by Cory Franklin

December 17, 2023

The great Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw once said, “I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespeare … the imaginary scenes and people he has created become more real for us than our actual life.” Given this, I offer a suggestion for cryptocurrency trader Sam Bankman-Fried, recently convicted of fraud charges and facing decades in prison. Rather than make license plates, he should get the Oxford compilation of all Shakespeare’s plays and begin reading to help him to pass the time. It will be especially therapeutic for that expected long stay in jail.

Sam Bankman-Fried

Today, most young people in their mid-twenties who major in math and physics at MIT, like SBF did, are probably not avid Shakespeare readers.

So if one of them volunteers the opinion that Shakespeare’s characters were “one-dimensional,” his plots “illogical,” his endings “obvious,” and he was not likely our greatest writer, all of which SBF has said (and author Michael Lewis has recounted in his new SBF biography), no one would pay much attention or at most offer a cursory eye-roll at the ignorance.  But when you are one of the world’s richest men, as SBF was briefly, people will listen to foolish opinions like belittling Shakespeare. As King Lear said, “Robes and furred gowns hide all.”

The irony is that Shakespeare’s plays now have much to teach SBF, because they are full of characters undone by their own ambition and delusions as he was. SBF failed to appreciate that those characters he deemed one-dimensional teach us eternal truths, and those illogical plots and obvious endings make us aware of our fate – through the words Shakespeare wrote.

Consider that not long ago Forbes put SBF on its cover as one of its 400 richest Americans, Fortune magazine speculated he might be the next Warren Buffett, and in 2022 Time magazine called him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Heady stuff, especially for a young man. But King Lear, the once all-powerful king, also cautioned, “They told me I was everything. ’Tis a lie. I am not ague proof.” Like Lear, SBF was not ague proof – immune to disaster.

As he accumulated billions of dollars in what was basically a high-tech Ponzi scheme, he might have paid attention to Macbeth, who decides to kill his friend, the King Duncan, to assume the throne. Yet even as he does, Macbeth realizes, in the back of his mind, that his ambition might end in his ruin, ” I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’ other.” But he is unable to resist, and his ambition ultimately leads to his death.

Shakespeare told the story of Julius Caesar, another man who aimed to take over the world more than two millennia ago. The assassins who stabbed Caesar to death stand over his body, and their leader, Brutus, assesses Caesar’s fate, “Ambition’s debt is paid.”

In prison, SBF can decide whether Caesar truly was ambitious or whether Antony, in his famous rejoinder to Brutus, was correct in saying “ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”

Perhaps the character most like SBF was Timon of Athens in the eponymous play. While he was giving money to stadium-naming’s, charities and politicians, SBF cavorted with the likes of Bill Clinton, Larry David, Tom Brady and Katie Perry. Timon, a leading citizen of Athens, also gave his influential friends gifts and held large feasts, expecting nothing in return. Eventually, Timon saw his money run out, leaving him destitute and pondering what it all meant.

Ultimately, a cynical Timon abandons Athens because he no longer belongs to that world, but not before he gives a speech about how quickly he fell from grace, “Who had the world as my confectionary; the mouths, the tongues, the eyes and hearts of men. At duty, more than I could frame employment, that numberless upon me stuck as leaves Do on the oak, hive with one winter’s brush fell from their boughs and left me open, bare for every storm that blows.”

SBF may have thought the same thing as he walked out of the courtroom after his verdict was read.

As he inventories all his losses, SBF might realize that, like Othello’s lieutenant Cassio, his worst loss was his reputation. Manipulated by the clever villain Iago, Cassio behaved badly in public and lost Othello’s respect. “Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.”

Even after SBF leaves prison, he can never get that reputation back. So many characters, so much to teach: Hamlet, Othello, Henry V, Richard III, Portia, Lady Macbeth, Beatrice, Puck, Falstaff, Caliban – these are only a few and don’t include minor characters, so richly drawn. The panoply of human emotion is present in Shakespeare, and it takes a special kind of arrogance to dismiss his works so casually – the kind which probably contributed to SBF’s eventual downfall.

You could do nothing but study Shakespeare all day, every day, and still not absorb everything there is to learn from his writings.

As luck would have it, SBF might be one of those people with enough unencumbered time to do just that. However, there is one Shakespeare play that may not resonate with SBF and he may want to skip while in prison: All’s Well That Ends Well.

Tolle lege, (take up and read)

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He was director of medical intensive care at Cook County Hospital in Chicago for more than 25 years. An editorial board contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page, he writes freelance medical and non-medical articles. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, Guardian, Washington Post and has been excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Cory was also Harrison Ford’s technical adviser and one of the role models for the character Ford played in the 1993 movie, “The Fugitive.” His YouTube podcast “Rememberingthepassed” has received 900,000 hits to date. He published “Chicago Flashbulbs” in 2013, “Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” in 2015, and most recently coauthored,  A Guide to Writing College Admission Essays: Practical Advice for Students and Parents in 2021.

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