If Rupert Murdoch had paid attention to the works of Shakespeare, he would have known that this hacking farrago would end badly
So is News Corp "fit and proper" to own all of BSkyB? Abso-bloody-lutely! Just as Fox News is "fair and balanced". To paraphrase George Orwell, language can mean whatever the fig you like if you, like Snap!, have got the power. Orwell was a big Snap! fan, you know. You should have seen that man move to Rhythm is a Dancer.
Misinterpretations of language are the only explanation for a certain claim about Rupert Murdoch, who has been in the news rather a lot of late, proposed by Sky News on Saturday morning.
"He's certainly not a sentimental man," mused the presenter, reflecting on the then upcoming closure of Jarvis Cocker's toilet paper, the News of the World. But in fact, it's hard to think of anything more sentimental than a man sacrificing, if not his empire (yet), then at least a lucrative principality to save a damsel in distress, Ms Rebekah Brooks.
But could Murdoch have saved himself all this time-consuming unpleasantness? OK, maybe there were indications along the way that things were going awry: at the time of writing, the latest punch in News International's solar plexus was Gordon Brown's gripping BBC interview about his and his wife's reaction to the revelation that their son's cystic fibrosis was seen by News International as similarly fair game as, say, a footballer's fondness for prostitutes; doubtless by the time I get to the last sentence of this piece there will be tales of bugs discovered in Mother Teresa's coffin, which appear to be linked to a room in Wapping.
But sometimes, one can miss the obvious. This is why we have literature. Literature, according to one of the many beleaguered souls who attempted to instruct me in the subject during my academic years, isn't just about churning out GCSE essays with titles such as "Discuss Steinbeck's treatment of loneliness in Of Mice and Men", but about understanding human behaviour through the filter of fiction.
Which brings us to Shakespeare, whose collected works might almost have as good a claim as the NoW to that paper's former catchphrase, all human life is there. Murdoch's Australian nationality gets trotted out occasionally, even by Murdoch himself, as a psychobabble explanation for his ambition and what-have-you. Something about always feeling like an outsider blah blah blah, wanting to break the establishment blah blah blah, his lifelong search for Bouncer the dog blah blah. You can fill in the blanks yourselves. But maybe his Australian-ness is the reason for his wilful disregard of the Bard whose work could have showed him long ago that this whole farrago would end badly.
Let's start with the obvious ? the hacking. Granted, there aren't too many mobile phones in Shakespeare's plays, but there are a lot of the Elizabethan equivalent thereof: letters. One hundred and eleven letters, to be precise, according to Shakespeare's Letters by Alan Stewart. Many of these letters are intercepted by others, which is Shakespearean for "hacked". While some might protest that this is yet another example of an overused and clunky theatrical device commonly found in Shakespeare's work, I say it is an example of Shakespeare warning Rupert of what was to come. Pretty much uniformly, the interception/ hacking of letters or, their close relation, overhearing of conversations leads to, at the very least, trouble, and is regarded as a villainous pursuit. One sees this in Henry VIII when the interception of Cardinal Wolsey's letters leads to his beheading, or in Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which the interception of Valentine's letter to Silvia results in the former's banishment.
Similarly, people pretending to be others, while an occasionally comic device, is generally a sign of tumult and trouble if not downright corruption, which again might have alerted someone at News International to the risks (other than legal) of blagging folks' medical and financial details. Measure for Measure is full of substitutions (bed tricks, head swaps), all of which are indicative of the rotten heart of the play's setting, Vienna. In this play, Shakespeare warns against the folly of leaving others seemingly in charge of one's empire when one is secretly still in control (through the characters of the Duke of Vienna and Angelo), particularly if those false substitutes are fond of affecting outrage about the moral failings of others when they themselves are the most corrupt of all.
Some could argue that Murdoch is the inverse of the typical ambitious Shakespearean character, as he, unlike, say, Macbeth or Brutus (Julius Caesar), sacrificed a commodity to save a beloved colleague, in the form of Rebekah Brooks, instead of the reverse, though Murdoch does undoubtedly have "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself" and may well be learning that "ambition is a good servant, but a poor master" (both Macbeth). But in fact, he personifies the classic Shakespearean weakness: blind love. Shakespeare coined this now cliched line and it appears repeatedly in his plays. And while love is generally the happy ending of a Shakespearean play, blind love comes freighted with perils.
Let us turn away from the plays and look towards the sonnets, or one sonnet in particular, number 137, AKA, as chance would have it, Thou Blind Fool, which explicitly warns against eyes that "behold and see not what they see /. . . / seeing this say this is not / To put fair truth upon so foul a face", concluding "In things right true my heart and eyes have erred/And to this false plague are they now transferred."
In other words, Rupert, Shakespeare is telling you to sack Ms Brooks. You might be able to bend the law, dear sir, but you can't argue with Eng Lit.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/12/murdoch-could-learn-from-shakespeare
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