Judge Stephen C. Robinson said today that, contrary to a few media reports, he was not “angry” during last week’s hearing where he ordered former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik jailed for slipping confidential court docs to a New Jersey lawyer who used them to formulate an email sent to but never printed in the Washington Times.

I’m going to take the judge at his word and must admit having seen him, shall we say, more animated in his disappointment at other times (the defense’s opening argument in the James Curley trial jumps to mind.)

In addition, I guess it’s hard to accuse a judge of being irate when he off the top of his head recites, flawlessly, a Shakespearean sonnet in reference to a defendant. Robinson  reached for the Bard’s No. 29 in explaining that he thought Kerik saw himself as an unfairly castigated man. It goes a little something like this:

“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

One of Kerik’s lawyers, Michael Bachner, duly impressed, sheepishly admitted the only line of Shakespeare he knew by heart was from Hamlet. (“To thine own self be true.”)

Robinson, as quick a wit as you’ll find on any bench, replied, “What about, ‘First kill all the lawyers.’”