Falstaff in Toronto, Angelo in New York

I write this on a train speeding—well, strolling at velocity, this being Canada—from my beautiful, troubled home town of Montreal to the super-successful city of Toronto, Canada’s true capital, where, to everyone’s shock, the first full-scale, messy, Louisiana-style, twenty-first-century political scandal in Canada is taking place, to the wonder of the burghers of a town once thought immune to all scandals save those of the meaner, pocket-filling kind. The facts are that Rob Ford, the rotund, wayward mayor of Toronto, was seen by reporters, on a smartphone video, smoking what looked like crack with what appeared to be Somali drug dealers, inhaling deeply while making scurrilous remarks about, among others, the new Liberal Party leader, Justin Trudeau. Ford and his still stranger brother, Doug, a councilman, denied that the video existed, or, if it did, that it really showed what it seemed to show—though the idea that two reporters from the Toronto Star would deliberately lie about such a thing seems difficult to credit, and the notion that anyone could, even with post-modern Photoshop methods, fake such a thing seems even odder. (One imagines an evil FX guy inserting a Ray Harryhausen-like puppet-animation figure of the portly Mayor Ford into the video, shimmering and jerking and rustling as he struggles with the pipe.)

The essential background, not sufficiently understood in the States, is that Ford’s rise is a cautionary tale, a consequence of a misbegotten scheme to consolidate the entire Toronto metropolitan area into a single municipal voting unit, as though New York City were joined with smaller towns and suburban reaches from Nassau County to New Jersey. Naturally, the suburbanites in Toronto resent paying taxes for what at times can seem an oppressively virtuous, bike-path-and-green-sward, “I’ll tolerate that, too!” urbane Toronto core. Ford is, or was, their revenge. The best detail in the story, though one capable of being truly relished only by Canadians, is that the Somalis, who were peddling the video for money, wanted the money in order to leave Toronto and escape to Calgary. (Calgary is a place that not even an Albertan would confuse with Rio de Janeiro or the Bahamas or any other more customary site of post-caper getaways.)

I’m on this train because I’m on my way to the Stratford Festival, still the best thing of its kind in the world, to give a talk on Shakespeare and feasting—what I might call, if I were a proper academic, “The Falstaffian Fress: Moral Tastes and the Embodiment of Appetite in the Early Histories.” If anyone eats big in the Bard, it’s Falstaff, and what an honest observer has to accept is that the obese and unashamed Ford is, by any accurate, unsentimental standard, a “Falstaffian” figure: a man of appetite for intoxicating, or merely inflating, substances who prevaricates and luxuriates and bounces from scandal to scandal and roguelike imposture to roguelike imposture without, it seems, any sense of honor, or any stopper on his gullet. The weird thing about this is that though Shakespeare’s Prince Hal grows up to realize that Falstaff is dishonorable, unreliable, and dangerous to have anywhere near the throne, we are instructed endlessly—by Professor Harold Bloom in particular, but the rest of the choir chimes in—to side with Falstaff. Flawed human appetite, we’re told, is better than abstract principle. This is comforting and makes us feel good about ourselves, until we see what flawed human appetite really is like when it arrives in power.

New Yorkers, of course, have no reason to put on airs, at least on the mayoral front, in this regard. We have our own odd Shakespearean figure, with his own smaller scandal to recover from, in Anthony Weiner. Weiner is no Falstaff, God knows: more like Angelo, in “Measure for Measure,” he’s a sensual hypocrite—the thin, high-strung man who turns out to have a gluttonous fat man screaming inside him. To be fair to Weiner, he never tried to sell himself as an ascetic; still, something in his Schumeresque bearing implied a devotion to ideology over indulgence; his willingness to appear regularly on Fox News and brave the half-wits, all by himself, seemed at least rigorous, the act of a man of ambition more than of appetite. Yet his silly and sordid public error in tweeting an intimate photograph paid off in the kind of derision we give not just to sinners but to phonies.

It seems that, while in plays and in classrooms we are taught, and teach each other, to extend endless sympathy to sinners—to recognize the humanity of the flawed, struggling man of dishonor, and to doubt, indeed, that he is a sinner at all— in life such an extension of our empathy seems unnatural. We just pile on until we get bored. We forgive in the end—Bill Clinton speaks to us these days without a stain on his character, or anything else—but only after a long, public, drawn-out, medieval repentance. The kid in Shakespeare class who says of Falstaff, “They should punish the guy! He’s a fat old drunk—of course the Prince should stay away from him!” is assaulted by the other kids, or criticized as a prig, or put down as missing the point. But give us a Falstaff or an Angelo in life, and we can’t kick him quite enough.

Shakespeare, at least, understood all this, and though he didn’t hate his sinners, he didn’t idealize them, either. Despite strenuous modern efforts to make him morally radical, he isn’t. He always prefers pleasure to Puritanism, but also always prefers wisdom to pleasure. The staid stuff that he puts in the mouths of Polonius and Ulysses and all the other stuffy guys, about measure and temperance and degree and self-restraint and not following appetite to its surfeit—he really meant all that. And Shakespeare, actually, was right: Falstaff is fun, but never let him anywhere near power. Toronto’s learned that. And also: the Angelos of the world are fallible, and even a little disgusting—but not necessarily irredeemable. New Yorkers are learning that.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Adam Gopnik