Tragedy: the Prince of Lago

When, in the year 1600, a London audience first witnessed the theatrical presentation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy, a scene was presented to them in which a young Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, sees a vision (or hallucination?) of his father, the slain King. The ghost compels Hamlet to avenge his death. Hamlet’s reaction to this terrible request becomes setting for a classic tragedy in which Hamlet imposes a litany of accusations against his Queen mother and her love, the now-King, Claudius. Hamlet’s character is self-tortured with this diabolical task, which he does not fully understand. He makes himself miserable with consternation over how he should go about exacting vengeance for the murder of his father. Among the many complexities of a Shakespearean tragedy plot, a troupe of actors arrives to present a play, ostensibly having been commissioned by Claudius and his courtiers to distract the infuriated Prince Hamlet. The scheming prince, however, approaches the actors with a different play, with which they are familiar. The plot that Hamlet convinces them to perform presents a scenario in which a king is murdered. . . thus raising, in a theatrical manner that only Shakespeare could have arranged, a situation in which Claudius the king and the queen (previously married to Hamlet’s dead father) are implicated, even accused, of murder. At one point in the drama, Hamlet steps aside to deliver this soliloquy: “the spirit I have seen may be the devil, and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape, yea. . . The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” In our 21st-centuary of mediaized drama, we have witnessed a tragic drama that echoes the dilemma that faced Hamlet, four centuries ago. A former president of our USA was torturing himself because he had lost, by the tabulated votes of the American people, his position of Oval Office power. He, like Hamlet, could not rest until he had made an attempt to recover, by hook or by crook, for himself the the hyped-up Oval ring of power, which he had lost to a regular Joe. So the Prince of Lago chose a treacherous course of confounding his people with a twisted plot, a plot in which he thought, after signaling to his proud boy minions, to “stand back and stand by” until, once again, he would surface from the depths of Electoral politics to apprehend, once again, the contested Ring of Oval Power for himself. So he instigated a gathering of his confederates whose riotous offense against the American people would obfuscate, for an illigitimate second term, the coveted Oval Ring of Power for the prince of Lago. At that moment in time, that coerced moment in which the insurrection’s the thing in which he would, once again make himself, again, a king! he would grasp, once again, the Oval Ring of Power. But his plan did not work. A classic document, the US Constitution, and We, the citizens of our USA, foiled his plot to purloin power and thus banish him from the Oval and render him, once again, a haunting presence in Lago and 5th Avenue, and wherever else in America, magamania strives to obfuscate and gerrymander the Spirit of Liberty that was assured to us by President Lincoln and the men who, by his determination and sacrifice, ended slavery and ensured us a government Of the People, By the People, For the People. E Pluribus Unum thus recovers the governance of our United States for We the People. In God We Trust. Glass half-Full