Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power

by Stephen Greenblatt

how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?

Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne?

Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity.

The playwright was not accusing England’s current ruler, Elizabeth I, of being a tyrant. Quite apart from whatever Shakespeare privately thought, it would have been suicidal to float such a suggestion onstage.

Dating back to 1534, during the reign of the queen’s father, Henry VIII, legal statutes made it treason to refer to the ruler as a tyrant.2 The penalty for such a crime was death.

There was no freedom of expression in Shakespeare’s England, on the stage or anywhere else. The 1597 performances of an allegedly seditious play called The Isle of Dogs led to the arrest and imprisonment of the playwright Ben Jonson and to a government orde...

Informants attended the theater, eager to claim a reward for denouncing to the authorities anything that could be construed as subversive. Attempts to reflect critically on contemporary ev...

As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more re...

Shakespeare understood, as well, something that in our own time is revealed when a major event—the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the housing market, a startling election result—manages to throw a garish light on an unnerving fact: even those at the center of the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen.

Shakespeare was the supreme master of displacement and strategic indirection.

When the Privy Council summoned Essex for a meeting on state business, he refused to go, declaring that he would be assassinated on Ralegh’s orders. His tangle of fear and loathing, coupled with a delusional confidence that the populace of London would rise up to support him, ultimately led Essex to stage an armed rising against the queen’s counselors and perhaps against the queen herself. The rising failed miserably. Essex and his principal allies, including the Earl of Southampton, were arrested.

That is the whole scene. It is over in a moment, but it is enough to conjure up an entire ethos of power in operation. No formal legal procedure is initiated against the deposed king. Instead, all that is needed is a pregnant hint, carefully repeated, conjoined with looks directed intently (“wistly”) toward someone likely to grasp the hint’s meaning.

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

The parts of King Henry VI are now among his least-known plays, but they first made him famous, and they remain acutely perceptive about the ways in which a society becomes ripe for a despot.

The power vacuum at the center gives the rivals space to maneuver and to plot against one another. But there are consequences to such partisan feuding: nothing gets done for the common good and, as we soon see, the factions are hardening into mortal enemies.

Each party naturally seeks power, but seeking power becomes itself the expression of rage: I crave the power to crush you.

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.

The adulterous queen, sly, sadistic Margaret, calls Duke Humphrey a “loser”

There are several possible answers. First, they are all politicians and, therefore, congenitally dishonest; the word “politician,” for Shakespeare, was virtually synonymous with hypocrite. (“Get thee glass eyes,” rages Lear. “And, like a scurvy politician,/Seem to see the things thou dost not” [King Lear 4.6.164–66]).

Second, they distrust one another and do not know what may be reported outside the room in which they are speaking. Third, each harbors a secret hope that their lie and theirs alone will deceive the others. Fourth, pretending that they are virtuous, even when they know that they are not, makes them feel better about themselves.

And fifth, they are all warily watching to see if anyone among them expresses even a slight reservation about the conspiracy, anything that would lead it to ...

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.

IN DEPICTING THE aspiring tyrant’s strategy, Shakespeare carefully noted among the landed classes of his time the strong current of contempt for the masses and for democracy as a viable political possibility.

Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation.

The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, s...

There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common.… [T]here shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score.

Famously, it is at the end of one of Cade’s speeches that someone in the crowd shouts, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”

Better to have the law come from the mouth of the dictator, who may claim to be a Plantagenet but whom they recognize as one of their own. The masses are perfectly aware that he is a liar, but—venal, cruel, and self-serving though he is—he succeeds in articulating their dream: “Henceforward all things shall be in common”

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.

Jack Cade longs for the time when, as he puts it, boys played games of toss “for French crowns,” a time before the country was “maimed and fain to go with a staff” (4.2.145– 50). Until weaklings led it astray, he suggests, England compelled its enemies to tremble before its power, and that glorious swaggering must now be recovered. He promises to make England great again.

He has in his hands the realm’s highest fiscal officer, the emblem of the swamp that he has pledged to drain. (The demagogue’s actual metaphor for what he intends to do is slightly homelier: “Be it known,” he declares, “that I am the besom”—the broom—“that must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art”

Cade and his followers will not slink away because the traditional political elite and the entirety of the educated populace regard him as a jackass.

“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The peasants’ leader, the revolutionary priest John Ball, spelled out the meaning of his incendiary little rhyme: “From the beginning all men were created equal by nature.” Before it was over, rebels had torched court records, opened jails, and killed officials of the crown.

I thought ye would never have given out these arms till you had recovered your ancient freedom. But you are all recreants and dastards and delight to live in slavery to the nobility. Let them break your backs with burdens, take your houses over your heads, ravish your wives and daughters before your faces.

Ardent patriots like Talbot are hopelessly naïve to believe that loyalty to the nation trumps personal interest.

A cynical insider like Queen Margaret knows better: “How can tyrants safely govern home,” she asks, “Unless abroad they purchase great alliance?” (3.3.69–70).

What might at another time have provoked charges of treason is simply accepted as the way things are. And if there are no longer the expected punishments for treachery, so, too, there are no longer the anticipated rewards for virtue.

There are also those who feel frightened or impotent in the face of bullying and the menace of violence. “I’ll make a corpse of him that disobeys” (Richard III 1.2.37), Richard threatens, and the opposition to his outrageous commands somehow shrivels away. It helps that he is an immensely wealthy and privileged man, accustomed to having his way, even when his way violates every moral norm.

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 ...

Richard is so obviously and grotesquely unqualified for the supreme position of power that they dismiss him from their minds. Their focus is always on someone else, until it is too late. They fail to realize quickly enough that what seemed impossible is actually happe...

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...

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.

True, there might be a world somewhere where this does not happen. Such is the world that Montaigne’s friend Étienne de La Boétie once envisaged, where the dictator would fall simply because of a massive, nonviolent refusal to cooperate.

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.

Brakenbury knows perfectly well that his prisoner has not received a trial, fair or otherwise, but, handing the keys to the murderers, he asks no questions and offers no protest: “I will not reason what is meant hereby/Because I will be guiltless from the meaning” (1.4.93–94). By multiple acts of this kind, taken by respectable people eager to be “guiltless from the meaning,” tyranny is enabled.

Yet if the lies hardly produce robust consent, they nonetheless have some effect. The steady barrage of falsehoods plays its part, working to marginalize skeptics, to sow confusion, to quiet protests that might otherwise have erupted. Whether from indifference or from fear or from the catastrophically mistaken belief that there is no real difference between Richard and the alternatives, the citizens fail to resist.

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.

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 a friend. Delay is dangerous; everything has to be done in haste, with scarcely a moment to think.