Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

by Stephen Greenblatt

Goneril and Regan are very nasty pieces of work, concerned only for themselves. But they grasp that they have a serious problem on their hands, and they quickly take steps at least to protect their own interests, if not those of the realm. Though their father has decided to turn over the actual running of the state to them and their husbands, he has retained a retinue of a hundred armed servants. These the daughters act almost immediately to remove from his control, lest he do something rash.

When he first began to act rashly and self-destructively, Cordelia and Kent were the only ones willing to speak out against Lear’s tyrannical behavior. Both of them did so out of loyalty to the very person most outraged by their words, a person they lovingly hoped to protect. With their banishment and Lear’s abdication, there is nothing to prevent the country from disintegrating. The disintegration was set off by the king’s lawless whim, but it is not he—stripped of his power and falling into madness—who will assume the mantle of tyranny. Rather, it is his vicious daughters, who show themselves to be unconstrained by any respect for the rule of law and indifferent to fundamental norms of human decency.

With Lear, unlike Richard III or Coriolanus, we have almost no glimpses into his childhood, where the seeds of his personality disorder may have been sown. We see only a man who has been long accustomed to getting his way in everything and who cannot abide contradiction. In the midst of his madness, sitting in a wretched hovel with a blind man and a beggar for his company, he still has delusions of grandeur: “When I do stare, see how the subject quakes” (4.6.108). But his insanity is shot through with lightning flashes of hard-earned truth.

Nothing in such an upbringing could prepare Lear to grasp reality in his family, in his realm, or even in his own body. He is a father who wrecks his children; he is a leader who cannot distinguish between honest, truthful servants and corrupt scoundrels; he is a ruler who is unable to perceive, let alone address, the needs of his people.