Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
A book review
Leave it to William Shakespeare, the playwright who died more than 400 years ago, to help us make sense of our tumultuous times and the politicians who stride the world’s stage.
Stephen Greenblatt, the Harvard professor and Shakespearean scholar who gave us the excellent The Swerve, applies his own deft touch in bridging the gap between some of the ruthless leaders the Bard wrote about and at least one world leader who shares many of their unfortunate traits.
In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Greenblatt never references today’s political scene. At least not until the “Acknowledgements” section at the end in which he writes how powerless he felt about “the possible outcome of an upcoming election” while in Sardinia “not so very long ago.” An historian-friend suggested he write a book — and so he did.
Greenblatt, who authored the engrossing and entertaining Shakespeare biography Will in the World, boils a satisfying stew of the ingredients in Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, Leontes and Caesar. Consider this passage from the chapter “Fraudulent Populism,” which is about Richard III but could easily apply to a certain America First firebrand:
“Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable. But he sees that they can be made to further his ambitions.”
Or how about this gem, about Macbeth and his evil partner, Lady Macbeth:
“Here, as throughout Shakespeare, the tyrant’s course of behaviour is fuelled by a pathological narcissism. The lives of others do not matter; what matters is only that he should somehow feel ‘whole’ and ‘founded.’ Let the universe fall apart, he has told his wife, let heaven and earth suffer destruction,
‘Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the afflictions of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly.’
It’s all there in Greenblatt’s Tyrant: the narcissism, the complicity of the populace in the elevation to power of tyrants, the ineptitude of those tyrants while in power, their cruelty, jealousy, paranoia, lies, infantalism, the partisan rancour.
No surprise, then, that the book earned the praise of the late, great Philip Roth whose quote adorns the dust jacket: “Stephen Greenblatt manages to elucidate obliquely our own desperate [in Shakespeare’s words] ‘general woe’,” the American novelist wrote.
The actor John Lithgow was more to the point about the “literary feat” that the author pulls off:
“Shakespeare craftily commented on his own times by telling tales of tyrants from centuries before. In an act of scholarly daring, Greenblatt then proceeds to do exactly the same thing. Rarely have their blood-soaked creatures seemed so recognizably human and so contemporary.”
Tyrant is not an explicit commentary about politics today. Greenblatt is writing about Shakespearean characters and plays and it is only because of the universality of the Bard’s art – how his genius transcends time and space – that we recognize tragic traits and faults in today’s leaders.
The author concludes Tyrant by acknowledging how Shakespeare knew it can be easy to become cynical about despotic leaders “and to despair about the all-too-human men and women who place their trust in them. The leaders are often compromised and corruptible; the crowd is often foolish, ungrateful, easily misled by demagogues, and slow to understand where its real interests lie,” he writes. “There are periods, sometimes extended periods, during which the cruellest motives of the basest people seem to be triumphant.”
If there’s any hope, it comes in his next passage and the question posed in Coriolanus:
“But Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of the people who steadfastly remained silent when they were exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant, or the servant who tried to stop his vicious master from torturing a prisoner, or the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. ‘What is the city but the people?’”
Claudio D’Andrea has been a journalist for more than 30 years, writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
