Tyrants old and new
TYRANT, BY the American Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt (Bodley Head, £16.99) begins with an account of a performance of Richard II probably intended to aid the Essex conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare and his players were investigated but escaped the fate of the performance’s sponsor, Essex’s henchman Sir Gelly Meyrick. He was hanged, drawn and quartered.
Dangerous politics prompted the Bard to write from “oblique angles” — on a monarch of two centuries past, on caricatured opponents of Elizabeth’s granddad, on remote Romans or preRoman Brits. Greenblatt in turn uses Shakespeare’s plays to assess tyranny as it has always existed. He leaves little doubt about who he has in mind today.
Half of his book is devoted to the early tetralogy: Henry VI, I-III/Richard III. The rise of the tyrant described here relies on distortion, but apologists will argue that dramatic truth trumps detail and, anyway, audiences must experience loathing and laughter. Greenblatt follows his master by implying similitudes to evoke current chills and chuckles.
As the playwright evaded overt allusion, so Greenblatt avoids being explicit. Generic traits are catalogued: deliberate lying, exploitation of party, descent into populism, anti-elitism, resentment, sarcasm, changeability, ingratitude, impunity, lust for domination, theatricality, stimulation of veniality and fear in followers, sowing of apathy and moral confusion.
With the mature Shakespeare, Greenblatt almost steps from behind the arras. Citing Macbeth’s final soliloquy, he observes: “It is difficult to picture the tyrants of our own times having any such moment of truthful reckoning”. In relation to King Lear, he poses the 25th Amendment question: “What happens when a chief executive is not mentally fit to hold office?” With The Winter’s Tale, he evokes a President’s dinner with an FBI Director: “When an autocratic, paranoid, narcissistic ruler sits down with a civil servant and asks for his loyalty, the state is in danger.”
Modes of resistance occupy a penultimate chapter. Those who oppose the tyrant in Julius Caesar fail to save their republic; those who oppose one in Coriolanus lure him into expressing contempt for the people, assuring his ejection. Enraged, the tyrant reverts to his homeland’s enemies: “It is as if the leader of a political party long identified with hatred of Russia… should secretly make his way to Moscow and offer his services to the Kremlin”.
Greenblatt ends by recalling that Shakespeare became a businessman and landowner in favour of law and order and prepared to leave it to the “unpredictability” of events to sweep tyrants away. Such pragmatism saved few lives in the 20th century. Many will view it as a compromised model for writerly conduct after Auschwitz. STODDARD MARTIN
Greenblatt almost steps from behind the arras