Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power, by Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power was first published in 2018, with an unstated but obvious impulse behind it, given what was happening at the top of the American power structure. Greenblatt could hardly have thought that three years later there was even more relevance in American political life, as we saw on January 6th 2021 (Twelfth Night, incidentally). And 2022 has opened with the Putin horror show in Ukraine, not to mention the sense of fragility in the world driven by a cost of living crisis, and, above all, climate change. These conditions are the perfect breeding grounds for more future tyranny.

Shakespeare was writing at a turbulent time, and Greenblatt says that he developed techniques for speaking in code, keeping ‘at least a full century between himself and the events he depicted.’ Shakespeare displaced central issues of his own political and cultural moment into plays set historically, or in different milieus:

As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare’s penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle.

In this book Greenblatt traces ideas of tyranny in a relatively straightforward way through King Henry VI, Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. Those familiar with these plays are less likely to gain as much as readers and audiences starting on their understanding. Greenblatt is particularly strong on Richard III as seen by Shakespeare (which is what matters here: the historical truth is not his focus):

As we have seen, Shakespeare reflected throughout his life on the ways communities disintegrate. Endowed with an uncannily acute perception of human character and with rhetorical skills that would be the envy of any demagogue, he deftly sketched the kind of person who surges up in troubled times to appeal to the basest instincts and to draw upon the deepest anxiety of his contemporaries.

The tyrant is destructive; once he reaches power, he (for it is always he in Shakespeare) finds that achievement and satisfaction turn to dust, as articulated by Macbeth in his ‘Tomorrow’ speech in Act Five. The tyrant’s determination to reach that position is essentially monstrous egotism, as he does not care about consequences, about the future: this is seen in the ‘overgrown child’s narcissism’ of Donald Trump, and in the catastrophic military decision of Vladimir Putin, the long-term results of which he will not have to address.

For the rest of us, the lesson is that we must never be complacent, never be optimistic in our comfortable assumptions, as Greenblatt shows in the story of Richard III, enabled by those ‘who trust that everything will continue in a normal way’:

They persuade themselves that there will always be enough adults in the room, as it were, to ensure that promises will be kept, alliances honored, and core institutions respected. Richard is so obviously and grotesquely unqualified for the supreme position of power that they dismiss him from their minds. Their focus is always on someone else, until it is too late. They fail to realize quickly enough that what seemed impossible is actually happening. They have relied on a structure that proves unexpectedly fragile.

At our best, there may even be a few individual heroes, like the unnamed servant who attacks and kills Cornwall in King Lear, sacrificing his own life in the cause of integrity after the blinding of Gloucester. But history has shown us that darkness is more likely to prevail, and this book, 4 years after its publication, is become steadily and dismayingly more relevant.