If Dogberry, the buffoon from Much Ado About Nothing who has trouble making sentences, is Joe Biden, which Shakespeare character should we select to portray Kamala Harris? While I had to do some searching to come up with Dogberry for Biden, Kamala is a much easier proposition – she is Mistress Overdone from Measure for Measure.

We meet Mistress Overdone in the first act, but she is more properly introduced in the second, when the Duke of Vienna’s counselor Escalus is interrogating Pompey, who is a pimp:

Escalus: “So. What trade are you of, sir?”
Pompey: “Tapster; a poor widow’s tapster.”
Escalus: “Your mistress’ name?”
Pompey: “Mistress Overdone.”
Escalus: “Hath she had any more than one husband?”
Pompey: “Nine, sir; Overdone by the last.”

Kamala Harris, of course, was overdone by Willie Brown, the notorious California politician who controlled much of what happened in the state for decades. When she was an unknown 30-year-old, and he was a married and very prominent 60, they engaged in a very public and prolonged affair that, even by California standards, was scandalous for its unconcealed nature.

Brown rewarded Harris for her service by appointing her to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, a position that paid $97,000 annually, which would be $167,000 in 2019. Five months later, she resigned from the board, and Brown immediately appointed her to the state Medical Assistance Commission. Did these appointments launch her political career? Let’s ask Willie Brown:

“Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker,” Brown recently wrote. That seems clear enough. Let’s go back to Vienna, and our other Mistress, who is listing all the headwinds her business is facing (the “sweat” is a contagion, likely the plague):

Mistress Overdone: “Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what
with the gallows and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk.
How now! what’s the news with you?”

Pompey: “Yonder man is carried to prison.”

Mistress Overdone: “Well; what has he done?”

Pompey: “A woman…You have not heard of the proclamation, have you?”

Mistress Overdone: “What proclamation, man?

Pompey: “All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down.”

“Houses” here means houses of prostitution, and they are being plucked down because the government of Vienna is attempting to reform the city’s morals. Kamala Harris faced no such impediment in 1990’s California. Even as Harris was being plucked from obscurity as an assistant district attorney to serve in an overpaid state board position, from which she launched her campaign for state District Attorney, Mistress Overdone was seeing her house plucked down, and was navigating the far more difficult career path of a madam of a house of ill repute:

Mistress Overdone: “But shall all our houses of resort in the
suburbs be pulled down?”

Pompey: “To the ground, mistress.”

Mistress Overdone: “Why, here’s a change indeed in the
commonwealth! What shall become of me?”

Pompey: “Come; fear you not: good counsellors lack no
clients: though you change your place, you need not
change your trade; I’ll be your tapster still.
Courage! there will be pity taken on you: you that
have worn your eyes almost out in the service, you
will be considered.”

The vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, may have changed her place, but she has not changed her trade, and we would never have heard of her if she had not slept with Willie Brown to advance her career. America’s women deserve better than that.

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.