What analysing the traits of Shakespeare’s tyrants teaches us about Donald Trump

What would Shakespeare have made of Donald Trump? It’s one of the impish and fascinating questions at the heart of this nimble and intriguing study of the Bard’s lurid gallery of vicious despots.

Greenblatt is the Harvard Shakespeare expert who co-founded new historicism, the lit-crit practice that seeks to place works in their historical context. The 45th president is not mentioned anywhere by name in Tyrant, but the analogies are clear.

Shakespeare, Greenblatt explains, had to speak of authoritarianism in code, lest he lose his head on charges of treason. The Elizabethan period was a “fragile” era politically, haunted by the shadow of Catholic terrorism.

Tyrant was borne out of a New York Times article Greenblatt wrote just before the 2016 US election; he confesses to having been moved to extend it into a book after the election result confirmed his “worst fears”.

The ogres Greenblatt focuses on — Macbeth, Richard III, Lear, Coriolanus and Leontes from A Winter’s Tale — unsurprisingly exhibit a checklist of the obvious Trumpian traits: narcissism, impulsiveness, indecency, incompetence.

These parallels, though, while playfully toothsome, are less striking than Greenblatt’s other preoccupations. These include the role of the masses in the tyrant’s rise, the opportunistic and self-deceiving “enablers” in his court and how, for the despot, there is “remarkably little satisfaction”, or serenity, once the throne is taken.

Shakespeare was a wealthy member of the ruling class, Greenblatt asserts, a conservative with democratic leanings, with little taste for disorder. He expresses his ultimate faith in the elemental virtue of the citizenry over revolution.

It’s a belief that chimes with the contentions of some key Trump (below) analysts, not least ex-FBI director James Comey, who has argued that the most restorative way of toppling Trump is through the will of the people over the trauma of impeachment.

In Tyrant, Greenblatt demonstrates the enduring relevance of Shakespeare’s outlook as much as providing a commentary on the vices of Trumpism. Shakespeare’s voice rings down the ages, and, as with innumerable other human matters, we would do well to listen to it.