Blog P.I.

I fully admit the title of this post makes no sense. I suppose I could conjure an overwrought analogy, but that would be no better than the equally senseless, half-baked uses of the word “Shakespearean” Stephen Marche rails against today at TNR.com:

Everybody’s calling Eliot Spitzer’s fall “Shakespearean.” I’ve seen the comparison made in The Wall Street Journal, on blogs, even on Fox News, and I wonder if other Shakespeare scholars find this as cringe-worthy as I do. Even if he did quote Hamlet in his high school yearbook, Spitzer’s story is in no way Shakespearean and he certainly is nothing like a Shakespearean hero. Not even a little bit.

Characters like Hamlet or Macbeth are destroyed by the virtues which lifted them to greatness in the first place. The most remarkable feature of the whole Spitzer debacle, his extreme hypocrisy, is maybe the one characteristic all Shakespearean tragic heroes lack. …

All [these pundits] are saying is that something dramatic has happened. “Shakespearean” used to mean a situation of extreme emotions in high politics mixed in with a measure of the unfathomability of fate. Now it is shorthand for any situation in which somebody becomes powerful and/or loses power. The whole range of Shakespearean terms has been debased. “Lady Macbeth” is shorthand for any ambitious woman. “Othello” is shorthand for anyone jealous. “Hamlet” is shorthand for anyone who overthinks. The time has come either to use these terms far more selectively or to retire them altogether.

Marche was the first to say it like an English teacher, but he is not in fact the first to say it at all. Dean Barnett at the Weekly Standard beat him to the “you’re no Shakespeare” punch by more than two weeks:

“Shakespearean” suggests a certain nobility of character that eventually lost out to the tragic figure’s flaws. Pardon me for playing Mickey the Dunce, but where, pray tell, was Eliot Spitzer’s nobility? As a prosecutor, he was a bully. As a husband and a father, he was a wretched failure who brought humiliation to his family while violating their trust in a serial manner. And finally, when the gig was up and he could have earned a small measure of redemption by showing a little honor and dealing forthrightly with his shortcomings, what did he do? He refused to face the music. He didn’t answer press inquiries. He uttered some rank rubbish suggesting he had a disease. And he hid behind the wife that he had treated so poorly.

This is, of course, a slightly different gloss on what “Shakespearean” is supposed to mean. But where Barnett says “nobility,” Marche says “dignity.”

Of the 76 results at Google News for Spitzer + Shakespearean, they aren’t all responsible for the cheapening of “Shakespearean.” Then again, those who object also have somewhat different notions of what “Shakespearean” is supposed to mean. But I’m inclined to think they all have a point.

Make sense?