Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

by Stephen Greenblatt

Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?

Shakespeare repeatedly depicted the tragic cost of this submission—the moral corruption, the massive waste of treasure, the loss of life—and the desperate, painful, heroic measures required to return a damaged nation to some modicum of health. Is there, the plays ask, any way to stop the slide toward lawless and arbitrary rule before it is too late, any effective means to prevent the civil catastrophe that tyranny invariably provokes?

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. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge truth—to possess it fully and not perish of it—through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance.

Shakespeare understood, as well, something that in our own time is revealed when a major event—the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the housing market, a startling election result—manages to throw a garish light on an unnerving fact: even those at the center of the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen.

For Shakespeare, then, it was easier to think clearly when the noise of those babbling tongues was silenced and easier to tell the truth at a strategic distance from the present moment. The oblique angle allowed him to lift off the false assumptions, the time-honored beliefs, and the misguided dreams of piety and to look unwaveringly at what lay beneath.

At the time he was writing, Elizabeth I had been queen for more than thirty years. Though she could on occasion be prickly, difficult, and imperious, her fundamental respect for the sanctity of the realm’s political institutions was not generally in doubt. Even those who advocated a more aggressive foreign policy or clamored for a harsher crackdown on domestic subversion than she was willing to authorize ordinarily acknowledged her prudent sense of the limits to her power. Shakespeare is very unlikely to have regarded her, even in his most private thoughts, as a tyrant.

For those with any imagination, there was more to worry about than the stealthy assault of time. It was widely feared that the kingdom faced an implacable enemy, a ruthless international conspiracy whose leaders trained and then dispatched abroad fanatical secret agents bent on unleashing terror. These agents believed that killing people labeled as misbelievers was no sin; on the contrary, they were doing God’s work. In France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere they had already been responsible for assassinations, mob violence, and wholesale massacres. Their immediate goal in England was to kill the queen, crown in her place one of their sympathizers, and subjugate the country to their own twisted vision of piety. Their overarching goal was world domination.

The menace in question, according to the zealous Protestants of late-sixteenth-century England, was Roman Catholicism. To the intense vexation of the queen’s principal advisers, Elizabeth herself was reluctant to call the threat by its name and to take what they regarded as the necessary measures. She did not wish to provoke an expensive and bloody war with powerful Catholic states or to tar an entire religion with the crimes of a few fanatics.

It is impossible to determine with any certainty where Shakespeare’s innermost sympathies lay. But he cannot have been neutral or indifferent. Both of his parents had been born into a Catholic world, and for them, as for most of their contemporaries, the links to that world survived the Reformation. There was every reason for wariness and circumspection, and not merely because of the harsh punishments meted out by the Protestant authorities. The menace in England attributed to militant Catholicism was by no means entirely imaginary.

Though most English Catholics wanted nothing to do with such violent measures, a few took it in their heads to try to rid the country of its heretical ruler. In 1583, the government’s spy network discovered a conspiracy, with the collusion of the Spanish ambassador, to assassinate the queen. All through the years that followed there were comparable stories of dangers narrowly averted: letters intercepted, weapons seized, Catholic priests captured.

Late Elizabethan England knew in its heart that the whole order of things was utterly fragile. The anxiety was by no means restricted only to a small Protestant elite eager to preserve its dominance. Beleaguered Catholics had argued for years that the queen was surrounded by Machiavellian politicians, each of whom was constantly maneuvering to advance the interests of his faction, stirring up paranoid fears of Catholic conspiracies, and waiting for the critical moment when he could seize tyrannical power for himself. Disgruntled Puritans had a comparable set of fears focused on a similar cast of characters.

Most of the talk, to be sure, had to be in whispers, but it went on all the time in the obsessive, round-and-round-the-same-track way that political discussions always go. Shakespeare repeatedly depicts minor characters—the gardeners in Richard II, nameless Londoners in Richard III, soldiers on the eve of battle in Henry V, starving plebeians in Coriolanus, cynical subalterns in Antony and Cleopatra, and the like—sharing rumors and debating matters of state. Such reflections by the lowly upon their betters tended to enrage the elite: “Go, get you home, you fragments” (Coriolanus 1.1.214), an aristocrat snarls at a group of protesters. But the fragments could not be silenced.

Censorship inevitably generates techniques of evasion. Like Midas’s wife, people feel compelled to talk, if only to the wind and the reeds, about whatever is most deeply disturbing to them. Theater companies, competing fiercely with one another, had a strong economic incentive for addressing this compulsion. They discovered that it was possible to do so by shifting the scene to far-off places or by depicting events in the distant past. On rare occasions, the censor found the parallels too obvious or demanded proof that historical events were being correctly rendered, but for the most part he winked at the subterfuge. Perhaps the authorities recognized that some escape valve was necessary.

In Richard II it is not only the king’s counselors who are killed by the usurper; it is the king himself. The usurper Bolingbroke never declares directly that he intends to topple the reigning monarch, let alone murder him. Like Essex, while he rails against the corruption of the ruler’s inner circle, he dwells principally upon the injustice done to him personally. But having contrived Richard’s abdication and imprisonment, and having had himself crowned as King Henry IV, he moves with cunning vagueness—the vagueness that confers what politicians call “deniability”—to take the essential last step. Fittingly, Shakespeare does not represent this move directly. Instead, he simply shows someone pondering what he has heard the king say:

By statutes dating back to 1352, it was treasonable “to compass or imagine” the death of the king or queen or of the principal public officials.16 The use of the ambiguous term “imagine” left the government wide latitude to decide whom to prosecute, and it would certainly appear that the performance of Richard II at the Globe was treading on very dangerous ground. After all, Shakespeare’s play staged for a mass audience the spectacle of the toppling and murder of a crowned king, together with the summary execution of the king’s principal advisers. Yet the events depicted occurred in England’s past, and by a tacit agreement, such distance in time provided a certain immunity, so that actions that in a contemporary setting would instantly arouse the censor’s furious wrath and that might lead to criminal prosecution could be represented without great risk to the playwright and his company.

Shakespeare’s direct allusion in Henry V to the Earl of Essex drew attention to searching political reflections throughout his plays that were safer left in the shadows. The queen, who had frequently commanded court performances, chose not to punish the players, as she could easily have done, and what might have been a disaster for Shakespeare and his entire company was narrowly averted.

The power vacuum at the center gives the rivals space to maneuver and to plot against one another. But there are consequences to such partisan feuding: nothing gets done for the common good and, as we soon see, the factions are hardening into mortal enemies.

play provides no details about the legal issue over which they are quarreling; perhaps Shakespeare thought that it was finally not very important. What mattered was their unwillingness to compromise, the belligerent certainty felt by each that his position, and his alone, was the only possible one.

But instead it invites us, in effect, to watch the invention of political parties and the transformation of aristocratic rivals into political enemies. Shakespeare does not envisage these exactly in our terms: there was nothing in the parliamentary system of his time that corresponded to the partisan organizational structures that subsequently developed in England and elsewhere. What he shows is nonetheless oddly familiar. The roses serve as party badges; they designate two opposed sides. With a weird immediacy, the legal argument (whatever it was) gives way to blind adherence to the white or the red.

It is possible to imagine that political parties, by virtue of being large conglomerations of diverse people, could deflect the hostility of their leaders and encourage compromise. But here the opposite happens: as soon as the distinct party affiliations emerge, everyone’s anger level suddenly seems to shoot up.

His high-minded contempt for their squabbles is perfectly understandable, but it only makes matters worse.

But such detachment only creates scope for intensified competition. It would have been better had he expressed a preference or had he possessed a clearer understanding of the danger brewing just beneath the surface of the institutions over which he presides.

Though they are cynical and ruthless, they cannot openly admit, even in their vicious little circle, that it is to further their own private ends that they are aiming to eliminate the Lord Protector. Instead, they profess to be concerned for the good of the state and the welfare of the naïvely trusting king.

Since they are not in public, why don’t they simply say what they mean?

There are several possible answers. First, they are all politicians and, therefore, congenitally dishonest; the word “politician,” for Shakespeare, was virtually synonymous with hypocrite. (“Get thee glass eyes,” rages Lear. “And, like a scurvy politician,/Seem to see the things thou dost not” [King Lear 4.6.164–66]). Second, they distrust one another and do not know what may be reported outside the room in which they are speaking. Third, each harbors a secret hope that their lie and theirs alone will deceive the others. Fourth, pretending that they are virtuous, even when they know that they are not, makes them feel better about themselves. And fifth, they are all warily watching to see if anyone among them expresses even a slight reservation about the conspiracy, anything that would lead it to unravel. They want everyone to be on board.

A descendent of King Edward III, York is at the very top of the status hierarchy and prides himself on his royal blood. But it is precisely this rank-obsessed man—he rehearses his pedigree in numbing detail—who, to advance his cause, introduces a new element into the political struggle between the red rose and the white.

Up to this point, midway through the Henry VI trilogy, there have been very few glimpses of those at the bottom. Politics has been almost entirely the affair of the elites, who maneuver against one another, while the anonymous masses of messengers, servants, soldiers, guards, artisans, and peasants remain in the shadows. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, the cast of characters changes: York sees an opportunity to forge an alliance with the miserable, overlooked, and ignorant lower classes, and he seizes upon it. And we learn that the hitherto invisible and silent poor are seething with anger. Party warfare cynically makes use of class warfare. The goal is to create chaos, which will set the stage for the tyrant’s seizure of power.

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.

Drawing on an indifference to the truth, shamelessness, and hyperinflated self-confidence, the loudmouthed demagogue is entering a fantasyland—“When I am king, as king I will be”—and he invites his listeners to enter the same magical space with him. In that space, two and two do not have to equal four, and the most recent assertion need not remember the contradictory assertion that was made a few seconds earlier.

In ordinary times, when a public figure is caught in a lie or simply reveals blatant ignorance of the truth, his standing is diminished. But these are not ordinary times.

Shakespeare knew that the line would get laughs, as it has done for the last four centuries. It releases the current of aggression that swirls around the whole enterprise of the law—directed not merely at venal attorneys but at all the agents of the vast social apparatus that compels the honoring of contracts, the payment of debts, the fulfillment of obligations. We blithely imagine that the crowd wants such responsible qualities in its leaders, but the scene suggests otherwise. What it wants instead is permission to ignore commitments, to violate promises, and to break the rules.

That in this destruction the common people would lose even the very limited power they possess—the power expressed when they voted in parliamentary elections—does not matter. For Cade’s ardent supporters, the time-honored institutional system of representation is worthless. It has, they feel, never represented them. Their inchoate wish is to tear up all the agreements, cancel all the debts, and wreck all the existing institutions. Better to have the law come from the mouth of the dictator, who may claim to be a Plantagenet but whom they recognize as one of their own. The masses are perfectly aware that he is a liar, but—venal, cruel, and self-serving though he is—he succeeds in articulating their dream: “Henceforward all things shall be in common” (4.7.16).

We are meant to find this ridiculous, of course; the scene is quite rightly played for laughs. But Shakespeare grasped something critically important: although the absurdity of the demagogue’s rhetoric was blatantly obvious, the laughter it elicited did not for a minute diminish its menace. Cade and his followers will not slink away because the traditional political elite and the entirety of the educated populace regard him as a jackass.

The play has already amply shown that the rich and well-born can get away with murder. Moreover, Shakespeare’s audience was well aware that the courts in their own time allowed something called “benefit of clergy,” a legal device whereby those condemned to be executed for murder or theft could, if they demonstrated that they were literate, be remanded to jurisdictions which had no death penalty. Cade’s accusation that those who could not read were hanged is perfectly accurate—and it gets at a whole legal system heavily weighted to favor the educated elite.

Shakespeare carries over into his depiction of Cade’s uprising the fear and loathing aroused among the propertied classes by lower-class insurgency. The peasant rebels are fueled by something like the murderous vision of Cambodia’s Pol Pot: their goal is to destroy not merely the high-ranking nobles but the entire educated population of the country.

The horrors of this war epitomize the breakdown of basic values—respect for order, civility, and human decency—which paves the way for the tyrant’s rise. The seeds of the breakdown had already been glimpsed in the argument between York and Somerset, where a disagreement over an obscure point of law had quickly escalated into a barrage of insults. The anger was intensified by the rise of party politics and then, through York’s subterfuge, had led to the murder of Duke Humphrey and Jack Cade’s rebellion. But civil war lifts the veil of subterfuge: the principal political figures no longer hide their highest ambitions or leave the enactment of their sadistic impulses to their subordinates. The byzantine complexity of the plot from this point forward has made the final play of Shakespeare’s trilogy notoriously difficult to stage, but several things are particularly notable. First, rising chaos makes the outcome of the struggle for power completely unpredictable.

Second, the dream of absolute rule is not the goal of a single person alone; in the political conception of the age, it is a dynastic ambition, a family affair. In an age in which power routinely passed from father to the eldest son (or, in the absence of sons, to the eldest daughter), it made perfect sense for tyrants to model themselves after the monarchs they sought to displace and to attempt to secure power for their heirs.

Even in democratic systems where succession is determined by vote, we have by no means left dynastic ambition behind; it seems, if anything, to be intensifying in contemporary politics.

Third, the political party determined to seize power at any cost makes secret contact with the country’s traditional enemy. England’s enmity with the nation across the Channel—constantly fanned by all the overheated patriotic talk of recovering its territories there, and fueled by all the treasure and blood spilled in the attempt to do so—suddenly vanishes.

Fourth, the legitimate, moderate leader cannot count on popular gratitude or support. In the chaotic free-for-all into which the realm has fallen, this apparent betrayal of principle does not produce any great outrage. What might at another time have provoked charges of treason is simply accepted as the way things are. And if there are no longer the expected punishments for treachery, so, too, there are no longer the anticipated rewards for virtue.

And fifth, the apparent restoration of order, in the wake of national turmoil, may be an illusion. Eager to “spend the time/With stately triumphs, mirthful comic shows” (5.7.42–43), Edward is a more moderate figure than York, his father, far less consumed with fantasies of absolute power. To return the country to a semblance of normal, legitimate rule, he hopes to bring about a collective forgetting of the nightmare from which everyone has barely awakened. In this spirit of amnesia, he characterizes the bloodshed that his party has caused a “sour annoy.” And he cheerfully declares that the threats have all vanished: “Thus have we swept suspicion from our seat/And made our footstool of security” (5.7.13–14).

SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD III brilliantly develops the personality features of the aspiring tyrant already sketched in the Henry VI trilogy: the limitless self-regard, the lawbreaking, the pleasure in inflicting pain, the compulsive desire to dominate. He is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant. He has a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses. He loves to bark orders and to watch underlings scurry to carry them out. He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude. The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.

He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers. The winners arouse his regard insofar as he can use them for his own ends; the losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.

But though he enjoys having what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination. He is a bully. Easily enraged, he strikes out at anyone who stands in his way. He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble, or wince with pain. He is gifted at detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult. These skills attract followers who are drawn to the same cruel delight, even if they cannot have it to his unmatched degree. Though they know that he is dangerous, the followers help him advance to his goal, which is the possession of supreme power.

Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. He knows that those he grabs hate him. For that matter, once he has succeeded in seizing the control that so attracts him, in politics as in sex, he knows that virtually everyone hates him. At first that knowledge energizes him, making him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies. But it soon begins to eat away at him and exhaust him.

Sooner or later, he is brought down. He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage. It would have been better had Richard III never been born.

Shakespeare does not repudiate his culture’s belief that bodily deformity signified moral deformity; he allows his audience to credit the notion that a higher power, whether nature or God, has provided a visible sign of the villain’s wickedness. Richard’s physical deformity is a kind of preternatural portent or emblem of his viciousness. But, against the dominant current of his culture, Shakespeare insists that the inverse is also true: Richard’s deformity—or, rather, his society’s reaction to his deformity—is the root condition of his psychopathology. There is nothing automatic in this conditioning; certainly, no suggestion that all people with twisted spines become cunning murderers.

He knows that people make cruel jokes about him when he is not in earshot, calling him the “toad” and the “boar,” but he knows, too, that his high birth confers upon him almost limitless authority over those beneath him. To this authority he conjoins arrogance, a penchant for violence, and a sense of aristocratic impunity. When he gives an order, he expects it to be instantly obeyed.

Dominating others serves to shore up lonely Richard’s damaged self-image, to ward off the pain of rejection, to keep him upright. It is for him as if his body were constantly mocking itself, as well as being mocked by others. Physically unbalanced, his body, he says, is “like to a chaos” (3 Henry VI 3.2.161). Exercising power, particularly the kind of power that throws people off balance, reduces his own sense of chaotic disproportionateness, or so at least he hopes. It is not simply a matter of commanding people to do what he wants them to do, though that is agreeable; it is also peculiar pleasure of making them tremble or totter or fall.

In his own nasty way, he is a man who has achieved an unusual clarity about himself.