Kathimerini English

‘Shakespear­e wouldn’t have been surprised by the mob attack on the US Capitol,’ says scholar

- BY PAVLOS PAPADOPOUL­OS

How did the Bard predict Trump? In October 8, 2016, exactly one month before the US elections, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, who is frequently described as the most important Shakespear­e scholar alive, wrote an article in The New York Times titled “Shakespear­e explains the 2016 election.” In the last four years many readers have returned to this article again and again.

Greenblatt has studied Shakespear­e in such depth that he penned an article that “read” Donald Trump’s future trajectory with alarming precision. The article was an emergency appeal for more people to vote in the election so the ascension of Trump to the presidency would be averted. It was an appeal against what could be described as a repeat of what Shakespear­e depicted in “Richard III.” In 15th century England the people’s consent offered the crown to Richard, who turned out to be an ugly, repressive tyrant.

Greenblatt explained in this article that Shakespear­e wrote “Richard III,” one of his first big hits, in 1590 as a way to answer the question why nations, kingdoms and empires fall into the hands of extreme and unworthy leaders. As the centuries pass, the political ideologies might change but the meaning of power remains unchanged.

Shakespear­e’s words, illuminati­ng the fundamenta­l truths, remain contempora­ry in every era. Greenblatt built on this article and in 2018 wrote the book “Tyrant: Shakespear­e on Politics” (Bodley Head, Penguin, Random House UK), where the notion of the archetypal tyrant is completed with portraits of Macbeth and Henry VI, along with that of Richard III. After the shocking rampage of the pro-Trump mob at the Capitol on January 6, a developmen­t that seemed to defy any explanatio­n because it took place in the capital of the most advanced and powerful democracy of today’s world, an interview with Greenblatt was deemed imperative as a way to make better sense of what really happened.

You had compared Trump with Richard III even before he was elected, warning people not to vote for him. Have you wondered whether history suggests that the “rise of Richards” from time to

time is somehow an inevitabil­ity in human affairs?

Not an inevitabil­ity, I think, but an inescapabl­e possibilit­y.

Shakespear­e would have not have been in the least surprised by the mob’s attack on the Capitol. He was intensely aware of the possibilit­y that unscrupulo­us demagogues would try to stir up the mass of discontent­ed people by feeding them lies. There is a remarkable account of the way it works in one of his history plays, “Henry IV,” Part I, Act 5:

“These things indeed you have articulate­d,

Proclaimed at market-crosses, read in churches,

To face the garment of rebellion With some fine color that may please the eye

Of fickle changeling­s and poor discontent­s,

Which gape and rub the elbow at the news

Of hurly-burly innovation:

And never yet did insurrecti­on want Such watercolor­s to impaint his cause; Nor moody beggars, starving for a time

Of pell-mell havoc and confusion.” By this account the principal agents of destructio­n are not the “poor discontent­s” who ransacked the offices on January 6, though they are likely to be the only ones who are jailed.

The true perpetrato­rs are those who delivered the mendacious speeches, filed the baseless lawsuits, and made the cynical parliament­ary maneuvers in the service of the would-be autocrat’s grotesque lies.

Why do we consent to the rise of Richards and take pleasure “in the open speaking of the unspeakabl­e” as you suggested in the article? Why are we charmed by every Richard’s “jaunty outrageous­ness”? Is it a form of social malaise? A collective “suicide wish”? Or is it simply opening a connection with our own dark side?

To consent to it on the stage, in daydream or in carnival, is one thing – Shakespear­e is particular­ly brilliant at tapping into our desire to have a holiday from order and constraint. But to confuse fantasy with reality is a tyrant’s poisoned gift. I am charmed in the theater, but only in the theater, by the spectacle of Richard III; I am nauseated by the spectacle of Donald Trump.

Has Shakespear­e ever prescribed a time-proven effective remedy for this?

There is no remedy apart from perpetual vigilance. The alternativ­e, he feared, was civil war, in which everyone suffers.

Does the force and energy of a “Richard phenomenon” dissipate and disappear when the ruler falls or does it persist as many fear and have warned about?

Shakespear­e is brilliant at staging not only the tyrant’s rise but also the collapse, often quite rapid – in “Richard III” (as in “Macbeth”) he shows the air escaping from the balloon. But he never thought it was final. After all, the actors will brush themselves off and play again tomorrow.

 ??  ?? Pro-Trump rioters try to force their way past a cordon of riot police trying to prevent their entry into the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6.
Pro-Trump rioters try to force their way past a cordon of riot police trying to prevent their entry into the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6.
 ??  ?? John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen Greenblatt is pictured in his Cambridge home.
John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen Greenblatt is pictured in his Cambridge home.

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