Henriad Quotes

“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 the lives of underclasses... But he sees that they can be made to further his ambition.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“He [Cade] promises to make England great again. How will he do that? He shows the crowd at once: he attacks education.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare's penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge the truth- to possess it fully and not perish of it- through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

“A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard's seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant's climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. 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.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics