Now I realize that directors do not always care about the meaning of the plays they direct, especially when they take on Shakespeare. So it would not surprise me if the directors were, in fact, trying to pull a Kathy Griffin. And that the audience of New Yorkers also are oblivious to the meaning of the play and get some kind of satisfying catharsis in seeing a Trump look-alike get killed. So I am not defending this particular staging. Purist that I am, I can’t stand these attempts to “make Shakespeare relevant,” a playwright who is already more relevant than anything else on Broadway.
But the assassination scene comes very early in the play. The bulk of the play is about how the conspiracy comes to a very bad end. And how Caesar’s friends and supporters rise up against them. And, what with Mark Antony’s funeral speech and Octavian’s military prowess, the assassination ends up creating the situation that the conspirators were trying to prevent: namely, the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire.
That is so obvious in the play that I can’t imagine anyone who pays attention being glad that Caesar gets killed by his friends and colleagues, or can miss the perfidy of Brutus and Cassius. I suspect that after the assassination of the actor in the blonde wig, viewers shift over to following the story more like Shakespeare wrote it.
If the purpose of the producers was to strike a blow for the “resistance” to Trump, they need to realize that they have instead, ironically, put on a play that would have to be seen as supportive of Trump.
And if the supporters of Trump want to censor Shakespeare, they need to realize that they are trying to censor a play that would have to be interpreted as supportive of their guy.
Painting: Mark Antony’s Funeral Oration by George Edward Robertson (1864), Public Domain
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