Book Review: Tyrant

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, that one took me a while. I'm going to blame an overseas move to China and the fact that, a month ago, 3 New Yorker magazines actually made it to my Chinese mailbox all on the same day, which distracted me from this little tome for several weeks.

But I'm also going to blame my inability to keep looking at the dumpster fire. Sometimes you just have to look away.

But none of those reasons detract from this being an instructive, if challenging, read.

Trump is not named in this book but he looms ominously in the near background much like he did at the televised debates with Clinton in 2016. Greenblatt says in his Acknowledgments that he sat in "...a verdant garden in Sardinia and expressed my growing apprehension about the possible outcome of an upcoming election. My historian friend Bernhard Jussen asked me what I was doing about it. 'What can I do?' I asked. 'You can write something,' he said. So I did."

As the title indicates, this is a study of tyrants in Shakespeare — the Henry VI trilogy, with the rise and fall of Jack Cade, Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Leontes, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus.

Tyrants do not come from a vacuum. They are brought to power by simplifying complicated issues into shouting points. By drawing a line in the sand and requiring the populace to choose sides. Tyrants are aided and abetted by the political systems of their time.

In the chapter entitled "Party Politics" Greenblatt discusses the Henry VI trilogy, wherein Shakespeare tackles the War of the Roses and the fact that, eventually, people forgot what they were really fighting about, which paves the way for a tyrant. "The roses serve as party badges; they designate two opposed sides. With a weird immediacy, the legal argument (whatever it was) gives way to a blind adherence to the white or the red."

In the chapter entitled "Fraudulent Populism," Greenblatt outlines how tyrants use ignorance to further their grasp of total power. "Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader ... surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of the underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable. But he sees that they can be made to further his ambitions."

In the Henry VI trilogy, the tyrant has a patsy, a fellow named Jack Cade. Cade was a real person who led a rebellion against the government in 1450. Shakespeare made him into a tool of the tyrannical ambitions of the Duke of York. It is in response to Cade that the famous line --"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"--is uttered. Greenblatt writes, "For Cade's ardent supporters, the time-honored institutional system of representation is worthless. It has, they feel, never represented them. Their inchoate wish is the tear up all the agreements, cancel all the debts, and wreck all the existing institutions...The poor whose passions Cade is arousing feel excluded, despised, and vaguely ashamed. 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 he did so. What he does instead is manipulate their resentment of the educated."

As Cade and his followers become a mob and sweep through London, they capture Lord Saye, whose worst crime, according to Cade, is building a grammar school. Greenblatt writes, "We are meant to find this ridiculous, of course; the scene is quite rightly played for laughs. But Shakespeare grasped something critically important; although the absurdity of the demagogue's rhetoric was blatantly obvious, the laughter it elicited did not for a minute diminish its menace. 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."

The Henry VI trilogy is the prelude to Richard III and in the chapter entitled "Enablers," Greenblatt explores the tyrant's need for sycophants. Richard is trying to come to the throne through a campaign that spreads misinformation; the illegitimacy of the other claimants to the throne. It doesn't work at first; the populace simply does not comply. But the tyrant and his sycophants do not stop. "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."

Richard takes the throne. But he has still not eliminated all the more legitimate claimants; he is keeping one alive in the Tower. Richard, in discussions with Buckingham, alludes to Edward still being alive and asks Buckingham what he thinks Richard should do. Buckingham refuses to say what Richard wants him to say; he refuses to be complicit. Richard doesn't need Buckingham's permission, of course, but he wants his consent. "At this critical moment at the onset of his reign, he [Richard] wants and needs to be assured of his associate's loyalty, and that loyalty is best guaranteed by having Buckingham make himself an accomplice to a horrendous crime."

Greenblatt goes on to write in the chapter entitled "Tyranny Triumphant;"

"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. Whatever pleasures he might have imagined would be his give way to frustration, anger, and gnawing fear. Moreover, the possession of power is never secure. There is always something else that must be done in order to reinforce his position, and since he has reached his goal through criminal acts, what is required inevitably are further criminal acts. The tyrant is obsessed with loyalty from his inner circle, but he can never be entirely confident that he has it. They only people who will serve him are self-interested scoundrels, like himself; in any case, he has no interest in honest loyalty or dispassionate, independent judgment. Instead, he wants flattery, confirmation, and obedience."

In the chapter entitled "The Instigator," Greenblatt deconstructs the character of Macbeth. "In Richard III, Shakespeare imagined the beleaguered tyrant torn between self-love and self-hate. In Macbeth, the playwright probes far deeper. 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."

In the chapter entitled "Madness in Great Ones," Greenblatt tackles King Lear, those rulers who started out legitimate and who have lost their minds along the way. "They may have thoughtful counselors and friends, people with a healthy instinct for self-preservation and a concern for their nation. But it is extremely difficult for such people to counter madness-induced tyranny, both because it is unanticipated and because their long-term loyalty and trust have inculcated habits of obedience... What he [the tyrant] 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 loyalty, the state is in danger."

As Paulina says in defiance to the tyrant Leontes in The Winter's Tale "It is an heretic who makes the fire, Not she which burns in't"

But Paulina is a noble. A high-born. Shakespeare never writes in his plays of the common people defying tyranny. Only investing in it.

According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare thought common people "...were too easily manipulated by slogans, cowed by threats, or bribed by trivial gifts..." Save for one nameless servant in Lear, Shakespeare does not depict anyone but elites fighting back.

The power of democracy for Shakespeare was only defined by the example of Rome, which was inherently corrupt and fallible.

Rome fell.

In Shakespeare's last play, Coriolanus, he finally gives the populace a little credit for having the spine to reject a dictator. But not much. It was still Rome, after all. Plebians are easily fooled and manipulated.

Is our example of democracy in America something the might have changed Shakespeare's mind? What would he make of the Tragedy of Trump?

"...Shakespeare reflected throughout his life on the ways communities disintegrate. Endowed with an uncannily acute perception of human character and with rhetorical skills that would be the envy of any demagogue, he deftly sketched the kind of person who surges up in troubled times to appeal to the basest instincts and to draw upon the deepest anxiety of his contemporaries. A society locked into bitterly factionalized party politics, in his view, is particularly vulnerable to the fraudulent populism. And there are always instigators who arouse tyrannical ambition, and enablers, people who perceive the danger posed by this ambition but who think that they will be able to control the successful tyrant and to profit from his assault on established institutions ... 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."

Tyrants never win, for good, in Shakespeare.

Macbeth's Act V Scene 5 soliloquy after the death of Lady Macbeth is one of my favorite moments of Shakespeare. And one of my favorite lines is, "It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

When read as judgement of the general human condition, the soliloquy is an exercise in hopelessness; what we do does not matter in the end.

But when read as a judgment on tyranny, it is full of hope.


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