Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

by Stephen Greenblatt

is as if, in the absence of the dominant figure of the king, the purely conventional and meaningless emblems precipitate a rush of both group solidarity and group loathing. This loathing is an important part of what leads to a social breakdown and, eventually, to tyranny.

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.

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.

They have been left out of an economy that increasingly demands possession of a once-esoteric technology: literacy. They do not imagine that they can master this new skill, nor does their leader propose that they undertake any education. It would hardly suit his purposes if they did so. What he does instead is manipulate their resentment of the educated.

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.

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.

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.

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 steady barrage of falsehoods plays its part, working to marginalize skeptics, to sow confusion, to quiet protests that might otherwise have erupted.

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.

The last thing the tyrant wants, even when he appears to solicit it, is an independent opinion. What he actually wants is loyalty, and by loyalty he does not mean integrity, honor, or responsibility. He means an immediate, unreserved confirmation of his own views and a willingness to carry out his orders without hesitation. When an autocratic, paranoid, narcissistic ruler sits down with a civil servant and asks for his loyalty, the state is in danger.