Hamlet faced the same problem we are facing. The government of Denmark had been usurped, and he was determined to restore legitimate rule. But he was facing in King Claudius a monarch who had gained the throne by running forged ballots repeatedly through voting machines in the dark of night; that is, by killing the preceding king, Claudius’ own brother, the valiant and orange-haired King Hamlet. But some world-historical figures are greater than death, whether real or political, and return thereafter to haunt the living:
Ghost: “…Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distilment,…”
And not content to pour poison into the porches of King Hamlet’s ears, the new usurping king married the murdered king’s widow, Queen Gertrude. And here to complete our comparison we must not shrink from the image of the usurping King Biden taking to bed the luminous Melania Trump, one of the great beauties of our age, holding her tender flesh in his withering, palsied hands as he tongues back into place his shifting teeth and whispers his curt and time-worn seduction line:
“Unity.”
With the exception of the ambiguous Storming of the Capitol, the political right, like Hamlet, has been patient to a fault, impressively law-abiding in the face of provocations that extended through an entire year of urban anarchy, and that culminated in a stolen election and, by some measures, the ending or at least the abeyance of our republic. Just like in the play, the audience in America begins to ask, will Hamlet never be spurred to action?
Everyone says that Hamlet hesitated, that he couldn’t summon the will to murder Claudius. He even says it of himself:
Hamlet: “…Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words…”
In this early scene in the play, he sounds a lot like the over 140 (by report) republican House members who, throwing up their hands in impotence, voted to retain Liz Cheney in leadership after she leveled unfounded charges against President Trump and endorsed an impeachment procedure that denied him due process.
Meanwhile, Claudius, like Biden’s stage managers, the masterminds behind the extraordinarily effective theft of the election, but unlike Biden himself, is no fool. Sensing that Hamlet is now coldly calculating whether the republic cannot be restored without lining up democrat officeholders in his sights the way Bernie Bro James Hodgkinson lined up in his rifle sights House Whip Steven Scalise during a Congressional baseball game before shooting him in his pelvis, requiring multiple surgeries and a willful act of mass amnesia on the part of the media afterward, Claudius sends Hamlet to Ukraine and China to collect millions in bribes to feed his off-stage son’s cocaine addiction and $25,000 per month house rental; that is, Claudius sends Hamlet to England to collect tribute.
And Claudius sends with Hamlet a letter, instructing the pliable Britons upon reading it to use the full arsenal of the Google/Facebook/Amazon surveillance state to roll up the right-leaning Stormers of the Capitol, while leaving the left-leaning Stormers alone, to wrap up the Dunham investigation without indictments, oh it sickens me even to go on with the long and obvious list; sometimes the Shakespearean parallels are too apt – I’ll cut to the chase, Claudius instructs the English to impeach and try former President Trump on charges Kafka would blush to bring; that is, to slice Hamlet’s head off (a cicatrice is a wound).
Claudius: “And, England, if my love thou hold’st at aught–
As my great power thereof may give thee sense,
Since yet thy cicatrice looks raw and red
After the Danish sword, and thy free awe
Pays homage to us — thou mayst not coldly set
Our sovereign process; which imports at full,…
The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England.”
Democrats are not afraid to exercise power. Hamlet foils the plot, but like the also-far-too-young Kyle Rittenhouse, in saving his own life he must take the lives of others (in Hamlet’s case, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s). Unlike the self-defending Rittenhouse, Hamlet faces no prosecution for this. Not even Claudius was that vindictive.
Hamlet, and those Americans who love America as dearly as he loved Denmark, has before him not the simple task of avenging his orange-haired father, but of restoring legitimate rule. To truly restore legitimacy, he must also demonstrate Fraudius’, sorry, Claudius’ guilt and foil his attempts to extend his usurpation. It would be wrong to send severed sheep’s eyes, betokening watchfulness, to democrat poll workers in select cities. Nor would he likely be able to cajole a videotaped confession out of someone involved in the 2020 theft (that’s better left to Project Veritas). But what should our Hamlet do?
In Hamlet’s case, he crabwalks his way to a solution, finding it only in Act V, during the duel with Laertes that he knows is, like the 2020 election, hopelessly rigged against him, with Laertes’ fencing foil tipped with poison, and yet more poison dripped into the voting machines and the cup of wine Claudius offers him for refreshment.
Hamlet knew that he would have to pay with his life to both retain his own honor and restore his nation to legitimate rule. People with that knowledge do indeed hesitate, they do indeed seek every solution short of any final, last resort.
