Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power

by Stephen Greenblatt

The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties:

a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.

Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.

Tyranny comes about, as her words acknowledge, through destruction, the destruction of people and of a whole country.

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.

Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone.

Institutional restraints have all failed. The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent.

What has it all been for, the betrayals, the empty words, the shedding of so much innocent blood? It is difficult to picture the tyrants of our own times having any such moment of truthful reckoning. But Macbeth describes unflinchingly what he has brought upon himself:

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

It is important to understand that this devastating experience of utter meaninglessness is not, as in some absurdist contemporary drama, the existential condition of humankind. The play insists that it is the fate precisely of the tyrant, and that word—“tyrant”—echoes and reechoes through the close of the play.

He fights and is killed. Macduff raises the “cursèd head” he has severed and proclaims that tyranny has come to an end. “The time is free”

Shakespeare was also interested in a more insidious problem, that posed by those who begin as legitimate rulers and are then drawn by their mental and emotional instability toward tyrannical behavior.

Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm?

It is ugly, and it is about to get still uglier. But the stripping away of the retainers stems from the recognition that an impulsive narcissist, accustomed to ordering people about, should not have control even of a very small army.

We see only a man who has been long accustomed to getting his way in everything and who cannot abide contradiction.

he is a ruler who is unable to perceive, let alone address, the needs of his people. In the first part of the play, when Lear is still on the throne, those people are entirely invisible. It is as if the king has never bothered to take in their existence.

they are not men o’ their words. They told me I was everything. ’Tis a lie. I am not ague-proof.

It is only when Lear himself wanders out into a wild storm that he takes in the plight of the homeless in the land over which he has ruled for many decades. As the rain beats down on him, the question he asks is a powerful one:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you From seasons such as these?

But even as he asks the question, he knows that it is too late for him to do anything to relieve their suffering: “Oh, I have ta’en/Too little care of this!”

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.

Lear has lost everything by this point, but he still has the mind of the tyrant who will brook no disagreement: “Death, traitor!”

A tyrant does not need to traffic in facts or supply evidence. He expects his accusation to be enough. If he says that someone has been betraying him, or laughing at him, or spying on him, it must be the case. Anyone who contradicts him is either a liar or an idiot.

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 loy...

Of course, from the perspective of the court, the “matter”—an accusation of a plot against the life of the ruler, the flight of the king’s principal counselor, and the imprisonment of the queen—is hardly Leontes’s alone. But in the manner characteristic of tyrants, he has folded the whole state into himself.

The one concession he has made—a concession, as he puts it, “to th’ minds of others”—is to send ambassadors to “Sacred Delphos, to Apollo’s temple,” to consult the oracle. The courtiers, otherwise silenced, approve.

For a brief, telling moment we glimpse the bureaucratic structure that characterizes all regimes and that becomes particularly important when the leader is behaving in alarming ways.

If there is a procedural anomaly, a high-ranking person—and Paulina, the aristocratic wife of the king’s counselor Antigonus, is of very high rank indeed—needs to step forward and take responsibility. “Do not you fear,” she again tells the jailor; “I/Will stand betwixt you and danger” (2.2.66– 67).

It is the effect of tyranny to invert the whole structure of authority: legitimacy no longer resides at the center of the state; instead, it is vested in the victims of its violence.

That is part of the point: once the state is in the hands of an unstable, impulsive, and vindictive tyrant, there is almost nothing that the ordinary mechanisms of moderation can accomplish. Sensible advice falls on deaf ears; dignified demurrals are brushed aside; outspoken protests only seem to make matters worse.

The ruler controlled the institutions that conferred the stamp of reality upon even his wildest claims. This is a show trial, in the manner of Henry VIII or, in our own time, Stalin.

New life may lie on the other side of years lost to tyranny, but this life will not be the same as it once was.

The tyrant, the playwright reflected, always and necessarily has powerful enemies. He can hunt down and murder some of them; he can compel others to bend under his will and to offer him what Macbeth calls “mouth-honor.” He can employ spies in every house and listen in the dark to whatever is being whispered around him. He can reward his followers, rally his troops, and stage an endless succession of public events that celebrate his innumerable accomplishments. But he cannot possibly eliminate everyone who hates him. For eventually almost everyone does.

No matter how tight a net the tyrant weaves, someone always manages to slip through and make it to safety.

Slip away, get out of the tyrant’s range, make your way across a border, join forces with other exiles, and return with an invasion force. That is the basic strategy, and it is not only a literary one: it has served for resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, Vichy France, and many others places.

As Shakespeare understood, the strategy is hardly without risk. The plan may go awry, as Buckingham’s does, and end in execution rather than escape. Friends and family may suffer. The tyrant may hold a loved one hostage, as when Richard III seizes Lord Stanley’s son in order to ensure his loyalty: “Look your heart be firm,” he tells the anguished father. “Or else his head’s assurance is but frail” (Richard III 4.4.495–96). As Macduff finds, the blow may fall heavily on innocent loved ones left behind.

Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted for very long. However cunning they were in their rise, once in power they were surprisingly incompetent. Possessing no vision for the country they ruled, they were incapable of fashioning enduring support, and though they were cruel and violent, they could never crush all of the opposition.

Their isolation, suspicion, and anger, often conjoined to an arrogant overconfidence, hastened their downfall. The plays that depict tyranny inevitably end at least with gestures toward the renewal of community and the restoration of legitimate order.

In King Lear’s nameless servant, however, he created a figure who serves as the very essence of popular resistance to tyrants. That man refuses to remain silent and watch. It costs him his life, but he stands up for human decency. Though he is a very minor figure with only a handful of lines, he is one of Shakespeare’s great heroes.

Shakespeare makes clear that Brutus’s desire to keep his motives free from any taint of self-interest or violence is a mere fantasy. He longs to destroy the threat that Caesar represents—the threat of tyranny—without destroying Caesar, but even Brutus recognizes that this clean, bloodless defense of liberty is impossible:

Caesar is dead, but by the end of the play Caesarism is triumphant.

We would not have been able to survive as a species had we not developed the skill to identify and deal with noxious threats from within as well as without. Communities are usually alert to the danger posed by certain people in their midst and contrive to isolate or expel them. This is why tyranny is not the norm of social organization.

Food shortages in England, linked to periodic bad harvests, had for generations led to noisy popular protests, with mobs crying out for emergency relief supplies. In 1607, a full-scale revolt erupted in the Midlands, spreading quickly from Northamptonshire to Leicestershire and Warwickshire. The angry crowds, thousands strong, denounced the hated practice of grain hoarding in the hope of a higher price and demanded that local landlords stop the illegal enclosure of common lands.

The principal rebel leader was John Reynolds, called “Captain Pouch” because he carried a small bag whose magical contents were supposed to defend the protesters from harm. Reynolds urged his followers to be nonviolent, and for the most part they contented themselves with tearing down the hedges and filling in the ditches with which the landlords were attempting to enclose, for their own profit, lands that had belonged to everyone.

This grim argument was, in effect, the one that prevailed. In June 1607, dozens of protesters were killed by the landlords’ armed servants, and Captain Pouch was seized and hanged. (According to a contemporary chronicler, his pouch contained “only a piece of green cheese.”)The Midland Revolt came to an end.

To his intense disgust, the patricians decide instead to appease the mob by giving them a measure of political representation in the form of two tribunes to speak for their interests. In Coriolanus’s view, two tribunes are two too many. The common people, he thinks, should have no representation at all; they should simply have their fates dictated to them.

The patrician party—the party of “the right-hand file,” as one of its principal spokesmen calls it—has a single dominant interest: to ensure (through what we would now call fiscal policy) a grossly unequal distribution of resources and to protect the property its members have amassed.

To this interest, the patricians are willing to sacrifice virtually everything else. They are certainly willing to sacrifice the well...

The wealthy aristocrats depend on the labor of the lower classes—the agricultural labor of those who sweat in the fields outside the city walls; the labor of the workmen, artisans, and servants within the city; and the labor of the common soldiers who sw...