Quote of the Day (Christopher Marlowe, on Rulers Shorn of Power)

“But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?”—Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Edward the Second

(The life of Marlowe—poet, dramatist, religious skeptic, spy, sexual outlaw—was arguably more dramatic than his own plays, which, at their best, were the zenith of Elizabethan theater—and it was certainly more dramatic than the quiet, bourgeois life of his contemporary, William Shakespeare. The quote above, from what might be his greatest play, nicely illustrates his genius at taking a prosaic fact—the loss of the force behind a ruler’s power—and render it into a vivid image. It also perfectly captures the loneliness of a politician/statesman now shorn of the attention that made him a force to be reckoned with.

Nearly a decade ago, a work colleague told me, they had seen Newt Gingrich, who had recently resigned as Speaker of the House, walk into a Manhattan publishing house, alone. Virtually nobody took any notice of him. It must have been agony for that most egocentric of politicians. My guess is that much of the same feeling is now shared, to one extent or another, by Rudy Blagojevich, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, and George W. Bush, among many others. Even the book deals and multimillion-dollar lobbying salaries when out of office are small compensation for the heady rush of power.)