Shakespeare Springs Eternal

     There's been a passel of public outrage - most of it from the right-wing media - over the current production at New York's Public Theater of William Shakespeare's play, "Julius Caesar" in which Julius Caesar resembles Donald Trump,

...too-long red tie and all,

...and the Roman Senate resembles Congress.

     The controversy arises over the scene in Act 3  when Julius Caesar is assassinated by the senators, which Donald Trump's supporters interpret as an effigial knocking off of the President by the artistic community which, by the way, will lose its funding when Trump takes an ax to the National Endowment for the Arts as he's promised to do in his 2018 budget, so maybe this "Julius Caesar" is  just sort of a tit-for-tat thing. 

  Now, it so happens that in 2012 the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis did a production of "Julius Caesar" in which Julius Caesar was portrayed to resemble Barack Obama, but nobody complained then,  probably because everybody knew that nobody really  disliked Obama all that much,  and so the play was allowed to be just a Shakespearean play done up with a contemporary imaginative twist.

     As for me, all right, I'll admit I'd like to see the Public Theater's production of "Julius Caesar" as well as the Obama-as-Caesar production, though I'll also admit that it's not because I've ever had a thing for "Julius Caesar" - in truth all I can recall about that play from when I studied it in college is thinking at the time of the reluctant assassin Brutus, man, that poor schmoe got used big time!
     No, I'd like to see the two productions just to be able to witness the brilliance of a play written over 400 years ago that can still be made relevant to almost any era and political climate, as Shakepeare himself must have understood about his work when he had one of the characters in "Julius Caesar" proclaim: "How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states  unborn and accents yet unknown?"
     So amazing that it's eerie, isn't it?

References
http://www.startribune.com/trump-themed-julius-caesar-is-talk-of-theater-world-unlike-2012-obama-version-in-twin-cities/427990033/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/theater/julius-caesar-shakespeare-donald-trump.html?_r=0

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