Shakespeare Subpoenaed

If you want to test your ingenuity against Yoshino’s, see if you can give the Shakespeare play he puts beside these events:

1. The war on terror.

2. Bill Clinton discussing Monica Lewinsky.

3. Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation.

4. The O. J. Simpson trial.

5. George W. Bush’s recovery from alcoholism.

6. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “arc of the moral universe” speech.

7. A dissent in the Dred Scott decision.

8. The inevitability of death.

9. George Washington turning down a third term.

Start with No. 6 above. Yoshino suggests that for King to claim that the arc of the moral universe bends of itself toward justice is simplistic, a belief that good things happen to good people, and it equals the idea in “Macbeth” that bad things happen to bad people. He concludes that the play is not drama but “propaganda,” since Shakespeare was just flattering King James with an attack on the Gunpowder Plot — which means that “Duncan, Macbeth and Banquo are more complex characters in Holinshed” (the source) “than in Shakespeare.” Can anyone think this deepens our understanding of Martin Luther King or of the play?

Or take No. 1 above. The book implies that the popularity of the previously neglected “Titus Andronicus” is linked to George Bush’s tit-for-tat response to the terror attack. But he dates the new respect for the play from 1955 (Peter Brook’s production), 1987 (Deborah Warner’s) and 1999 (Julie Taymor’s film) — all before the beginning of the 2001 war on terror. He never mentions dramatic theories like those of Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud and Jan Kott, which have long been recognized as setting the stage for “Titus” to come back as theater of cruelty or nightmare of history.

No. 4 above has the most detailed legal arguing, since the book counts out meticulously how the O. J. Simpson “bloody glove” resembles Desdemona’s ­strawberry-spotted handkerchief in six ways, to attack reliance on “ocular proof” of guilt. Fair enough. But he does not show whether or how Othello’s gulling by the handkerchief and the jury’s by the glove resemble each other — and short of that, what have we really learned about the play or the trial?

The author thinks readers might guess the dramatic partner to No. 5 above, since commentators said after the attack on the World Trade Center that George W. Bush had gone from alcoholic youth to heroic leader, like Prince Hal of the “Henry IV” plays becoming Henry V. It was a silly comparison at the time, and recalling it now tells us nothing important about ­either Henry V or George Bush.

All right, how about No. 7, the dissent of Justice Benjamin Curtis in the Dred Scott case? Bad as the majority decision was, we are told that the dissent indulged “flights of fancy,” repeating “Hamlet’s mistake” of seeking perfect justice instead of imperfect adjustments.

The same limitation applies to all the pairings. Washington’s refusal to run for a third term (No. 9) is compared to Pros­pero’s breaking his wand in “The Tempest.” “Measure for Measure” is said to praise empathy in a judge, which the author thinks should have been (but wasn’t) a lesson of the Sotomayor hearings (No. 3). And the death of Cordelia in “King Lear” makes Yoshino realize that he must die (No. 8) — a realization that comes to most of us when a relative or friend dies. The plays are cut to such trite lessons to keep up the game of headline rummaging.