Shakespeare’s Close Call With Tyranny

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From The New Yorker:

From the early fifteen-nineties, 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, a tyrant over the unwilling,” the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan wrote. 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.” 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, to his spectacular indecency?

Shakespeare was not accusing England’s then ruler, Elizabeth I, of such behavior. Quite apart from whatever he privately thought, it would have been suicidal to float such a suggestion onstage. Dating back to 1534, during the reign of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, legal statutes made it treason to refer to the ruler as a tyrant. 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 “The Isle of Dogs,” an allegedly seditious play, 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. Informants attended the theatre, eager to claim a reward for denouncing to the authorities anything that could be construed as subversive.

As in modern totalitarian regimes, people in Elizabethan England developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what mattered to them most. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare’s penchant for thematic displacement in his work. He seems to have grasped that the issues that preoccupied his world came more clearly to him when he confronted them from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could acknowledge truth—to possess it fully and not perish of it—through the artifice of fiction or historical distance. Hence the fascination he found in the legendary Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus, or in the historical Julius Caesar; hence the appeal of such figures from the English and Scottish chronicles as 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.”

Link to the rest at The New Yorker