Tyrant

Stephen Greenblatt examines how Shakespeare's plays explore the mechanisms by which societies fall into tyranny. The book traces this preoccupation across Shakespeare's career, from the early 1590s to its end, arguing that the playwright used historical and fictional distance as an "oblique angle" to address political questions too dangerous to raise directly in Elizabethan England, where legal statutes dating to 1534 made it treason, punishable by death, to call the sovereign a tyrant.

Greenblatt opens by establishing the political anxieties of late Elizabethan England. Protestant authorities feared a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and impose papal authority. The queen's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, ran extensive counterintelligence operations, but threats persisted, notably from Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic claimant whose involvement in the 1586 Babington Plot, a conspiracy to kill Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne, led to Mary's execution. Elizabeth was aging, childless, and refused to name a successor. Shakespeare set his political dramas in ancient Rome, prehistoric Britain, or England at least a century before his own time, allowing honest reflection and safety from censorship.

The one exception proved the rule. In Henry V (1599), Shakespeare included a direct reference to the Earl of Essex's military campaign in Ireland, likely at the urging of his patron, the Earl of Southampton. The campaign failed, and Essex eventually staged a disastrous armed rising. On the eve of the coup, Essex's supporters paid Shakespeare's company to revive Richard II, which depicts a king's overthrow, to make their intended action imaginable to a mass audience. After Essex's execution, Elizabeth recognized the parallel, telling an archivist, "I am Richard II; know ye not that?" One of Shakespeare's associates was questioned by the Privy Council, the queen's governing advisory body, but released; Essex's steward Sir Gelly Meyrick, who arranged the performance, was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Greenblatt traces Shakespeare's anatomy of tyranny's rise through the Henry VI trilogy. The starting point is weakness at the center: King Henry VI is a youth managed by his uncle Duke Humphrey, the Lord Protector and chief governing deputy, surrounded by self-serving nobles who prefer a ruler they can dominate. In the Temple Garden scene, two of these nobles, the Duke of York and the Duke of Somerset, quarrel over an obscure legal point, transforming the dispute into rival party badges, the white rose and the red. Party rage develops a life of its own, each faction seeking the other's destruction. Young Henry diagnoses the problem but lacks the charisma or ruthlessness to stop it.

A cabal including the nobleman Suffolk, Cardinal Beaufort, York, and Queen Margaret, Henry VI's queen, conspires to destroy Humphrey, falsely accusing him of treason and arranging his murder. With Humphrey gone, York forges an alliance with the lower classes. His instrument is the demagogue Jack Cade, whom York secretly funds to lead a popular revolt. Cade makes absurd promises and advances transparent lies about his origins, entering what Greenblatt calls a "fantasyland" where contradictions do not matter. His appeal lies in giving followers permission to destroy institutions, demanding that the laws of England come from his mouth alone and that all records be burned. Beneath the absurdity, a genuine grievance fuels the revolt: "Benefit of clergy," a legal privilege, allowed literate people to escape execution while the illiterate were hanged. The rebellion collapses, but York simultaneously arrives with an army, launching full-scale civil war.

The war paves the way for tyranny. York is captured and killed by the cruelty he unleashed. His sons continue the dynastic struggle, while the party seeking power secretly contacts England's enemy, France, betraying the nationalism it had weaponized. The legitimate king cannot count on popular gratitude, and both Henry VI and his son are murdered. The apparent restoration of order under the new Yorkist king, Edward IV, is illusory: His brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who murdered Henry VI, has already declared, "I have no brother. . . . I am myself alone" (5.6.80–83).

Greenblatt turns to Richard III to analyze the psychology of the tyrant. Shakespeare roots Richard's drive for power in his physical deformity, a twisted spine that caused people to recoil from birth, and in his mother the Duchess of York's failure to love him. Shakespeare insists on dual causation: The deformity is both a sign of inner wickedness and, through society's cruel reaction, the condition that produces Richard's psychopathology. Unable to be a lover, Richard compensates by pursuing absolute domination, his chief weapon being the very absurdity of his ambition, which prevents anyone from suspecting him.

Greenblatt catalogs the enablers who make Richard's rise possible: those genuinely fooled, those frightened into silence, those who normalize the abnormal, those who trust institutions will hold, and those who think they can profit. He examines the murder of Richard's brother Clarence as illustrating how guilt and rapidly shifting events cloud judgment. Richard stages a fraudulent election with the Duke of Buckingham, his chief strategist, but the lies fool almost no one. A nameless scribe asks the essential question: "Who is so gross/That cannot see this palpable device? Yet who so bold but says he sees it not?" (3.6.10–12). Once in power, Richard proves incompetent to govern. He orders the murder of the princes in the Tower, and his paranoia drives away allies. He confronts absolute loneliness on the eve of Bosworth Field and dies at the hands of the Earl of Richmond, who leads the opposing forces against him.

Greenblatt examines Macbeth as Shakespeare's most mature exploration of tyranny, contrasting Macbeth's moral sensitivity with Richard's gleeful villainy. Macbeth harbors no long-term dream of power until three witches prophesy that he will be king. His wife, Lady Macbeth, is the true instigator, goading him with sexual taunts about his manhood until he agrees to murder King Duncan. Afterward, Macbeth deteriorates rapidly: The man once appalled by treachery hires murderers to kill his friend Banquo, grows afraid of everything, and becomes enmeshed in lies. His marriage disintegrates. His "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy expresses not the existential condition of humankind but the specific fate of the tyrant: utter meaninglessness.

Greenblatt examines legitimate rulers who descend into tyranny through mental instability. In King Lear, an aged king demands his daughters compete in flattery; only his youngest, Cordelia, refuses, and only the Earl of Kent, a loyal counselor, dares object, for which he is banished. Cordelia returns from France with an army, but her forces are defeated, she is hanged in prison, and Lear dies of grief. In The Winter's Tale, King Leontes's sudden paranoid conviction that his wife Hermione has committed adultery drives the plot. Hermione's friend, the noblewoman Paulina, defies the king to his face, and the play uniquely allows recovery through genuine repentance, but the dead child Mamillius, Leontes's son, stands as an emblem of what cannot be recovered.

Greenblatt surveys Shakespeare's depictions of resistance. He identifies the nameless servant in Lear who intervenes to stop the blinding of the Earl of Gloucester, a loyal nobleman, as one of Shakespeare's great heroes. In Julius Caesar, the conspirator Brutus's principled assassination of Caesar backfires, producing the very Caesarism he sought to avert. In Coriolanus, the tribunes, cynical career politicians who insist on democratic procedures, prove to be the city's real saviors against a warrior-aristocrat whose mother Volumnia raised him solely for military glory. When banished, Coriolanus defects to Rome's enemies and leads an army against his homeland, until Volumnia shames him into sparing the city.

In his concluding chapter, Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare believed tyrants would always fail, brought down by their own incompetence and by a spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never extinguished. The playwright's best hope lay in the unpredictability of collective life and the political action of ordinary citizens: those who stayed silent when exhorted to acclaim the tyrant, the servant who defied his master, the hungry citizen who demanded justice.