The Tyrant and His Enablers
July 21, 2018 3:18 PM   Subscribe

Long excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt's new book: Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics It's about Richard III of Shakespeare's telling, not the "real" Richard. After all, he was writing for the Tudors, and we all know that victors write the history. But what he has to say about tyranny is as trenchant today as it was then.
posted by MovableBookLady (6 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is a wonderful book that lays out some incise interpretation of Shakespeare, that makes your brain to keep jumping from the past to now and back, over and over across a number of the plays, as Greenblatt outlines the various aspects of tyranny without ever mentioning the name or the person we all immediately recognize is the actual subject of this book. It’s a welcome way to address these difficult times with a convenient distancing provided by the plays of Shakespeare. You don’t need the New York Times or the Washington Post to understand the news. A Works of Shakespeare and an insightful, smart guide is sufficient.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:44 PM on July 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


Great read! I got to play the Duchess of York (Richard's mother) in Richard III once. The scene near the end where she curses him is mad fun to play. And yet... I do understand what Greenblatt is saying about his appeal. Even as I was spitting, "Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell. A grievous burden was thy birth to me," there was that little Luke Skywalker voice in me crying, "No! He's my son! He can't be all bad!"
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:01 PM on July 21, 2018


I just got an ARC of this book. Can’t wait to dig in.
posted by thivaia at 8:30 AM on July 22, 2018


Rhodri Lewis, writing in the LA Review of Books, found it deeply unconvincing, an "egregiously distorted" view of Shakespeare's characters, designed to make tendentious metaphors for Trump.
posted by vincebowdren at 2:21 PM on July 22, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, Shakespeare didn't really write in a modern realistic mode, so I'm not sure how many lessons about real politics you can take.

Richard III is a bit like a Werewolf versus Nazis story. Normally in that era anyone who rebels against the King's authority is a baddie. But in this case the usurper is rebelling against the House of York. Shakespeare depicted their rise in his not-very-good blockbuster hits "Henry VI", and they're also usurpers who overthrew the legitimate Henry VI.

So although Richard III is a baddie, he's taking on other baddies, and a good Elizabethan is allowed to take a certain amount of satisfaction as he tears up the House of York, paving the way for the coming of Henry VII who will found the Tudor dynasty who of course are legitimate, good, and in power at the time.

This also paves the way to the conventions of Jacobean tragedy, where pretty much everyone is a horrible person and the satisfaction comes from watching them all get slaughtered at the end.

So the way that Richard III takes powers isn't necessarily a realistic guide to how a tyrant takes power, but a moral guide to how people who reject kingly authority in turn become vulnerable to chaos and retribution.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:35 PM on July 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


So much deja vu reading this.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:09 PM on July 23, 2018


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