Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

by Stephen Greenblatt

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.

There are always people in a new regime who will do anything to win the ruler’s favor.

This loathing is an important part of what leads to a social breakdown and, eventually, to tyranny.

Rage generates insults, and insults generate outrageous actions, and outrageous actions, in turn, heighten the intensity of the rage. It all begins to spiral out of control.

Fourth, pretending that they are virtuous, even when they know that they are not, makes them feel better about themselves.

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.

The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.

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.

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.

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.

Moreover, the possession of power is never secure. There is always something else that must be done in order to reinforce his position,

Tyranny attempts to poison not merely the present but generations to come, to extend itself forever. It is not the exigencies of plot alone that make Macbeth, like Richard, the killer of children. Tyrants are enemies of the future. But it proves more difficult to eradicate both future

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?”