The decider

摘要

Patrick stewart, once of Star Trek, was a petrifying Macbeth, and Sir Ian McKellen a monumental King Lear. Ewan McGregor is a slimy Iago. There has been a lot of top-notch Shakespeare on the London stage recently-and quite a lot of him in political commentary. "Shakespearea0n"-usually combined with "tragedy"-is one of the adjectives sometimes applied to Gordon Brown's premiership, the office for which he waited so long, but which so quickly came to seem ill-starred. There is some competition from Cassius in "Julius Caesar" (who "thinks too much" and "seldom smiles"); but the flawed Shakespearean hero whom Mr Brown has most seemed to resemble is Hamlet, with his "craven scruple/ Of thinking too precisely on th'event". Chiefly but not only because of last autumn's non-election fiasco, Mr Brown has begun to appear perilously indecisive-and he knows it.