What Spitzer could learn from Shakespeare

The hypocrisy of the self-righteous:
What Eliot Spitzer could learn from Shakespeare

JIM RUTTER

New York’s governor Eliot Spitzer— he of the high morals and high-priced prostitutes— won’t be present this weekend when the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival opens half of its repertory season with a staging of Romeo and Juliet. This is a double shame. Spitzer could learn a lot from Shakespeare, and the Festival could seize a timely opportunity by performing one of my favorites, Shakespeare’s morality play Measure for Measure.

As Measure opens, Duke Vincentio pretends to leave Vienna on a diplomatic mission to discover “If power change purpose, what our seemers be." To enforce the law in his absence, he appoints the upright judge Angelo, “a man whose blood is very snow-broth [and] never feels the wanton stings and motions of the sense.”

But the self-righteous Angelo believes the Duke lax in his enforcement of the law, and argues that “the law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.” Using his newfound power, Angelo enacts a strict application of the statutes— particularly in matters of sexual immorality— and sentences the first offender he encounters (Claudio) to death, proclaiming the virtue of absolute justice while subsequently abusing his power to commit (sexual) indiscretions of his own.

Of course, this plot is the same motif that now plagues Eliot Spitzer. This self-proclaimed man of integrity built his career as New York attorney general on a strict application of existing statutes. Threatening Wall Street, large corporations, and the Mafia alike, he pledged to eliminate corruption and injustice. But like Angelo, he forgot that virtue starts at home.

Caught in a wiretap

On Monday, Spitzer acknowledged the federal wiretap that recorded him hiring a New York based escort to provide him with services for $4,300 on a recent trip to Washington, D.C. And if we believe the escort service, it seems that long before he became governor, Spitzer, like Angelo, decided to “give my sensual race the rein." George Fox (Spitzer’s “john” name) doesn’t sound as theatrically a propos as “Angelo,” but otherwise Spitzer has definitely captured all the elements of the classic story.

Where art and reality part ways:

In Shakespeare’s play, Vincentio lets Angelo off easy—forcing him to marry his former fiancée Marianna, whom Angelo is tricked into bedding out of wedlock, thus violating the law he so unscrupulously enforced. Spitzer, already married, is precluded from this interesting option— and though I’ll never understand why the wives of these philandering politicians appear beside them for their confessionals—there’s also no reason to think that an otherwise honest worker in the underground economy would give up a $4,300-an-hour job to marry a mere (crooked) public servant anyway.

What crime did he commit?

Although life and art often imitate each other, Spitzer shouldn’t get such an easy out as Angelo. Fictitious characters threatening to kill one another is one thing, but Spitzer used his self-proclaimed moral perfection in part to justify his crusades against “lesser mortals,” from stock traders to prostitutes. Invariably he beat them down with an iron bar standard that (we now know) he lacked the integrity to wield.

I can’t answer whether or not Spitzer should step down from office. In my (Libertarian) view, he committed the vice of dishonesty (to his wife), but not a real crime against the public. But I do hope that the dramatic possibilities won’t go unnoticed by New York producers. Perhaps Broadway theatergoers will soon have the chance to see a slim, slightly balding actor playing a recreation of the man they only recently elected into high office, with a script loosely following Shakespeare’s.

Here in Philadelphia, Pig Iron could re-stage its underappreciated fringe hit, Isabella, in Spitzer’s honor. That play dealt with lust, death and the abuse of authority by removing Measure For Measure to a 21st-Century morgue with stark naked characters. Could there be any more apt analogy for Spitzer’s downfall, and his career’s likely destination?

A lesson from Edmund Burke, too

In Shakespeare’s play, Mariana remarks of Angelo that “the best men are molded out of faults, and become much more the better for being a little bad.” Isabella— who suffers the brunt of Angelo’s abuse— remarks, “It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant,” offering a conflicting view of the possible redemption for the virtuous who have fallen.

Spitzer could bounce back or even remain in office, but I don’t buy the Bard’s wisdom in this case. Instead I’d heed Edmund Burke: “The only recourse for good men is to believe all possible evil of bad men.” As events from Shakespeare’s time to Spitzer suggest, perhaps we should start applying that standard to the self-righteous as well.



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