(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.)

Fortinbras, the young tough from Norway, is organizing an assault on the U.S. Capitol to protest the installation of Biden as President; that is, he’s planning to storm Denmark’s capital to expand his territory. Recall he was pushed aside by his uncle just as Hamlet was by his, but Fortinbras is not one to wait on legal niceties – he goes straight to signing executive orders. And here’s some irresistible language Horatio uses to explain how young Fortinbras:

Horatio: “…Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes
For food and diet to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in ‘t, which is no other –
As it doth well appear unto our state –
But to recover of us, by strong hand
And terms compulsory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost. And this, I take it,
Is the main motive of our preparations.…”

Bernardo: “I think it be no other but even so:
Well may it sort, that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch, so like the king
That was an is the question of these wars.”

Fortinbras, not even waiting for his uncle to die, has put together an Antifa-like army composed of criminal riff-raff, drawn from the “skirts” of Norway, who will fight not for a noble cause but for “food and diet,” out of poverty and desperation. Well, Antifa are the white children of liberal teachers, social workers, and college administrators who are failing in life because of the maladaptive education their parents gave them, and are hiding their poverty and desperation behind political ideology. But basically they are a dispossessed class, like the thugs Fortinbras assembled.

Amidst this atmosphere of external threat, the appearance of a spectral image of the illegally deposed President Trump; that is, the late King Hamlet’s Ghost, bodes ill. Horatio regards the appearance as similar to the signs and portents seen in ancient Rome at the time of Julius Caesar’s murder. As he does so, the Ghost of Trump appear:.

Horatio: “A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye,
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets…
But soft, behold! Lo, where it comes again!
I’ll cross it, though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me:
If there be any good thing to be done,
that may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me:
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Of if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
Speak of it: stay, and speak! [The cock crows]
Stop it, Marcellus!”

Shakespeare is drawing a parallel between the most tumultuous period in Roman history and what is happening today in America as Biden systematically disassembles or subverts every institution designed to protect our civil liberties; that is, what is happening in Denmark. Meanwhile, dawn is approaching, and the Ghost keeps vampire hours.

(Partisan here means sword):

Marcellus: “Shall I strike at it with my partisan?”

Horatio: “Do, if it will not stand.”

Bernardo: “’Tis here!”

Horatio: “’Tis here!” [Exit Ghost]

Marcellus: “’Tis gone!
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
For it is, as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.”

Ber: “It was about to speak when the cock crew.”

Horatio: “And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard,
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day, and at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine: and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.”

Marcellus: “It faded on the crowing of the cock.”…

The Ghost hides from the daylight with all the skill and alacrity of a democrat ballot-stuffer hiding from a district attorney – if there still were DAs willing to enforce election laws.

The drama in Shakespeare, by the way, is never too intense to pause for a lovely description of a sunrise, which is coming up (“But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad/Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.”) Compare that to Romeo and Juliet, when Benvolio tells Romeo’s parents that he spied Romeo “an hour before the worshipped sun peered forth/The golden window of the east.”

Horatio: “But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill;
Break we our watch up; and by my advice,
Let us impart what we have seen tonight
Unto young Hamlet; for upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it,
As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?”

Marcellus: “Let’s do’t, I pray…”.

 

Hope you’re enjoying this mashup of Hamlet and current events. The Blogging Hamlet series starts with this post.