Tyrant

Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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courtier Sir Walter Ralegh delicately put it, “a lady whom Time has surprised.” Yet she would not name a successor.

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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:

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the only possible one. “The truth appears so naked on my side,” declares York, “That any purblind eye may find it out.” “And on my side,” replies Somerset, it is “So clear, so shining, and so evident/That it will glimmer through a blind man’s eye” (2.4.20–24). There is no acknowledgment of a gray area here, no recognition that it might be possible for reasonable people to disagree. Each thinks it must be mere perversity not to admit what is so undeniably “evident.”

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before stabbing him to death. Such is the vicious cruelty that he himself has helped to release and legitimate, and such, too, is the end of the would-be tyrant.

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attempt to secure power for their heirs. Even in democratic systems where succession is determined by vote, we have by no means left dynastic ambition behind; it seems, if anything, to be intensifying in contemporary politics. Besides, who can the perennially insecure tyrant trust more than the members of his own family? But family interest

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will support him because he has always been a reasonably just, caring, and moderate king. The claim is true enough; the mistake, a fatal one, is to think that this will earn him secure popular support. “I have not stopped mine ears to their demands,” Henry reassures himself,

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that decides whether the Yorkists will finally succeed

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his inner condition. And Richard concurs: “Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,” he says, “Let hell make crooked my mind to answer it” (5.6.78–79). Feeling in himself none of the ordinary human emotions—I have, he says, “neither pity, love, nor fear” (5.6.68)—he actively wills his mind to match the stigmatized crookedness of his body.

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Shakespeare does not repudiate his culture’s belief that bodily deformity signified moral deformity; he allows his audience to credit the notion that a higher power, whether nature or God, has provided a visible sign of the villain’s wickedness. Richard’s physical deformity is a kind of preternatural portent or emblem of his viciousness. But, against the dominant current of his culture, Shakespeare insists that the inverse is also true: Richard’s deformity—or, rather, his society’s reaction to his deformity—is the root condition of his psychopathology.

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Shakespeare does, however, suggest that a child unloved by his mother, ridiculed by his peers, and forced to regard himself as a monster will develop certain compensatory psychological strategies, some of them both destructive and self-destructive.

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goddess connived with Nature To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub, To make an envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body; To shape my legs of an unequal size, To disproportion me in every part. (3 Henry VI 3.2.153–60)

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Whatever pleasure he could seize from life thus could not possibly come from making his “heaven in a lady’s lap” (3.2.148). But there is a way he can compensate for the painful loss: he can devote himself to bullying those who possess the natural endowments he lacks.

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refuse, he showers insults upon them—“villains,” “unmannered dog,” “beggar”—and threatens to kill them (Richard III 1.2.36–42). Such is the force of his social position and the confidence with which he wields it that they tremble before him and obey.

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Exercising power, particularly the kind of power that throws people off balance, reduces his own sense of chaotic disproportionateness, or so at least he hopes. It is not simply a matter of commanding people to do what he wants them to do, though that is agreeable; it is also peculiar pleasure of making them tremble or totter or fall.

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bind together his physical deformity, his psychological disposition, and his overarching political goal: since this earth affords no joy to me But to command, to check, to o’erbear such As are of better person [i.e., appearance] than myself, I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown. (3.2.165–68)

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least longs to have) in order to experience joy. Absolute power—the power to command everyone—is the extreme form of this joy; indeed, nothing less than this taste of heaven will serve to satisfy him. He will, he declares, “account this world but hell/Until my misshaped trunk that bears this head/Be round impaled with a glorious crown” (3.2.169–71).

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Shakespeare then reopened the window into his character. England is at last at peace, but there is no peace for the twisted Duke of Gloucester. Everyone else can turn to the pursuit of pleasure: But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking glass; I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time. (1.1.14–25)

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“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world scarce half made up,” Richard will not attempt to be a lover but will instead pursue power by any means necessary.

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Shakespeare did not suggest that a compensatory model—power as a substitute for sexual pleasure—could fully explain the psychology of a tyrant. But he held on to the core conviction that there is a significant relationship between the lust for tyrannical power and a thwarted or damaged psychosexual life. And he held on as well to the conviction that traumatic and lasting damage to a person’s self-image could be traced back to early experiences—to an adolescent’s fear that he is ugly, or to the cruel mockery of other children, or, even earlier in life, to the responses of nurses and midwives. Above all, he thought, irreparable harm could come from a mother’s failure or inability to love her child. Richard’s bitter anger at the goddess Love, who forswore him, and at nature, who shrank his arm like a withered

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himself heard, attended to, and taken in. One of Richard’s uncanny skills—and, in Shakespeare’s view, one of the tyrant’s most characteristic qualities—is the ability to force his way into the minds of those around him, whether they wish him there or not. It is as if, in compensation for the pain he has suffered, he has found a way to be present—by force or fraud, violence or insinuation—everywhere and in everyone. No one can keep him out.

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way violates every moral norm. Then there are those who cannot keep in focus that Richard is as bad as he seems to be. They know that he is a pathological liar and they see perfectly well that he has done this or that ghastly thing, but they have a strange penchant for forgetting, as if it were hard work to remember just how awful he is. They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.

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never lacks for such people, in Shakespeare and, from what I can tell, in life. True, there might be a world somewhere where this does not happen. Such is the world that Montaigne’s friend Étienne de La Boétie once envisaged, where the dictator would fall simply because of a massive, nonviolent refusal to cooperate. He would call for some strawberries or for a round of executions, and no one would move a muscle. But Shakespeare seems to have regarded such a proto-Gandhian idea as hopeless pie in the sky. He thought that the tyrant would always find willing executioners, men who would, in Hamlet’s phrase, “make love to this employment” (Hamlet 5.2.57).

Relates to book on Stalin

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for, the betrayals, the empty words, the shedding of so much innocent blood? It is difficult to picture the tyrants of our own times having any such moment of truthful reckoning. But Macbeth describes unflinchingly what he has brought upon himself:

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rage only intensifies. He orders that the “bastard” be burned and then turns on Paulina and threatens to have her burned as well. “I care not,” the intrepid woman replies, adding some of the most magnificent words of defiance in all of Shakespeare: It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t. (2.3.114–15) It is the effect of tyranny to invert

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