Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt (review)

I should let Professor Greenblatt describe the origin of this strange book in his own words:

Not so very long ago, though it feels like a century has passed, I sat in a verdant garden in Sardinia and expressed my growing apprehensions 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. And so I did.

Bernhard Jussen may have had something different in mind, not a book but several op-ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or the New York Times, which might have a prompt impact on the 60 million citizens who, lacking such persuasion, intended to vote for Mr. Trump as President. A book could not appear until after the gloomy deed was done.

Professor Greenblatt is not a man to waste his energy. Tyrant is a series of commentaries on Shakespeare’s history plays, tragedies, and romances that present the rise and fall of tyrants, notably the Henry VI plays, and Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and The Winter’s Tale. But these commentaries are really homilies addressed to American readers, as if to say, “You have chosen a tyrant as President. Think of what you have done. Do not repeat the folly in 2020. Shakespeare knew what a tyrant was. True, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by a respectable three million votes, but she lost the only contest that mattered, the Electoral College. Take heed.” But the homilies won’t stand much examination. The one quality of character a Shakespearean tyrant must have is readiness to dispose of his opponents by murdering them, as Bolingbroke disposed of Richard II, Gloucester of Clarence, the Macbeths of Duncan, Brutus of Caesar—“It must be by his death.” The weakest of Greenblatt’s homilies is on King Lear. He is not a tyrant, despite his wretched taste for flattery. “I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee,” he says to the dead Cordelia. That hardly counts as tyranny. I would do the same if one of my beloved daughters were up for hanging. But in any case President Trump, often called buffoon and liar, has never been accused of murder. He admires leaders who indeed have committed murder—Putin, Kim Jong-un, Erdogan—but he has not joined them in that capacity. Greenblatt’s homilies are wildly in excess of their Sardinian occasion.

Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton is named in Tyrant. Mrs. Clinton is never alluded to; Mr. Trump is summoned up by rough-and-ready quotation from him, phrases we have heard on TV and wish we hadn’t. Jack Cade, scoundrel of 2 Henry VI, promises, according to Greenblatt, to “make England great again” (41). Cade “has in his hands the realm’s highest fiscal officer, the emblem of the swamp that he has pledged to drain.” Greenblatt describes Richard III as if he were giving evidence against Trump:

He is not merely indifferent to the law; he hates it and takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and because it stands for a notion of the public good that he holds in contempt. He divides the world into winners and losers.

Richard “has found a way to be present—by force or fraud, violence or insinuation—everywhere and in everyone. No one can keep him out.” I would not have thought of that if I hadn’t adverted to the fact that it is impossible to tune into MSNBC without seeing Trump’s complacent face.

Greenblatt sometimes shows his own hand in cosmic generalizations. Trying to explain Richard’s success in getting the crown (or, more quietly, Trump’s getting the chair in the Oval Office) Greenblatt thinks of the lackeys who do the master’s bidding in hope of being eventually rewarded, and he says that “the aspiring tyrant never lacks for such people...