WASHINGTON — For actors, it’s the most poignant, dreaded line ever written.
“It’s the Mona Lisa of literature,” said Simon Godwin, the director of the Shakespeare Theater Company here. “It’s something that we’re so familiar with, it’s hard to contextualize it and bring it back to life.”
So it was astonishing when an actor not known for his classical performances spoke the opening of Hamlet’s monologue with more dramatic weight than Gielgud, Burton, Olivier or Cumberbatch.
“The question for us now is to be or not to be,” Volodymyr Zelensky told the British Parliament in a video call in Ukrainian on Tuesday. “This is the Shakespeare issue. This question could have been asked for 13 days. But now I can give you a definitive answer. It is certainly yes, to be.”
As Godwin noted of the TV sitcom actor who became Ukraine’s war president, “He has in a way become the world’s greatest actor dealing with the world’s deepest truth, using a piece of poetry to express this truth in a powerful context.” to push.”
Shakespeare, knowing that character is revealed when much is at stake, would have approved. Zelensky has taken up arms against ‘a sea of problems’.
As Drew Lichtenberg, resident dramatist with the Shakespeare Theater Company, points out, Hamlet’s turmoil over suicide and dying resonates in the part of the world that now bears the slings and arrows of a demented dictator.
“There is a long tradition in Central European countries, such as Poland or Ukraine, of embracing Shakespeare and especially Hamlet as a kind of metaphor for the wider political situation,” he said. “Poland and Ukraine have both had periods when they did not exist, when their language was erased and replaced by German or Russian as the official language and culture of the state. They know what it is to ‘not be’.”
What made the Ukrainian president’s speech so powerful was that the world is getting caught up in the existential questions raised by the moody prince of Denmark.
Will Zelensky live or die if the Russian forces go down? Will Ukraine Exist as a Sovereign Nation? What does this crisis mean for the identity of America and the West – who will we be when this is over? Will the planet even survive?
Zelensky and the Ukrainians chose to stand for something, and be. They are united as a democracy in a way that America hasn’t been in a long time, as we have become more and more torn apart by politics, with burning questions of reality and artifice; with the destructive bias of masks and Covid; and with the caustic effect of our culture of greed, selfishness and billionaires.
Ukraine shows a collective will, an inspiring community of people working together. Their heroic efforts against a cunning tyrant playing on the empire are reminiscent of America’s own beginnings. They also showed military experts that in a conventional war, the US would smoke Russia. The military is alarmingly slow and staggering, even as it has set people on fire around the world killing children and fleeing civilians.
President Biden and his generals face their own existential moment as they try to figure out the incredibly tricky problem of where to draw the line. Are Javelins OK and MiGs Too Far? How can we do everything we can to help Ukraine without inciting a sadistic and unhinged Vladimir Putin to start World War III and a nuclear conflagration?
Despite the threat, we must assist Ukraine in what its ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, calls “the 1939 moment” of good versus evil.
As Illia Ponomarenko, a reporter for The Kyiv Independent, tweeted Friday (vulgarity cut out): “I wonder how many Ukrainian cities Russia will have to bomb until the West realizes that every time it refuses to give Ukraine a weapon out of ‘fear of provoking Putin’ is an invitation to further escalation into war.”
I spoke to George Pataki, the former governor of New York who helps refugees in Ukraine near Hungary.
“When we ask Ukrainians what they want most, we always get: ‘Close the sky,’ because families, houses and cities are being destroyed from above by the Russian army,” he said. “And it’s very disappointing not to be able to answer that question. I understand that we are not going to create a no-fly zone, but we need to provide material support to the Ukrainians so that they can create their own no-fly zone.”
Echoing our military leaders, Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia, told Stephen Colbert on Thursday evening that a “no-fly zone is a euphemism for a declaration of war. That means an American pilot shoots down a Russian pilot, and that is a declaration of war.” Give Ukraine all but that in terms of military weapons and sanctions, he said.
The toned down debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan have tired many Americans out of the conflict. But this is not the time to withdraw into ourselves.
It’s a horrendous position Biden finds himself in, facing an irrational, soulless enemy with more than 4,000 nuclear weapons who thinks he can glue the Soviet empire back together with the blood of innocents.
As Hamlet said, the oppressor is wrong.