What a falling off was there!
Do we still recall the sheer consciencelessness with which Bill Clinton occupied the Oval Office for eight years? His estimable wife threatens to bring it all back home, but it helps to remember the sheer ruthlessness of their operation.
Macbeth was of course Lincoln's favorite Shakespeare play. "Some of Shak[e]speare’s plays I have never read," Lincoln wrote the actor James Hackett in 1863, "while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader." Among the latter Lincoln included Lear, Richard III, and Hamlet. But Macbeth stood alone for Lincoln in Shakespeare's corpus. "I think nothing equals Macbeth," he wrote.
Bill Clinton too has thought about Macbeth. In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Harvard Shakespearian Stephen Greenblatt recalls his 1998 visit to the White House:
"Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."Greenblatt is blown away by the depth of Clinton's insght: "I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler."
Greenblatt to the contrary notwithstanding (I hesitate to say), I think Clinton's comment about Macbeth is completely wrong. Yet it vividly brings back the highmindedness with which the Clintons conceive of themselves. Unlike us, unlike even Macbeth, they have an "ethically adequate object" that drives their ambitions. I remember! Greenblatt's comments also help us recall the prostration of the academy before the Clintons, a phenomenon that will also recur with a second Clinton presidency.
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