Shakespeare’s Tyrants and the Dictators of Our Times

Another book on Shakespeare? Will no one get rid of this turbulent playwright? Apparently not. For good reasons, I suppose. When the world’s most popular – and defamed – author comes up against his most brilliant interpreter (shall we say, in Joker parlance, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object?), the contest is truly amazing.

Stephen Greenblatt, Pulitzer winner and Harvard professor, returns to his oldest hunting ground in a highly readable account of the dramatist’s most enduring theme: power. But, and this is the catch, it is not (just) a Shakespeare book. It is a book about our times: its totalitarian regimes, its demagogues, its dictators and, horrifyingly, its democratically elected tyrants. The case Greenblatt makes for tyranny is emphatically not restricted to Henry VI, Richard III, Lear, Macbeth, Leontes – the ostensible subjects of his study, but can be applied to the people who occupy positions of power, institutional, state, corporate.

Greenblatt begins with Henry VI (Part II), where he shows how a perceived weakness at the centre of a state enables a less-than-able person to occupy the throne, and acquire the power that comes with it. Chaos is also engineered – there is always the bogeyman of ‘national security’ – so that what Greenblatt calls ‘fraudulent populism’ drives the successful bid for the throne. The leader-in-waiting has only contempt for the underclass: ‘he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and stupid’ but ‘they can be made to further his ambitions’. Appeals to various segments of the society with promises of their welfare if elected, but underwritten by contempt and issuance of threats, are instances Greenblatt’s analysis of Shakespeare directs us to, and from our own time.  There is a promise, in one case, Greenblatt says, to ‘make England great again’ and appeals made to the people on the basis of parochially inflected jingoism about ‘us’ and ‘them’.

It is the break down of basic values – respect for order, civility, and human decency – that enables a tyrant to capture power. But Greenblatt shows how political propaganda in terms that would have ‘provoked charges of treason’ and outrage at some point in the past – hate speech, exclusionary and discriminatory language, unverifiable accusations, implied threats from within, the attack on established national values enshrined in the constitution – become acceptable as a build up to the demagogue’s ascent.

In another case Greenblatt maps the psychological make up of tyrants: ‘barking orders’, ‘has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency’, and ‘the feelings of others mean nothing to him’. A tyrant divides the world into winners and losers alone. More worryingly, Greenblatt notes, ‘the public good is something only losers like to talk about’, and what a tyrant likes to talk about is only winning. In an age when the public good has been subsumed under the target of corporate good (and corporate greed), and anybody defending the former is a ‘loser’ (read: liberals!), we understand Richard III, the immediate subject of analysis. Such tyrants are supported and encouraged by ‘enablers’.

First, there are those who cannot accept and see the tyrant for what he is and what he will do to the nation: ‘they have a strange penchant for forgetting … just how awful he is… they are drawn irresistibly to normalise what is not normal’. Then there are those who feel ‘frightened and impotent in the face of bullying and the menace of violence’. Then there is a group that hopes to benefit from the rise of the tyrant. Finally, there is a crowd that simply carries out orders, ‘hoping to seize something along the way for themselves, still others enjoying the cruel game of making his targets … suffer and die’. Greenblatt makes it clear that all these are persistent ‘types’, and each one, in their own way is complicit with the tyrant. This is lived experience, transformed into theatre, emphasises Greenblatt.

But uneasy lies the head that wears the undeserving crown – the tyrant having reached his goal is solely obsessed with loyalty and suspects everybody around him, there is growing fear and frustration at not being able to keep the confidence of his ‘trusted’ people. He only seeks ‘flattery, confirmation, and obedience’. Naturally, there is no appeal to the general populace, who never count in his scheme of things: he only seeks to secure his position, further.

When signs and portents – or accusations, dissent, public opinion – appear, finally, the tyrant lashes out. He ensures the exit of anybody, from within his party/inner circle, or even his older mentors, through any means. In Shakespeare they are killed, of course, as is the case with the Stalins and the Pol Pots, but Greenblatt’s reading allows us to see how even in democracies the former more-moderate comrades and mentors are erased, marginalised, sent away. Those with a vestige of self-reflexivity – a rare thing in any tyrant – discover what they have brought upon themselves. Greenblatt cites Macbeth as an instance here, and his ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ soliloquy.

When the tyrant makes absurd promises or indulges in crazy rituals or unwarranted exercise of power, few recognise them as a deteriorating mind and personality, evidenced for Greenblatt in Lear’s actions that precipitate the crisis in the kingdom eventually. As Greenblatt argues, even in systems with ‘multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power’, but the question is: is he fit to employ it? ‘What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm?’ This is a question that resonates throughout history, as Greenblatt makes clear. Those who object are summarily dismissed, counter-opinions are discounted. Those who stay silent, are complicit and commit the wrong  with the tyrant (Gandhi is reported to have said, ‘I serve the empire by not partaking in its wrong’).

Greenblatt explores resistance, such as it is, from courtiers, insiders, and well-wishers of the realm, but acknowledges that it is hard to fight a tyrant. However, there are unlikely possibles: such as the very minor servant who says ‘hold your hand, my lord’ when Cornwall is about to gouge out Gloucestor’s eye in King Lear. Then there is a courtier’s wife, Paulina, who stands up to the tyrant-king, Leontes, in A Winter’s Tale. Greenblatt reads the former as an unforgettable moment when ‘someone in the ruler’s service feels compelled to stop what he is witnessing’. Although the common people, ‘easily manipulated by slogans, cowed by threats, or bribed by trivial gifts’ do not resist, ‘tyrannicides are drawn … from the same elite whose members generate the unjust rulers they oppose and eventually kill’. But even the small voice of dissent, Greenblatt seems to suggest, is a blow against the tyrant.

Greenblatt gives pride of place to two lines in A Winter’s Tale when Paulina, threatened with death by burning by the king, Leontes, retorts:

It is an heretic that makes the fire,

Not she which burns in’t.

Greenblatt calls this ‘some of the most magnificent words of defiance in all of Shakespeare’.

As early as 2016, soon after Donald Trump came to be elected, Greenblatt had formulated a question in a New York Times piece that went astronomically viral:

In the early 1590s, Shakespeare sat down to write a play that addressed a problem: How could a great country wind up being governed by a sociopath?

Also read: How Shakespeare Used Music to Tell Stories

This is the book in which he sets out the answers. Uniformly reviewed as a Trump book (or rather how Shakespeare explains Trump), Tyrant also offers us, around the globe (befittingly, for Shakespeare’s theatre, alarmingly prophetic, surely, was called The Globe) ways of seeing not just power but its duplicity. More worrying, Greenblatt shows, is the complicity from many sources that enables the tyrant to seize, reinforce and iterate the power endlessly. Look around, says Greenblatt and we see tyrants practise power (but not necessarily authority) over the people they claim to govern and guard. They expect loyalty, quash even a minor difference of opinion, are megalomaniacal as they are fed, like tweets, flattery, fake news, rumours and shallow promises by their inner circle, which alone stands to gain. In all of this, the public good – after all, as many respected government servants in India declare ‘I don’t care if public money goes waste’ – is not even in shouting distance.

Greenblatt makes Shakespeare speak to us, always a contemporary even to non-fans (I am one) for the relevance and the sheer topicality of his characterisation and plots. Pop cultural references might be not be too inappropriate as analogies to Greenblatt’s reading. Everybody kneels to Loki in The Avengers when he screams, ‘kneel’ at them. After hearing a couple of insults directed at the human race (kneeling to power, says Loki, is ‘the natural state’ of humans), one old man stands up. ‘Not to men like you’, says the old man. ‘There are no men like me’, retorts the supremely arrogant Loki. ‘There are always men like you’, the old man responds. Greenblatt calls attention to such craven obeisance and the minor figures of dissent in a world populated by tyrants, or incipient tyrants. The ones who start the fire are the heretics, not the ones who burn in them, Greenblatt asks us to remember this, for ourselves, in a world given to tyrants.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.