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House of Bards

Shakespeare on the Hill

With his frequent asides that confess his diabolical intent, Frank is most clearly the son of Richard in both style and substance. But evil men have many parents. Underwood is also an Iago—the impetus for Frank’s vengeance comes from being passed over for secretary of state, just as Cassio’s success was too much for the trusted lieutenant to bear. He’s Macbeth, nakedly ambitious but without a legitimate claim, who abets his deception with the aid of an equally power-hungry spouse. He’s Brutus, repeatedly betraying his loyalties when the moment is ripe.

There’s also a strong resonance between Underwood and that most complex member of the Shakespearean pantheon of villains: the bastard Edmund in King Lear. Both are misbegotten, with Frank the son of a weak father in a backwater Southern town and Edmund disavowed of his estate by primogeniture.

“As to the legitimate: fine word—legitimate! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed, and my invention thrive, Edmund the base shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper: Now, gods, stand up for the bastard!” Edmund vows in the play’s second scene. It’s the best credo for Underwood for whom legitimacy is a mere afterthought to his indomitable will.

“What you’re asking is just shy of treason?” his protégé Jacqueline Sharp once asks when his web of lies begins to show its elegant threads.

“Just shy, which is politics,” he replies without a second’s hesitation.

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And so it goes.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.

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