Imagine Shakespeare’s treatment of the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein

The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein hangs over American public life and makes occasional forays across the pond, into Britain as well.

On November 12, Donald Trump’s troupe of Republicans in Congress dropped 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate into the public domain. That was hours after the Democrats had released three emails in which Epstein mentioned Mr Trump to other people, appearing to suggest the president may have known more about his habits and predilections than he has acknowledged. According to America’s National Public Radio, there are some 1,000 references to Mr Trump in those 23,000 pages.

In Britain, meanwhile, there’s a new story every other week about disgraced royal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor over his links to Epstein.

Six years and three months after Epstein died in his jail cell, his name is constantly evoked, his image appears in newspapers and websites and his papers and preoccupations are pored over.

Had the Bard been alive, he would’ve probably had something to say about the ghost of Epstein haunting US and UK public life. In fact, he may already have. Here are subtly revised bits from various plays. Some have been left untouched!

My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.

But not before one last round

Presidential houses, palaces

Fine places, I’ve found

—

For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger;
At whose approach, Epstein’s ghost, wandering here and there,
Troops home to his Manhattan lair

—

I have heard (but not believ’d) the spirits of the dead
May walk again: if such thing be, Epstein
Appeared to prince and president o’er and o’er; for ne’er was dream
So like a waking.

—

O, answer me, begged the man formerly known as prince

Or was it king of the republic?

Not wood, not stones, but men;

Tongues tell the anger of the heart

O, answer me:
Let me not burst in ignorance! but tell,
Why thy bones, hears’d in death,
Have burst their cerements! why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d.
Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again.

—

Why, what care I ? If thou canst nod, speak too, –
If charnel-houses, and our graves, must send
Those that we bury, back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.