Everything is in Shakespeare: the triumph against the prognosis of Donald Trump, the dementia of Kim Jong-un, the Brexit, the iron fist of Vladimir Putin, the populism of Jair Bolsonaro, the mad promises of Matteo Salvini, the murder of Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy ... Even Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad . A William Shakespeare as a political strategist who staged plots to usurp the kingdom, revolutions against a corrupt state and the most fascinating tyrants.
If Machiavelli laid the foundations of modern political philosophy in The Prince, Shakespeare defined in his plays the psychological profile of the despotic sovereign . This is what Stephen Greenblat, Harvard Professor of Humanities, Pulitzer Prize and founder of the new historicism current in the 80s, reads in his essay The Tyrant. Shakespeare and politics (Alphabet), where he reviews the villains of the playwright to establish a canon of how an entire country allows them to come to power.
«Machiavelli was arrested and tortured. As far as we know, Shakespeare never went to prison, although he faced serious problems he always knew how to drive himself out. He developed a very subversive speech, widely applauded by the public. Shakespeare always works that way: it talks about what you can't talk about at the time, ”says Greenblatt. An era in which to imply that Queen Elizabeth I, on the throne for more than 30 years and who stubbornly refused to name a successor, was a tyrant amounted to the death penalty. In fact, Cristopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's colleague-competitor, was stabbed by a secret agent serving the queen.
The Elizabethan theater was subject to iron censorship. Moralists, clergymen and officials cried out to close the theater pens . And Shakespeare turned to a remote past, classical antiquity, 11th-century Scotland or pre-Christian Britain. "As in contemporary totalitarian regimes, people developed ways to speak in code," says Greenblatt. Shakespeare could afford to criticize the rich and powerful from the lips of a mad king like Lear. A madness strategy that, by the way, Cervantes already used in Don Quixote, which Shakespeare read at the end of his career.
From the figures of Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolano, Julio César and, above all, Ricardo III, Greenblatt traces the robot portrait of the Shakespearean tyrant: narcissistic, arrogant, choleric, dominant, of an aggressive masculinity, with a deep contempt towards the laws because they get in their way and ... moved by diverse psychosexual concerns (the need to show their virility, fear of impotence, anxiety not to be considered powerful enough, etc.). "It may have been a little naive, but Shakespeare associates tyranny with psychosexual problems, misogyny, seizing women, the personality of a catastrophic mother ...", points Greenblatt.
Women also don't get better stops. Although there is no explicit figure of a tyrant, there is Lady Macbeth (manipulates her husband and takes him to a throne that, in reality, he does not want) or the evil daughters of King Lear, Gonerilda and Regania (in abbreviated version: they banish their father, they send their third sister Cordelia to death, they kill without their pulse shaking and kill each other.) "Shakespeare, who lived under the regime of a queen, did not think that women were morally superior : they could also be monsters and psychopaths," adds Greenblat.
The germ of The Tyrant goes back to an article that Greenblatt wrote for the New York Times and that immediately went viral: Shakespeare explains the 2016 election , in full battle between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Although he is not mentioned even once - neither Trump nor any contemporary leader - there are clear references to the president, Greenblatt slides the slogan make England greet again when referring to the impossible promises of Jack Cade in Henry VI . Cade is an unscrupulous leader who manages to seduce the masses by building "a magical space, in which two and two do not have to be four and it is not necessary that the last statement agrees with the one he made a few seconds before," The professor stands out.
The demagogue stands in turbulent times and great difficulties, appeals to the lower instincts and takes advantage of the anguish of the dispossessed. “In the case of the United States, it would be very easy for people like me, who are part of the system, to say that Trump's victory is due to the proletariat lumpen. But it is a mistake. Many citizens feel lost and excluded : from the world economy, from globalization, from the technological revolution, from public policies ... Many do not even vote and when they do it is to break a system that does not represent them, ”says Greenblatt. Shakespeare already denounced that system in the sixteenth century, particularly in Coriolano, which begins with the revolt caused by food shortages in ancient Rome. A mirror of what happened in England, on the verge of a revolution because of the lack of grain: the peasants asked that the landowners open the warehouses, where they kept the wheat so that it would increase in price. "The rich would soon allow the grain to rot in stores that lower market prices," criticize Greenblatt and Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's tyrants do not hesitate to let the people starve, plot perverse plots, betray and torture. Some scenes of torture were particularly violent and caused fainting among the public of the time: as in King Lear, when they take the eyes of one of his supporters to confess the whereabouts of the former monarch.
“In traditional authoritarian regimes, dissent was repressed through torture. But the new way to silence the opposition is to make a lot of noise so that people don't hear, with tweets and bombardments of news every day. The shock of last week is soon forgotten because there is a new shock, ”Greenblatt updates. That is why he always turns to Shakespeare, to that literary space that is still talking about today.
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