Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power

by Stephen Greenblatt

It is for this reason that, when the poor, in their desperation, finally put down their tools and riot, the patricians concede to at least a few of their demands. But even this concession is not an actual acknowledgment of dependence. On the contrary, the elite perceive the poor, and the urban poor in particu...

After all, most of the land and what it produces, along with the houses, the factories, and almost everything else, belongs to the patricians. To them, looking down from the top of this mountain of possessions, ...

So, too, the patrician soldiers: trained from childhood in the arts of war, well-armed, mounted on fierce war horses, shining in battle and honored with medals, they see the poor—who merely drag up the siege equipment, carry the gear, and try to shi...

For the patricians, the plebeians have no names. Still, the poor people who riot for bread in Rome at least manage to make their complaints heard. If only the patricians were willing to release it, they shout, there is more than enough grain stored up, despite the bad harvests, to prevent starvation.

The wealthy, however, would rather let the grain rot in the granaries than undermine its market price. And, beyond the greed of hoarders, the fundamental problem is that the state’s whole economic system has been designed in such a way as not to temper but to exacerbate the income gap between rich and poor.

Though they are responsible for this system, having drawn up the tax code and the financial regulations, the patricians, of course, would nev...

In their genial spokesman, Menenius Agrippa, Shakespeare draws a deft portrait of a successful conservative politician, altogether in the camp of the rich but adept at presenting himself as the people’s friend. Exuding his deep sympathy for their plight, he reminds the rioters—“my good friends, mine honest neighbors” (1.1.55), as he calls them—that t...

Violence will achieve nothing. He counsels patience and prayer, along with trust in the “charitable care” that the wealthy always take fo...

Suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich; and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor.

Another voice in the crowd even offers a theory, bitter yet plausible, of why those who have more wealth than they need or could possibly use would complacently allow others to go hungry.

“The leanness that afflicts us,” he notes at the scene’s opening, the visible fact “of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance” (1.1.17–18). The spectacle of so many poor make the rich feel even richer.

Refusing to put on the kinder, gentler mask of the politically adept conservatives, he speaks out instead in the voice of an alternative right-hand file that, far from dressing its policies in genial fables, is itching to unleash a massacre.

He might have carried out his threat had not news arrived of an impending attack on Rome by its chief enemy, the Volsces. The news makes him happy, not merely because war is his vocation but also because it will, with any luck, sweep away the lives of a significant number of the “rabble.” “I am glad on’t,” he exults, for now “we shall ha’ means to vent/Our musty superfluity”

For this fierce warrior, the poor—those who are now on the dole—are like scraps of food that have turned moldy. The best thing is to ...

This is the perfect moment, as his mother and other leaders of the patrician party grasp, for Coriolanus to stand for election as consul. To be sure, his political views are quite extreme, and he voices them without restraint, but the wealthy now regret the concessions they made under the pressure of the urban riots. As consul, Coriolanus would be in a position to take back what has been given away.

From the beginning, he has voiced steadfast opposition to giving the plebeians any political representation and to creating any safety net at all. “They said they were an-hungry,” he remarks contemptuously, describing the starving crowds,

In the wake of the Volscian wars, even Menenius, who took care to cloak his right-hand-file views with a genial air of populism, has adopted a harder edge. There is no longer any reason to compromise with or appease the lower classes. “You wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange-wife and a faucet-seller,” he says, mocking the tribunes.

“More of your conversation would infect my brain,” he sneers, as he parts from them, “being the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians” (2.1.62–63, 85–86). There is a new tone in Roman political life, one that is meaner and that flirts with violence.

Volumnia thinks that now, when the political opportunity has arisen, her son will adapt to circumstances, enter politics, and solicit the votes of the common people. But he initially refuses to do what his mother asks. After all, it was she, as Coriolanus points out, who taught him to call those very people “woolen v...

He has only to go through the formality of presenting himself to the people and showing them his battle scars. Of course, in principle the voters could still reject him; they know perfectly well that he is not their friend. Still, genuinely grateful for his military service to Rome, many are prepared to give him their votes—their “voices”—against their own class interests.

The patricians urge him to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in office, there will be plenty of time for him to resume his actual stance and to roll back the concessions that have been made to the poor.

It is the most familiar of political games: the plutocrat, born into every privilege and inwardly contemptuous of those beneath him, who mouths the rhetoric of populism during the electoral campaign, abandoning it as soon as it has served his purposes. The Romans had boiled it all down to a conventional performance, comparable to a well-coiffed politician’s donning of a hard hat at a rally held at a construction site:

Tyranny cannot be stopped, Shakespeare must have thought, if the democratic opposition is so high-minded that it is powerless to counter the political conniving that leads up to a seizure of power.

Attempts to sooth the multitude, he fumes, only encourage “rebellion, insolence, sedition” (3.1.68). The poor are “measles”; letting them get anywhere close to power is inviting infection. His friends try to shut him up. Though these are views they may share among themselves, they do not wish to make them public.

But Coriolanus will not stop. There cannot, he declares, be two authorities in the state. Either the patricians rule over the plebeians, as they should, or the whole social order will be turned upside down:

For once, thanks to Coriolanus’s complete lack of restraint, everything is out in the open. The more moderate senators had been willing to concede just barely enough to ward off a major public health emergency and massive social protest. Although they contrived to constrain the popular vote, they allowed at least a semblance of representation. But for Coriolanus, who cannot abide the hypocrisy and temporizing of his own class, that “just barely enough” is far too much.

His modest proposal: let the poor starve. Famine will reduce the number of drones, and those who survive will be less inclined to ask for handouts. Those handouts, he thinks, only make the lower classes less self-reliant; the entire welfare system is a kind of drug.

What is needed, he openly declares, is for the patricians to have courage enough to take away what the plebeians think they want but what is actually, he believes, hurting them and hurting the state. This means eliminating not only the free food but also the whole institution of tribunes who give the poor a political voice. It is not enough to restrict popular representation—in effect, to practice the Roman equivalent of...

The only intelligent course of action, she says, is for Coriolanus to do what, in effect, the elite have always known how to do: to speak To th’ people, not by your own instruction, Nor by th’ matter which your heart prompts you, But with such words that are but roted in Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth. (3.2.52– 57) Just lie.

It is a perverse but familiar pattern: the party of privilege argues that it needs authoritarian power so that it can preserve order in the state. Coriolanus speaks for his class when he tells the people that only “the noble Senate …/Under the gods, keep you in awe, which else/Would feed on one another” (1.1.177–79). Then when the wealthy are proven wrong—when the state, rich and poor alike, turns out to thrive under a more democratic system—they long for the disorder they promised to quell.

The plot twist is worth dwelling upon. It is as if the leader of a political party long identified with hatred of Russia—forever saber-rattling and accusing the rival politicians of treason—should secretly make his way to Moscow and offer his services to the Kremlin.

His bitter words provide a clear view into his vision of his homeland: the common people, whose votes he was supposed to solicit, are all “slaves”; the “dastard nobles” are cowards who refused at the crucial moment to make the streets flow with blood to prevent his humiliating banishment. Now he longs for revenge against his entire “cankered country” (4.5.74, 90).

But when it becomes clear that the approaching enemy army is not fake news, the patrician response is instructive. They do not cry out against Coriolanus’s treachery and curse him for his violent betrayal of everything he had professed to love and defend. They turn instead on the plebeians:

“You have made good work,/You and your apronmen,” Menenius jeers at the tribunes. “You that stood so much/Upon the voice of occupation and/The breath of garlic-eaters” (4.6.95–98). It is all the fault of working people, with their stinking breaths and their presumptuous insistence on being heard. They—and not Coriolanus—have betrayed Rome.

Perhaps Shakespeare thought that the official strategy—the celebration of those in authority, a belligerent refusal to acknowledge gross economic inequity, the perpetual invocation of God’s partisan support for whoever was on top, and the demonizing of even the most modest skepticism—had the very opposite effect of what was intended.

“When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world,” More wrote in Utopia, “I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich.”

The playwright knew that it is easy to become cynical about these leaders and to despair about the all-too-human men and women who place their trust in them. The leaders are often compromised and corruptible; the crowd is often foolish, ungrateful, easily misled by demagogues, and slow to understand where its real interests lie.

There are periods, sometimes extended periods, during which the cruelest motives of the basest people seem to be triumphant. But Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished.

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?”