Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

by Stephen Greenblatt

It is a moral triumph of some kind for so extreme a solipsist to realize that he is, after all, subject to the same bodily afflictions as everyone else.

But Shakespeare’s play looks soberly at the tragic cost of this quite modest realization. Lear insists that he is “more sinned against than sinning,” but he cannot be held entirely innocent of the fact that his two older daughters are twisted monsters who seek to kill him. He is certainly not innocent of the disastrous fate of his youngest daughter, whose moral integrity he spurned and whose love he failed to understand. He has evidently failed, as well, to distinguish between the basic decency of Goneril’s husband, Albany, and the sadism of Regan’s husband, Cornwall, and he has split his kingdom without grasping the high likelihood of violent conflict between the two ruling parties.

And what he now thinks—that the rich should expose themselves to what wretches feel so that they may share some of their superfluous wealth with them—hardly constitutes a new economic vision for the country he has ruled.