Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

by Stephen Greenblatt

There is something desperate and almost pathetic about this twisted man dreaming that he will one day have the power to push everyone around and, in doing so, compensate for his unloved, unbalanced body. He is, he ruefully acknowledges, like someone “lost in a thorny wood,” tearing himself on the thorns and struggling in torment to find the open air.

these circumstances, the principal weapon Richard has is the very absurdity of his ambition. No one in his right mind would suspect that he seriously aspires to the throne. And he is confident in his possession of one particular and, in his case, essential skill. He is a gifted deceiver.

Shakespeare did not suggest that a compensatory model—power as a substitute for sexual pleasure—could fully explain the psychology of a tyrant. But he held on to the core conviction that there is a significant relationship between the lust for tyrannical power and a thwarted or damaged psychosexual life. And he held on as well to the conviction that traumatic and lasting damage to a person’s self-image could be traced back to early experiences—to an adolescent’s fear that he is ugly, or to the cruel mockery of other children, or, even earlier in life, to the responses of nurses and midwives. Above all, he thought, irreparable harm could come from a mother’s failure or inability to love her child. Richard’s bitter anger at the goddess Love, who forswore him, and at nature, who shrank his arm like a withered shrub, is a thin screen for his rage against his mother.

The Henry VI trilogy manages to feature York’s four sons—Edward, George, Rutland, and Richard—without bothering to introduce their mother. The plays’ emphasis is not on the individual or the family but on the whole realm’s slide into civil war. When, however, Shakespeare focused on the character of the tyrant himself—the inward bitterness, disorder, and violence that drive him forward, to the ruin of his country—then he needed to explore something amiss in the relation between mother and child.

One of Richard’s uncanny skills—and, in Shakespeare’s view, one of the tyrant’s most characteristic qualities—is the ability to force his way into the minds of those around him, whether they wish him there or not. It is as if, in compensation for the pain he has suffered, he has found a way to be present—by force or fraud, violence or insinuation—everywhere and in everyone. No one can keep him out.

RICHARD’S VILLAINY IS readily apparent to almost everyone. There is no deep secret about his cynicism, cruelty, and treacherousness, no glimpse of anything redeemable in him, and no reason to believe that he could ever govern the country effectively. The question the play explores, then, is how such a person actually attained the English throne. The achievement, Shakespeare suggests, depended on a fatal conjunction of diverse but equally self-destructive responses from those around him. Together these responses amount to a whole country’s collective failure.

Then there are those who cannot keep in focus that Richard is as bad as he seems to be. They know that he is a pathological liar and they see perfectly well that he has done this or that ghastly thing, but they have a strange penchant for forgetting, as if it were hard work to remember just how awful he is. They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.

Another group is composed of those who do not quite forget that Richard is a miserable piece of work but who nonetheless 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.

A more sinister group consists of those who persuade themselves that they can take advantage of Richard’s rise to power. Like almost everyone else, they see perfectly well how destructive he is, but they are confident that they will stay one step ahead of the tide of evil or manage to seize some profit from it.

Finally, there a motley crowd of those who carry out his orders, some reluctantly but simply eager to avoid trouble; others with gusto, hoping to seize something along the way for themselves; still others enjoying the cruel game of making his targets, often high in the social hierarchy, suffer and die. The aspiring tyrant never lacks for such people, in Shakespeare and, from what I can tell, in life.

Listing the types of enablers risks missing what is most compelling about Shakespeare’s theatrical genius: not the construction of abstract categories or the calculation of degrees of complicity but the unforgettably vivid imagining of lived experience. Faced with the deep disturbance caused by Richard’s ambition, grappling with confusing signals, and utterly uncertain of the outcome, people are forced to choose among flawed alternatives. Richard III brilliantly sketches men and women making anxious calculations under unbearable pressure and taking fateful decisions, conditioned by emotional currents beyond their rational control. It is the power of great theater to bring these dilemmas to life.

He is hardly alone: in Shakespeare’s play, there are almost no morally uncompromised lives. Virtually everyone grapples with painful memories of lies and broken vows, memories that make it all the more difficult for them to grasp where the deepest danger lies.

In hindsight, Clarence’s dream had a horrible premonitory power, extending to the detail of his death by drowning, but its significance reaches beyond this local irony. It reveals something broadly important about tyranny on the rise: its frightening ability to penetrate the mind in sleep, even as it can also penetrate the body. In Richard III, dreams are not decorative touches or mere glimpses of individual psychology. They are essential to an understanding of a tyrant’s power to exist in and as everyone’s nightmare. And the tyrant has the power to make nightmares real.

A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard’s seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant’s climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. Instead, it is the consequence of an election. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated threat to national security.

The ambiguity seems built into Shakespeare’s conception of Richard. Notwithstanding his ugliness, does he have some allure? Is there a moment in which the crowd actually supports him, or is it only a conspiracy? Are his lies somehow still effective, even though people see through them?

seduction? To the extent that the actor evinces anything other than sheer disgust, Anne exhibits the peculiar excitement that Richard arouses in most spectators. The play does not encourage a rational identification with Richard’s political goal, but it does awaken a certain complicity in its audience, the complicity of those who take vicarious pleasure in the release of pent-up aggression, in the black humor of it all, in the open speaking of the unspeakable.

Within the play, Richard’s rise is made possible by various degrees of complicity from those around him. But in the theater, it is we, the audience, watching it all happening, who are lured into a peculiar form of collaboration. We are charmed again and again by the villain’s outrageousness, by his indifference to the ordinary norms of human decency, by lies that seem to be effective even though no one believes them. Looking out at us from the stage, Richard invites us not only to share his gleeful contempt but also to experience for ourselves what it is to succumb to what we know to be loathsome.

In his jaunty wickedness and perverse humor, Richard has seduced more than four centuries of audiences.

THERE IS A TOUCH of comedy in the tyrant’s rise to power, catastrophe though it is. The people he has pushed aside and trampled on are for the most part themselves compromised, cynical, or corrupt. Even if their fates are ghastly, it is satisfying to see them get their comeuppance, and as we watch the schemer bluster and connive and betray his way to the top, we are invited to take a kind of moral vacation.

Much of the pleasure of his winning derived from its wild improbability. Now the prospect of endless winning proves to be a grotesque delusion. Though he has seemed a miracle of dark efficiency, Richard is quite unprepared to unite and run a whole country.

The tyrant’s triumph is based on lies and fraudulent promises braided around the violent elimination of rivals. The cunning strategy that brings him to the throne hardly constitutes a vision for the realm; nor has he assembled counselors who can help him formulate one. He can count—for the moment, at least—on the acquiescence of such suggestible officials as the London mayor and frightened clerks like the scribe. But the new ruler possesses neither administrative ability nor diplomatic skill, and no one in his entourage can supply what he manifestly lacks.

That the tyrant asks his principal ally for his “consent” has to do not with permission but with complicity. At this critical moment at the onset of his reign, he wants and needs to be assured of his associate’s loyalty, and that loyalty is best guaranteed by having Buckingham make himself an accomplice to a horrendous crime. Though it would have been still better if Buckingham had suggested on his own that the children

The brief exchange introduces several key features of the tyrant’s rule, as Shakespeare envisaged it. For the tyrant, there is remarkably little satisfaction. True, he has obtained the position to which he aspired, but the skills that enabled him to do so are not at all the same as those required to govern successfully. Whatever pleasures he might have imagined would be his give way to frustration, anger, and gnawing fear. Moreover, the possession of power is never secure. There is always something else that must be done in order to reinforce his position, and since he has reached his goal through criminal acts, what is required inevitably are further criminal acts. The tyrant is obsessed with loyalty from his inner circle, but he can never be entirely confident that he has it. The only people who will serve him are self-interested scoundrels, like himself; in any case, he has no interest in honest loyalty or dispassionate, independent judgment. Instead he wants flattery, confirmation, and obedience.

The tyrant is, in effect, the enemy of hope.

Impatience is another of the qualities that, in Shakespeare’s view, inevitably marks the tyrant’s experience of power. He expects his wishes to be carried out almost before he has expressed them aloud. New developments keep arising, most of them alarming, and time is no longer

While all of this is going on, Richard continues with his plan to marry his young niece, and in doing so he reveals a further feature that Shakespeare associated with tyranny: utter shamelessness. Though he has caused the murder of her two sons, he has the fathomless effrontery to approach Elizabeth, the widow of the late king, and propose that he marry her daughter. He does not even bother to deny his crime; instead, he proposes to repair the loss of her children by giving her grandchildren!

scene on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field—the decisive military encounter that ends in Richmond’s triumph and Richard’s death—Shakespeare provides a glimpse of one further quality he associates with the tyrant: an absolute loneliness. With his henchmen Catesby and Ratcliffe, Richard can review battle plans and give orders, but he has no real closeness to them or to anyone else. He has long been aware that no one loves him and that no one will grieve his loss.

his dreams, Richard is haunted by the ghosts of those he has betrayed and killed. They stand, in effect, for the conscience he conspicuously lacks. But he bears the most terrible burden—the burden of self-loathing—when he is fully awake and by himself.

In a very few years, Shakespeare would invent the inwardness he confers on Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, and others, and he never returned to the kind of writing he did here. But perhaps Richard’s schematic words manage to convey the notion not only of psychological conflict—I love myself; I hate myself—but also of a painful emptiness. It is as if we look inside the tyrant and find that there is virtually nothing there, merely a few shrunken traces of a self that had never been allowed to grow or to flourish.

The physical deformation vividly conjured up the figure who actually accounted for the worldwide press coverage—not the relatively minor historical Richard but the unforgettable tyrant Shakespeare created and unleashed onto the London stage.

Drenched in blood from his treacherous assassination of Duncan to his miserable, despairing end, Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most celebrated and memorable tyrant. But now the loneliness, self-loathing, and emptiness at the center of the tyrant’s being have nothing to do with physical deformity. Macbeth does not use power to compensate for his lack of sexual attractiveness; he does not seethe with barely suppressed rage; he has not learned from childhood to disguise his actual feelings beneath a fraudulent mask of warmth or piety. And, strangely enough, he does not even wholeheartedly wish to be the king.

Lady Macbeth’s gibes about her husband’s manhood—his ability to be the same in act as he is in desire—bring up to the surface a recurrent implication in Shakespearean tyranny. The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.

Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.

had else been perfect”—Macbeth longs to possess a form of completeness, the hardness, solidity, and invulnerability of stone or, alternatively, the pervasiveness, invisibility, and unlimited extension of air. In either case, the dream is to escape from the human condition, which he experiences as unendurably claustrophobic. The longing is almost pitiable; it seems even to harbor an unrealizable spiritual dimension, until one takes in that the means by which Macbeth hopes to become “perfect” is the double murder of his friend and his friend’s son.

Here, as throughout Shakespeare, the tyrant’s course of behavior is fueled 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,

doubt those dreams are truly terrible, and though he has brought them on himself, we might even generate a twinge of sympathy for the nightmares he must endure. But any sympathy is brought up short by his own vicious indifference to anyone and anything else, including the planet itself: “Let the frame of things disjoint” (3.2.16).

But it proves more difficult to eradicate both future and past than the tyrant imagines. Fleance manages to flee. And just as Richard was haunted in his dream by the ghosts of those he has killed, so Macbeth, at the royal banquet he and his wife host, is haunted by the blood-spattered ghost of Banquo. The apparition figures as an emblem not of the tyrant’s repressed conscience but, rather, of his psychological deterioration.

The dinner guests face a problem that Shakespeare portrays as recurrent and almost inescapable in tyrannies: observers, particularly those with privileged access, see clearly that the leader is mentally unstable.

“Tedious” is a telling word to use for the nightmare in which Macbeth finds himself. Considerations of morality, political tactics, or basic intelligence have all disappeared, and in their place is a mere calculation of the effort involved. Better not to stop and think but simply to act on impulse:

Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restraints have all failed. The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent. “From this moment,” Macbeth declares, “The very firstlings of my heart shall be/The firstlings of my hand” (4.1.145–46).

Macbeth is aware that he is loathed by his people and that his very name, as Malcolm puts it, “blisters our tongues” (4.3.12). He has known virtually from the beginning—from before he treacherously killed Duncan—that he is unfit to be king. He bears all the trappings of his exalted station, but they sit awkwardly upon him, only calling attention to his unfitness.

In Richard III, Shakespeare imagined the beleaguered tyrant torn between self-love and self-hate. In Macbeth, the playwright probes far deeper. What has it all been for, the betrayals, the empty words, the shedding of so much innocent blood? It is difficult to picture the tyrants of our own times having any such moment of truthful reckoning.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (5.5.19–28)

is important to understand that this devastating experience of utter meaninglessness is not, as in some absurdist contemporary drama, the existential condition of humankind. The play insists that it is the fate precisely of the tyrant, and that...

Though he has “supped full with horrors” and plumbed the depths of despair, Macbeth sees this carnival-like end as unbearably degrading.

RICHARD III AND MACBETH are criminals who come to power by killing the legitimate rulers who stand in their way. But Shakespeare was also interested in a more insidious problem, that posed by those who begin as legitimate rulers and are then drawn by their mental and emotional instability toward tyrannical behavior. The horrors they inflict on their subjects and, ultimately, on themselves are the consequences of psychological degeneration. They may have thoughtful counselors and friends, people with a healthy instinct for self-preservation and a concern for their nation. But it is extremely difficult for such people to counter madness-induced tyranny, both because it is unanticipated and because their long-term loyalty and trust have inculcated habits of obedience.

It is possible that the spectators to this grotesque contest say nothing because they believe it is merely a formal ritual, designed to gratify the autocrat’s vanity on the occasion of his retirement. After all, one of the highest-ranking noblemen, the Earl of Gloucester, remarks in the play’s first moments that he has already seen a map with the division of the kingdom scrupulously plotted out.

Lear’s court faces a serious, possibly insuperable problem. In the distant age in which the play is set, roughly in the eighth century B.C.E., Britain does not seem to have any institutions or offices—parliament, privy council, commissioners, high priests—to moderate or dilute royal power. Though the king, surrounded by his family, his loyal thanes, and his servants, may solicit and receive advice, the crucial decision-making power remains his and his alone. When he expresses his wishes, he expects to be obeyed. But the whole system depends on the assumption that he is in his right mind.

Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm? In the case of King Lear, the ruler had probably never been a model of stability or emotional maturity.