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Stephen Greenblatt '64: NY Times reviews his book "Tyrant"

What would Shakespeare have made of Donald Trump?

June 20, 2018

The New York Times

Book review by Simon Callow

TYRANT
Shakespeare on Politics
By Stephen Greenblatt
212 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $21.95.

Is Shakespeare our contemporary? Stephen Greenblatt would have us believe he is. Tormented by the rise to power of the current occupant of the White House, he has discerned in it a pattern chillingly reminiscent of that of the tyrants of the author whose work he has spent a lifetime studying. In groundbreaking books like “Hamlet in Purgatory” and “Will in the World,” he has, by exploring lesser-known areas of Elizabethan life and thought, thrown new light on these infinitely rich and endlessly subtle plays. In “Tyrant,” he reverses the process. Slyly and wittily, he analyzes political events in Shakespeare’s world in terms of our own experience. “The terrorists,” he writes of the Elizabethan Roman Catholic insurgency, “were not easy to identify, since most of them were homegrown. Having been radicalized, lured abroad to training camps, and then smuggled back into England, they blended easily into the mass of ordinary, loyal subjects.” Most of their recruits, he says, were drawn from “disaffected, unstable youths prone to dreams of violence and martyrdom.”

Similarly, in his trenchant analysis of the power play in “Henry VI,” Greenblatt notes how the sudden eruption of hostility between the Dukes of Somerset and York precipitates “group solidarity and group loathing … which makes the voice, even the very thought, of the opponent almost unendurable.” Nobody is listening to anyone else, simply engaging in tribal chanting. Again and again, Greenblatt retells the familiar stories of Shakespeare’s egregious tyrants — Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and, unexpectedly and acutely, Jack Cade, the rebel leader in “Henry VI, Part II” — in ways that unavoidably recall the situation in America today.

Though Greenblatt never names the 45th president, he has, on his own admission, a severe case of the DTs. Virtually every paragraph of the book points to him: “Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself,” do the “cherished institutions” of a free society, “seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to?” And of the populist fantasist: “Cade himself, for all we know, may think that what he is so obviously making up as he goes along will actually come to pass.” Greenblatt goes for the jugular with this particular parallel: “Drawing on an indifference to the truth, shamelessness and hyperinflated self-confidence, the loudmouthed demagogue is entering into a fantasyland — ‘When I am king, as king I will be’ — and he invites his listeners to enter the same magical space with him. In that space, two and two do not have to equal four, and the most recent assertion need not remember the contradictory assertion that was made a few seconds earlier.”

“Richard III” offers even richer pickings. Dramatists have regularly enlisted the crookbacked Plantagenet as a paradigm of tyranny: Brecht, famously, in “Arturo Ui,” his cartoon of Hitler’s “resistible” rise to power, and the British dramatist David Edgar’s brutal assault on Richard Nixon in the multiply-punning “Dick Deterred.” In a powerful chapter, Greenblatt homes in less on the tyrant himself than on those who have allowed him to come to power — the enablers, as he calls them. He names and shames seven categories: those who are taken in by the tyrant; those who ignore him; those who believe that such a person could never come to power (“Richard is so obviously and grotesquely unqualified for the supreme position of power that they dismiss him from their minds”); those cowed by his bullying; those who believe they can control him (these are “among the first to go under, once Richard has used them to obtain his end”); those who happily take orders from anyone; and those who fall for “the big, bold lie.” There is one more corrosive category, the fascinated bystanders (in other words, everyone else): “Something in us enjoys every minute of his horrible ascent to power.”

Greenblatt’s most savage parallels are from “King Lear.” “Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office?” Examining the great early scene of the division of the kingdom, he observes, chillingly, “It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.” The whole of “Lear” bears this out.

In “The Winter’s Tale” King Leontes is not mad, but in the grip of hysteria: “When an autocratic, paranoid, narcissistic ruler sits down with a civil servant and asks for his loyalty, the state is in danger.” Rampant narcissism is the greatest threat. Leontes, Greenblatt says, in one of his most memorable phrases, “has folded the whole state into himself.” In the end, Leontes repents, an outcome unlikely with present-day tyrants. “Imagining this inner transformation,” Greenblatt says, with a wry allusion to the final redemptive scene of “The Winter’s Tale,” “is almost as difficult as imagining a statue coming to life.” Our best hope is that some fearless soul within the tyrant’s circle, like the unnamed servant in “Lear” who protests at Cornwall’s gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes, will call a halt. In the bleak universe of “Lear,” though, the fearless soul in question is rewarded with sudden death.

Salvation finally comes in “Coriolanus.” Here Greenblatt dares to hope, keeping faith, as he feels Shakespeare does, with “the sheer unpredictability of collective life, its refusal to march in lock step to any one person’s orders.” The tyrant is at last brought down by the tribunes — not heroes, mere functionaries, “akin to the much-maligned professional politicians of democratic congresses and parliaments everywhere. … It is they who are the city’s real saviors.” “What is the city,” Greenblatt asks, quoting the play, “but the people?”

“Tyrant” is a fine polemic, but it is considerably more than that. We learn not simply what Trump tells us about Shakespeare but what Shakespeare tells us about Trump. Illuminating scene after scene, Greenblatt is especially fine on the mechanisms of tyranny, its ecology, so to speak, leaving one deeply moved all over again by Shakespeare’s profound and direct understanding of what it is to be human — which includes, alas, being a tyrant.