A critical thinker for our time

Shakespeare’s seeming anticipation of the Brexit fiasco has not passed unnoticed by commentators. Scotland’s former first minister, Alex Salmond, likened then justice secretary Michael Gove and Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine to ‘Lord Macbeth’ and Lady Macbeth for having ‘dispatched’ David Cameron and Boris Johnson. As Johnson ruled himself out of the leadership race, the ghost of Shakespeare’s Caesar was invoked by reporters, who put the words ‘Et tu, Michael?’ into Johnson’s mouth. Ben Wright, a political correspondent for the BBC, began his analysis of the fallout by claiming that ‘“Shakespearian” is the word being mumbled by dazed politicians and pundits at Westminster’, adding the Machiavellian Richard III into the mix of appealing (if imperfect) Shakespearean comparisons.¹

Ralph Fiennes, who played Richard III at the Almeida this English summer, weighed in to say that Gove is the ‘closest’ to embodying Richard III’s personality and role, ‘[b]ecause all those protestations about “I could never lead, it’s not in my DNA to lead”—that’s classic Richard’.² One of Gove’s own former policy advisers tweeted, ‘It’s like the end of Hamlet. Tim Farron as Fortinbras is just going to walk on stage when everyone else is dead and claim the kingdom.’³ Quotations from Cymbeline (‘Britain is a world by itself’) and Richard II (‘this sceptred isle’) have been used by Brexit campaigners with scant regard for their original context. Some writers have even posed the pointless question, ‘Would William Shakespeare vote to Leave …’⁴