AT the hearing into the News of the World phone hacking scandal in London this past Tuesday, the commissioner of Scotland Yard did something unusual for a policeman. He quoted Shakespeare. Explaining the swiftness of his resignation, he mangled a bit of Macbeth: “If ’twere best it were done, ’twere well it were done quickly.” The reference was perfectly fitting for a scandal whose defining adjective is coming to be “Shakespearean.”

Many have noted superficial similarities between the scandal and Shakespearean tragedy: overheard messages, hired thugs. There’s a hashtag sprawling through Twitter: #shakespeare4murdoch. (My favorite so far: “remorse, remorse, my kingdom for remorse.”)

Usually comparisons between events in the news and Shakespeare are strained, cropping up with each downfall of a prominent public figure. Eliot Spitzer slept with a hooker. He is not Marc Antony. Tony Hayward, formerly of BP, is not Julius Caesar. Neither is Dominique Strauss-Kahn an aging version of Prince Hal. But in the case of Rupert Murdoch, the comparison is, for once, accurate: the scandal is exactly like a Shakespearean tragedy, in specific and profound ways.

The great Shakespeare tragedies fuse crises in families and in states, connecting the most significant historical events with the most delicate psychological realities. In “King Lear,” a family squabble about a retiree can be rectified only by a full-scale invasion by France. In “Antony and Cleopatra,” the fate of the Roman Empire hinges on a man who likes his Egyptian mistress more than his family.