CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

How does a truly disastrous leader – a sociopath, a demagogue, a tyrant – come to power?

How, and why, does a tyrant hold on to power?

And what goes on in the hidden recesses of the tyrant’s soul?

For help in understanding our most urgent contemporary dilemmas, William Shakespeare has no peer.

As an ageing, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social and psychological roots and the twisted consequences of tyranny. What he discovered in his characters remains remarkably relevant today. With uncanny insight, he shone a spotlight on the infantile psychology and unquenchable narcissistic appetites of demagogues and imagined how they might be stopped.

In Tyrant, Stephen Greenblatt examines the themes of power and tyranny in some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays – from the dominating figures of Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Coriolanus to the subtle tyranny found in Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale.

Tyrant is a highly relevant exploration of Shakespeare’s work that sheds new light on the workings of power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning.

He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, and has edited seven collections of literary criticism.

EDITED BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays (with Peter G. Platt)

Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall (with Ramie Targoff)

Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto

The Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor)

The Norton Shakespeare (general editor)

New World Encounters

Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (with Giles Gunn)

Representing the English Renaissance

Allegory and Representation

ALSO BY STEPHEN GREENBLATT

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Shakespeare’s Freedom

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Hamlet in Purgatory

Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher)

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles

Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley

One

OBLIQUE ANGLES

FROM THE EARLY 1590S, at the beginning of his career, all the way through to its end, Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?

“A king rules over willing subjects,” wrote the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, “a tyrant over unwilling.” The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.”¹ Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne?

Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?

Shakespeare repeatedly depicted the tragic cost of this submission—the moral corruption, the massive waste of treasure, the loss of life—and the desperate, painful, heroic measures required to return a damaged nation to some modicum of health. Is there, the plays ask, any way to stop the slide toward lawless and arbitrary rule before it is too late, any effective means to prevent the civil catastrophe that tyranny invariably provokes?

The playwright was not accusing England’s current ruler, Elizabeth I, of being a tyrant. Quite apart from whatever Shakespeare privately thought, it would have been suicidal to float such a suggestion onstage. Dating back to 1534, during the reign of the queen’s father, Henry VIII, legal statutes made it treason to refer to the ruler as a tyrant.² The penalty for such a crime was death.

There was no freedom of expression in Shakespeare’s England, on the stage or anywhere else. The 1597 performances of an allegedly seditious play called The Isle of Dogs led to the arrest and imprisonment of the playwright Ben Jonson and to a government order—fortunately not enforced—to demolish all the playhouses in London.³ Informants attended the theater, eager to claim a reward for denouncing to the authorities anything that could be construed as subversive. Attempts to reflect critically on contemporary events or on leading figures were particularly risky.

As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare’s penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge truth—to possess it fully and not perish of it—through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance. Hence the fascination he found in the legendary Roman leader Caius Martius Coriolanus or in the historical Julius Caesar; hence the appeal of such figures from the English and Scottish chronicles as York, Jack Cade, Lear, and, above all, the quintessential tyrants Richard III and Macbeth. And hence, too, the lure of entirely imaginary figures: the sadistic emperor Saturninus in Titus Andronicus; the corrupt deputy Angelo in Measure for Measure; the paranoid King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale.

Shakespeare’s popular success suggests that many of his contemporaries felt the same thing. Liberated from the surrounding circumstances and liberated, too, from the endlessly repeated clichés about patriotism and obedience, his writing could be ruthlessly honest. The playwright remained very much part of his place and time, but he was not their mere creature. Things that had been maddeningly unclear came into sharp focus, and he did not need to remain silent about what he perceived.

Shakespeare understood, as well, something that in our own time is revealed when a major event—the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the housing market, a startling election result—manages to throw a garish light on an unnerving fact: even those at the center of the innermost circles of power very often have no idea what is about to happen. Notwithstanding their desks piled high with calculations and estimates, their costly network of spies, their armies of well-paid experts, they remain almost completely in the dark. Looking on from the margins, you dream that if you could only get close enough to this or that key figure, you would have access to the actual state of affairs and know what steps you need to take to protect yourself or your country. But the dream is a delusion.

At the beginning of one of his history plays, Shakespeare introduces the figure of Rumor, in a costume “painted full of tongues,” whose task is ceaselessly to circulate stories “blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures” (⊠ Henry IV Induction 16).⁴ Its effects are painfully apparent in disastrously misinterpreted signals, fraudulent comforts, false alarms, sudden lurches from wild hope to suicidal despair. And the figures most deceived are not the gross multitude but, rather, the privileged and powerful.

For Shakespeare, then, it was easier to think clearly when the noise of those babbling tongues was silenced and easier to tell the truth at a strategic distance from the present moment. The oblique angle allowed him to lift off the false assumptions, the time-honored beliefs, and the misguided dreams of piety and to look unwaveringly at what lay beneath. Hence his interest in the world of classical antiquity, where Christian faith and monarchical rhetoric do not apply; his fascination with the pre-Christian Britain of King Lear or Cymbeline; his engagement with the violent eleventh-century Scotland of Macbeth. And even when he came closer to his own world, in the remarkable sequence of history plays extending from the fourteenth-century reign of Richard II to the downfall of Richard III, Shakespeare carefully kept at least a full century between himself and the events he depicted.

At the time he was writing, Elizabeth I had been queen for more than thirty years. Though she could on occasion be prickly, difficult, and imperious, her fundamental respect for the sanctity of the realm’s political institutions was not generally in doubt. Even those who advocated a more aggressive foreign policy or clamored for a harsher crackdown on domestic subversion than she was willing to authorize ordinarily acknowledged her prudent sense of the limits to her power. Shakespeare is very unlikely to have regarded her, even in his most private thoughts, as a tyrant. But, like the rest of his countrymen, he had every reason to worry about what lay just ahead. In 1593, the queen celebrated her sixtieth birthday. Unmarried and childless, she stubbornly refused to name a successor. Did she think she was going to live forever?

For those with any imagination, there was more to worry about than the stealthy assault of time. It was widely feared that the kingdom faced an implacable enemy, a ruthless international conspiracy whose leaders trained and then dispatched abroad fanatical secret agents bent on unleashing terror. These agents believed that killing people labeled as misbelievers was no sin; on the contrary, they were doing God’s work. In France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere they had already been responsible for assassinations, mob violence, and wholesale massacres. Their immediate goal in England was to kill the queen, crown in her place one of their sympathizers, and subjugate the country to their own twisted vision of piety. Their overarching goal was world domination.

The terrorists were not easy to identity, since most of them were home-grown. Having been radicalized, lured abroad to training camps, and then smuggled back into England, they blended easily into the mass of ordinary, loyal subjects. Those subjects were understandably reluctant to turn in their own kin, even ones suspected of harboring dangerous views. The extremists formed cells, praying in secret together, exchanging coded messages, and trolling for other likely recruits, drawn largely from the population of disaffected, unstable youths prone to dreams of violence and martyrdom. Some of them were in clandestine contact with the representatives of foreign governments who hinted darkly at invasion fleets and support for armed uprisings.

England’s spy services were highly alert to the danger: they planted moles in the training camps, systematically opened correspondence, listened in on conversations in taverns and inns, and carefully scrutinized ports and border crossings. But the danger was difficult to eradicate, even when the authorities managed to get their hands on one or more of the suspected terrorists and questioned them under oath. After all, these were fanatics licensed by their religious leaders to deceive and instructed in what was called “equivocation,” a method of misleading without technically lying.

If the suspects were interrogated under torture, as was routinely done, they were still often difficult to break. According to a report sent to the queen’s spymaster, the extremist who assassinated Holland’s Prince of Orange in 1584—the first man ever to kill a head of state with a handgun—remained uncannily obdurate:

“An act acceptable to God”: these were people brainwashed to believe that they would be rewarded in heaven for their acts of treachery and violence.

The menace in question, according to the zealous Protestants of late-sixteenth-century England, was Roman Catholicism. To the intense vexation of the queen’s principal advisers, Elizabeth herself was reluctant to call the threat by its name and to take what they regarded as the necessary measures. She did not wish to provoke an expensive and bloody war with powerful Catholic states or to tar an entire religion with the crimes of a few fanatics. Unwilling, in the words of her spymaster Francis Walsingham, “to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts,”⁶ for many years she allowed her subjects quietly to hold on to their Catholic beliefs, provided that they outwardly conformed to the official state religion. And, despite vehement urgings, she repeatedly refused to sanction the execution of her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots.

Having been driven out of Scotland, Mary was being held, without charge or trial, in a kind of protective detention in the north of England. Since she had a strong hereditary claim to the English throne—stronger, some thought, than Elizabeth herself—she was the obvious focus for the machinations of the Catholic powers of Europe and for the overheated daydreams and dangerous conspiracies of Catholic extremists at home. Mary herself was foolhardy enough to sanction sinister designs on her behalf.

The mastermind behind these designs, it was widely believed, was none other than the pope in Rome; his special forces were the Jesuits, sworn to obey him in everything; his hidden legions in England were the thousands of “Church papists” who dutifully attended Anglican services but harbored allegiance to Catholicism in their hearts. When Shakespeare was coming of age, rumors of the Jesuits—officially banned from entering the country, on pain of death—and the threats that they posed circulated widely. Their actual numbers may have been few, but the fear and loathing they aroused (along with clandestine admiration in some quarters) were considerable.

It is impossible to determine with any certainty where Shakespeare’s innermost sympathies lay. But he cannot have been neutral or indifferent. Both of his parents had been born into a Catholic world, and for them, as for most of their contemporaries, the links to that world survived the Reformation. There was every reason for wariness and circumspection, and not merely because of the harsh punishments meted out by the Protestant authorities. The menace in England attributed to militant Catholicism was by no means entirely imaginary. In 1570, Pope Pius V issued a bull excommunicating Elizabeth as a heretic and a “servant of crime.” The queen’s subjects were released from any obligation they might have sworn to her; indeed, they were solemnly enjoined to disobey. A decade later, Pope Gregory XIII suggested that killing England’s queen would not be a mortal sin. On the contrary, as the papal secretary of state declared on his master’s behalf, “there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing God service, not only does not sin but gains merit.”⁷

That declaration was incitement to murder. Though most English Catholics wanted nothing to do with such violent measures, a few took it in their heads to try to rid the country of its heretical ruler. In 1583, the government’s spy network discovered a conspiracy, with the collusion of the Spanish ambassador, to assassinate the queen. All through the years that followed there were comparable stories of dangers narrowly averted: letters intercepted, weapons seized, Catholic priests captured. Alerted by suspicious neighbors, officers would descend on rural safe houses, where they would smash cupboards, tap on walls for telltale hollow sounds, and rip up floorboards in search of so-called priests’ holes. But still Elizabeth did nothing to eliminate the threat posed by Mary. “God open her Majesty’s eyes,” prayed Walsingham, “to see her peril.”⁸

The queen’s inner circle took the highly irregular step of drawing up a “Bond of Association,” whose signers pledged to take revenge not only on anyone who made an attempt on the queen’s life but also on any potential claimant to the throne—Mary was the obvious target—in whose interest such an attempt, successful or not, had been made. In 1586, Walsingham’s spies got wind of another plot, this time involving a wealthy twenty-four-year-old Catholic gentleman named Anthony Babington, who, together with a group of like-minded friends, had persuaded himself that it was morally acceptable to kill the “tyrant.” Using double agents who had penetrated the group and deciphered its secret codes, the authorities watched and waited as the conspiracy slowly unfolded. Indeed, when Babington began to get cold feet, one of Walsingham’s agents provocateurs urged him on. The strategy paid the dividend the Protestant hard-liners had most hoped for: not only did the net catch fourteen conspirators, who were duly convicted of treason and then hanged, drawn, and quartered, but it also ensnared the careless, conniving Mary.

Like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the beheading of Mary on February 8, 1587, did not end the threat of terrorism in England; nor did it end with the defeat of the Spanish Armada the following year. If anything, the country’s mood darkened. Another foreign invasion seemed imminent. The government’s spies continued their work; Catholic priests continued to venture into England and minister to their increasingly desperate and beleaguered flock; wild rumors continued to circulate. A day laborer was forced to stand in the pillory in 1591 for having said, “We shall never have a merry world while the Queen liveth”; another received a similar punishment for declaring that “this is no good government which we now live under … and if the Queen die there will be a change and all those that be of this religion now used will be pulled out.”⁹ At Sir John Perrot’s treason trial in 1592, it was reported as a serious charge that he had described the queen as “a base bastard piss-kitchen woman.” In the Star Chamber, the Lord Keeper complained of all the “railing open speeches [and] false, lying, traitorous libels” circulating in London.¹⁰

Even if loose talk bordering on treason could somehow be shrugged off, there was still the succession issue to worry about. The queen’s fluorescent red wig and her extravagant jeweled gowns could not conceal the passage of years. She had arthritis, her appetite failed her, and she began to use a staff to steady herself when she climbed stairs. She was, as her courtier Sir Walter Ralegh delicately put it, “a lady whom Time has surprised.” Yet she would not name a successor.

Late Elizabethan England knew in its heart that the whole order of things was utterly fragile. The anxiety was by no means restricted only to a small Protestant elite eager to preserve its dominance. Beleaguered Catholics had argued for years that the queen was surrounded by Machiavellian politicians, each of whom was constantly maneuvering to advance the interests of his faction, stirring up paranoid fears of Catholic conspiracies, and waiting for the critical moment when he could seize tyrannical power for himself. Disgruntled Puritans had a comparable set of fears focused on a similar cast of characters. Anyone concerned about the country’s religious settlement, about the distribution of wealth, about its foreign relations, about the possibility of civil war—that is, almost anyone who was fully sentient in the 1590s—must have brooded about the state of the queen’s health and talked about rival favorites and counselors at court, the threat of Spanish invasion, the clandestine presence of Jesuits, the agitation of Puritans (then called Brownists), and other reasons for alarm.

Most of the talk, to be sure, had to be in whispers, but it went on all the time in the obsessive, round-and-round-the-same-track way that political discussions always go. Shakespeare repeatedly depicts minor characters—the gardeners in Richard II, nameless Londoners in Richard III, soldiers on the eve of battle in Henry V, starving plebeians in Coriolanus, cynical subalterns in Antony and Cleopatra, and the like—sharing rumors and debating matters of state. Such reflections by the lowly upon their betters tended to enrage the elite: “Go, get you home, you fragments” (Coriolanus 1.1.214), an aristocrat snarls at a group of protesters. But the fragments could not be silenced.

None of England’s national security concerns, major or minor, could be depicted directly on the stage. The theater companies that thrived in London were feverishly in search of exciting stories, and they would have loved to draw audiences with the equivalent of television’s Homeland. But the Elizabethan theater was censored, and though on occasion the censor could be lax, he would never have permitted the staging of plots that depicted threats to the queen’s regime, let alone allowed the public impersonation of figures like Mary, Queen of Scots, Anthony Babington, or Elizabeth herself.¹¹

Censorship inevitably generates techniques of evasion. Like Midas’s wife, people feel compelled to talk, if only to the wind and the reeds, about whatever is most deeply disturbing to them. Theater companies, competing fiercely with one another, had a strong economic incentive for addressing this compulsion. They discovered that it was possible to do so by shifting the scene to far-off places or by depicting events in the distant past. On rare occasions, the censor found the parallels too obvious or demanded proof that historical events were being correctly rendered, but for the most part he winked at the subterfuge. Perhaps the authorities recognized that some escape valve was necessary.

Shakespeare was the supreme master of displacement and strategic indirection. He never wrote what were called “city comedies,” plays in contemporary English settings, and, with very rare exceptions, he kept a safe distance from current events. He was drawn to plots that unfolded in places like Ephesus, Tyre, Illyria, Sicily, Bohemia, or a mysterious, nameless island in a remote sea. When he engaged with fraught historical events—succession crises, corrupt elections, assassinations, the rise of tyrants—these happened in ancient Greece and Rome or in prehistoric Britain or in the England of his great-great-grandparents and earlier. He felt free to alter and reshape the materials he drew from the chronicle histories, in order to produce more compelling and pointed stories, but he worked with identifiable sources, which, if required by the authorities, he could cite in his defense. He was understandably reluctant to spend time in prison or have his nose slit.

There was only one notable exception to this lifelong strategy of indirection. Henry V, which Shakespeare wrote in 1599, depicts the spectacular military triumph, almost two centuries earlier, of an English army that had invaded France. Toward the end of the play, a chorus invites the audience to imagine the glorious reception the victorious king received when he returned to his capital: “Behold/In the quick forge and working-house of thought/How London doth pour out her citizens” (5.0.22–24). Then, on the heels of this image of a popular celebration in the nation’s past, the chorus conjures up a comparable scene it hopes to witness in the near future:

The “General” in question was the queen’s favorite, the Earl of Essex, who was at that moment leading English forces against Irish insurgents led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone.

It is not clear why Shakespeare decided to refer directly to a current event—and one that could only be hoped for “in good time.”¹² Perhaps the playwright was urged to do so by his patron, the wealthy Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare had dedicated his poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Essex’s close friend and political ally, Southampton knew that his vainglorious, debt-ridden friend avidly courted popular acclaim, and the theater was the perfect venue for reaching the masses. Accordingly, he may have hinted to the playwright that a patriotic anticipation of the general’s impending triumph would be most welcome. It would have been difficult for Shakespeare to have refused.

As it happened, shortly after Henry V was first performed, the headstrong Essex did indeed return to London, but not with the head of Hugh O’Neill spitted on his sword. Facing the abject failure of his military campaign, he had thrown up his hands and left Ireland, against the queen’s explicit orders that he remain there. He decided to come home.

What then unfolded were a series of events that quickly built to a crisis at the very center of the regime. Essex’s precipitous and unwelcome return—still mud-spattered, he burst in upon the queen, threw himself at her feet, and ranted wildly about those who hated him—gave his principal enemies at court—her chief minister, Robert Cecil, and her favorite, Walter Ralegh—the opportunity they long had sought. Outmaneuvered and increasingly agitated, the earl saw the queen’s favor slipping away. Always hard-pressed to control himself, he made the fatal mistake of uttering in a rage that the queen had grown “old and cankered” and that her mind “was become as crooked as her carcass.”¹³

Court culture inevitably generates fiercely competing factions, and Elizabeth had for years brilliantly played one off against another. But with her increasing debility, the old enmities sharpened and became murderous. When the Privy Council summoned Essex for a meeting on state business, he refused to go, declaring that he would be assassinated on Ralegh’s orders. His tangle of fear and loathing, coupled with a delusional confidence that the populace of London would rise up to support him, ultimately led Essex to stage an armed rising against the queen’s counselors and perhaps against the queen herself. The rising failed miserably. Essex and his principal allies, including the Earl of Southampton, were arrested.

Ralegh urged Cecil, who conducted the official inquiry, not to let slip the golden opportunity to destroy their hated enemy once and for all: if you “relent towards this tyrant,” he wrote, “you will repent it when it shall be too late.”¹⁴ “Tyrant” here is something more than a random insult. If Essex were to recover his preeminence, Ralegh implies, he would be in a position, given the queen’s advanced years, to rule the kingdom, and he would no doubt dispense with legal niceties. He would be eager to get rid of his rivals—and this would not mean politely asking them to retire. He would do what tyrants do.

After Cecil finished with his inquiry, Essex and Southampton were put on trial, convicted of high treason, and sentenced to die. Southampton’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but for the queen’s onetime favorite, there was no mercy. Essex was executed on February 25, 1601. The government saw to it that the abject confession he allegedly made on the scaffold—he had planned the treasonous rising, he said, and was now “justly spewed out of the realm”—was duly published after his death.

Shakespeare had been a fool to get anywhere close to these vicious struggles. The uncharacteristic contemporary reference to the “General” in Henry V does not seem to have provoked an official response, but it could easily have led to disaster. For on the afternoon of Saturday, February 7, 1601, the day before the attempted coup, a number of Essex’s key supporters, including his steward, Sir Gelly Meyrick, had taken a boat across the Thames to go to the Globe Theatre. A few days earlier, Meyrick’s close associates had requested from the theater’s resident company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants, a performance of an earlier Shakespeare play, a play about “the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second.” The actors objected; Richard II was an old play, they said, and it was not likely to draw a large crowd. Their objection was overcome when they were offered forty shillings on top of their ordinary fee of £10 for a command performance.

But why were Gelly Meyrick and the others so eager to have Richard II performed? It was not the idle impulse of a moment; at a crucial juncture, when they knew the stakes were life and death, it cost them planning, time, and money. They did not leave a record of their reasoning, but they presumably remembered that Shakespeare’s play depicted the downfall of a ruler and his cronies. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” (5.5.49), the doomed king laments, after his rapacious counselors (“the caterpillars of the commonwealth,” as the usurper calls them) have met the fate that Essex hoped to visit upon Cecil and Ralegh.

In Richard II it is not only the king’s counselors who are killed by the usurper; it is the king himself. The usurper Bolingbroke never declares directly that he intends to topple the reigning monarch, let alone murder him. Like Essex, while he rails against the corruption of the ruler’s inner circle, he dwells principally upon the injustice done to him personally. But having contrived Richard’s abdication and imprisonment, and having had himself crowned as King Henry IV, he moves with cunning vagueness—the vagueness that confers what politicians call “deniability”—to take the essential last step. Fittingly, Shakespeare does not represent this move directly. Instead, he simply shows someone pondering what he has heard the king say: