Benedict Arnold, Brutus, and Iago?

Et tu, Brute? (Image: Jonathan Ernst, Reuters)

In a startling interview with CNN on July 28th, Rudy Giuliani compared Michael Cohen to three figures Giuliani identifies as “traitors”:  Benedict Arnold, Brutus, and Iago.

These were surely the first examples that came to Giuliani’s mind — common-knowledge figures, presumably, but an odd trio nonetheless. All have some connection to the military; two are real, one a canonical traitor; two are Shakespearean characters, one a conspirator and assassin, one a psychopath.

Every school child is taught about Arnold’s plan in 1780 to switch sides and turn West Point over to the British. The plan failed. Having turned coat, Arnold fought for the British, eventually moved to Canada and then London, and subsequently outlived  George Washington, the man who, Mr. Giuliani points out, “didn’t know Arnold was a traitor.”

Iago — Othello’s “honest Iago” — and Caesar’s Brutus are another matter.

At the moment, London’s Globe theater is offering Othello, with a mesmerizing performance by Mark Rylance as the play’s villain. In the opening scene, we watch an actor in full command of his art playing a monster in full command of his art, moving rapidly about the Globe’s thrust stage, like a poisonous spider weaving a web to catch his prey.

But would you describe Iago as a traitor?

Shakespeare has much to say about traitors, though his plays have at least as much to say about villainy and betrayal, thus giving us three negative categories that aren’t always neatly distinct.

The history plays are full of traitors. In fact, Shakespeare’s versions of history seem to be about the struggles of kings and traitors, as if the political past were exactly that dance. The tragedies are stuffed with betrayals and murders, the comedies with amatory injury, and in both the word traitor appears, though usually in a metaphorical sense.

In Julius Caesar, the title character is an overreacher, a war hero who is drawn dangerously to a crown, much to the horror of Rome’s republicans, who bond together in hopes of saving the state from tyranny.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which unsurprisingly dates the term traitor back to the 13th century, offers as its first definition “One who betrays any persons that trusts him, or any duty entrusted to him; a betrayer. In early use often, and still traditionally, applied to Judas Iscariot.” Then, secondarily, “one who is false to his allegiance to his sovereign or to the government of his country.”

The Merriam-Webster edition “for English-language learners” leaps over the Scriptural reference: “a person who is not loyal to his or her own country, friends, etc.: a person who betrays a country or group of people by helping or supporting an enemy.”

In his funeral speech over Caesar’s body, Antony tells the crowd that Caesar loved Brutus dearly, and that of the wounds (we’re told there were 33), Brutus’s was “the most unkindest cut of all.”

And yet, Antony declares, it was “ingratitude, more than strong traitors’ arms,” that “quite vanquish’d” Caesar.

The anger over Michael Cohen’s putative turn is surely over ingratitude (one hardly imagines he did not profit mightily from a career as political fixologist).

It’s also difficult not to hear “Et tu, Brute?” as the message to Michael Cohen, whose testimony may undo some buttons.

Indeed, Mr. Giuliani might have turned to King Lear who, wracked by the behavior of his daughters, exclaims against “Ingratitude, thou marble-headed fiend.”

Or digging deeper into the canon, he might have found his way to Timon of Athens, a play about an indulgent, wealthy man and the difficulty he has with people who don’t appreciate all he’s done for them. In Timon, a servant, says

I know my lord hath spent of Timon’s wealth, And now ingratitude makes it worse than stealth.

Friend, fiend; stealth, wealth. Whatever the revelations to come, and whatever the consequences, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Cohen might want to recall Cordelia’s consolatory couplet:

Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides, Who covers faults, at last shame them derides.

Though that, of course, assumes the concept of shame is still operational.

Oh, and, we’d have to overlook the fact that Cordelia gets done in at the end.