Shakespeare in his own time was more famous for two epic poems that he wrote at the beginning of his career, than for any of the plays that he wrote thereafter. In 1593 he published Venus and Adonis, and the year after saw The Rape of Lucrece. And this week, with Andrew Cuomo’s career-long record of abuse suddenly coming to light, it’s time to dip into this irresistible chronicle of the weakness of the flesh.

The backstory: Lucius Tarquinius, after gaining control of Rome and while on a military campaign, extolled the beauty of his wife Lucrece at an evening feast. His description inflamed the passions of his own son, Andrew Cuomo; I mean Sextus Tarquinius, who stole away from camp and traveled to Lucrece’s lodgings. That night, when everyone was asleep, Sextus Cuomo, called Tarquin in the poem, stole into Lucrece’s chambers and ravished her:

Here’s a taste of the poem:

Now stole upon the time the dead of night,
When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes:
No comfortable star did lend his light,
No noise but owls’ and wolves’ death-boding cries;
Now serves the season that they may surprise
The silly lambs: pure thoughts are dead and still,
While lust and murder wake to stain and kill.

“Cuomo, 63, has made no secret that he’s on the prowl after a very public breakup in 2019,” according to the New York Post. Cuomo is facing accusations of on-the-job sexual harassment from two former aides, Lindsey Boylan and Charlotte Bennett.

And now this lustful lord leap’d from his bed,
Throwing his mantle rudely o’er his arm;
Is madly toss’d between desire and dread;
Th’ one sweetly flatters, th’ other feareth harm;
But honest fear, bewitch’d with lust’s foul charm,
Doth too too oft betake him to retire,
Beaten away by brain-sick rude desire.

Boylan — who’s a Democratic candidate for Manhattan borough president — penned an emotional essay on Medium alleging New York’s top elected official kissed her “on the lips” without warning inside his Manhattan office in 2018. “I was in shock, but I kept walking,” Boylan wrote. “After that, my fears worsened. I came to work nauseous every day.”

Now is he come unto the chamber-door,
That shuts him from the heaven of his thought,
Which with a yielding latch, and with no more,
Hath barr’d him from the blessed thing be sought.
So from himself impiety hath wrought,
That for his prey to pray he doth begin,
As if the heavens should countenance his sin.

Charlotte Bennett, a 25-year-old former aide to Cuomo, told The New York Times that in the spring of 2020, the governor asked her inappropriate personal questions, told her he was open to relationships with women in their 20s, and left her feeling that he “wanted to sleep with me.”

Cuomo pressed her: “Who did I last hug,” she said. She tried to dodge the question by saying she missed hugging her parents. “And he was, like, ‘No, I mean like really hugged somebody,’” she said.

“I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared,” Bennett told the Times.

This said, his guilty hand pluck’d up the latch,
And with his knee the door he opens wide.
The dove sleeps fast that this night-owl will catch:
Thus treason works ere traitors be espied.
Who sees the lurking serpent steps aside;
But she, sound sleeping, fearing no such thing,
Lies at the mercy of his mortal sting.

“And I was wondering how I was going to get out of it and assumed it was the end of my job,” Bennett said. Bennett is around the same age as Cuomo’s oldest daughters. When she told Cuomo in May of her experience as a sexual-assault survivor, he seemed fixated by the revelation, she said.

Into the chamber wickedly he stalks,
And gazeth on her yet unstained bed.
The curtains being close, about he walks,
Rolling his greedy eyeballs in his head:
By their high treason is his heart misled;
Which gives the watch-word to his hand full soon
To draw the cloud that hides the silver moon.

She told a friend via text message: “The way he was repeating, ‘You were raped and abused and attacked and assaulted and betrayed,’ over and over again while looking me directly in the eyes was something out of a horror movie,” according to the Times.

Without the bed her other fair hand was,
On the green coverlet; whose perfect white
Show’d like an April daisy on the grass,
With pearly sweat, resembling dew of night.
Her eyes, like marigolds, had sheathed their light,
And canopied in darkness sweetly lay,
Till they might open to adorn the day.

Cuomo told her he was lonely since his relationship celebrity chef Sandra Lee, his girlfriend of 14 years, ended in 2019. He stressed to her that Lee was “out of the picture,” and referred to “wanting a girlfriend, preferably in the Albany area.”

Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue,
A pair of maiden worlds unconquered,
Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew,
And him by oath they truly honoured.
These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred;
Who, like a foul ursurper, went about
From this fair throne to heave the owner out.

“Age doesn’t matter,” he told her, as he asked about her feelings about age differences in relationships — a conversation she told a friend about at the time, in a text reviewed by the Times. Cuomo, age 63, was “fine with anyone above the age of 22,” she said he told her.

What could he see but mightily he noted?
What did he note but strongly he desired?
What he beheld, on that he firmly doted,
And in his will his wilful eye he tired.
With more than admiration he admired
Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,
Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.

Once, when she told him she was mulling getting a tattoo, he suggested she get it on her buttocks, so people wouldn’t see it when she wore a dress, she told the Times. She reported Cuomo’s conduct to his chief of staff and was transferred to another job.

This said, he sets his foot upon the light,
For light and lust are deadly enemies:
Shame folded up in blind concealing night,
When most unseen, then most doth tyrannize.
The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries;
Till with her own white fleece her voice controll’d
Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold

It’s fortunate Shakespeare made this poem so long, because a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth victim of Governor Tarquin’s lust came forward after I published this post. I’ll just add a few more stanzas, for the third victim. It seems another aide for the governor, Anna Ruch, 33, said the governor touched her face and back and asked to kiss her moments after they met at a 2019 wedding reception.

For with the nightly linen that she wears
He pens her piteous clamours in her head;
Cooling his hot face in the chastest tears
That ever modest eyes with sorrow shed.
O, that prone lust should stain so pure a bed!
The spots whereof could weeping purify,
Her tears should drop on them perpetually.

Ruch said Cuomo put his hands on her lower back, and when she removed them, she said he seemed “aggressive” and put his hands on her cheeks and asked if he could kiss her.

He like a thievish dog creeps sadly thence;
She like a wearied lamb lies panting there;
He scowls and hates himself for his offence;
She, desperate, with her nails her flesh doth tear;
He faintly flies, sneaking with guilty fear;
She stays, exclaiming on the direful night;
He runs, and chides his vanish’d, loathed delight.

P.S. I wanted to let you all know that my recasting of Hamlet as the 2020 election is now up for sale as an e-book and paperback through this link.

‘Hamlet’s 2020 Vision; A recasting of Hamlet as the tragedy of the 2020 election,’ reimagines Hamlet as the 2020 election by substituting the main players on our national stage for the play’s original cast of characters. I think the result is highly entertaining, but it also provides surprising insights into our current predicament, and it gives readers a chance to enjoy Shakespeare’s great tragedy from an entirely new angle.