Guardian Review
The literary scholar leaves parallels with today inexplicit, but has written an engaging study of some of the most eloquent despots on stage Near the end of this book, Stephen Greenblatt observes that Shakespeare was unusually good at staying out of trouble. His friend and rival Ben Jonson was imprisoned for the allegedly seditious play The Isle of Dogs. Their contemporary, Thomas Kyd, fled from an arrest warrant for sedition and was interrogated under torture. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by a government agent, while awaiting an investigation of his unconventional religious beliefs. The career of playwright was not a safe one in Elizabethan or Jacobean England. Greenblatts opening chapter lays out the evidence for the dangers of staging drama in Shakespeares day, culminating in the elderly Elizabeth I reportedly likening herself to Shakespeares Richard II, a monarch defeated and finally murdered by rebels. Yet Richard II was never banned. Shakespeare prospered while creating his anatomies of power and its abuse. No reader of this single-minded book could be in any doubt of Shakespeares fascination with the ways in which a tyrant exercised power. Some of his greatest characters are tyrants, displayed for spectators who knew that, outside the theatre, political dissent or religious heterodoxy could be death. Some of the most memorably caustic lines about the arbitrariness of authority a dogs obeyed in office were spoken on Shakespeares stage to an audience that included government agents. Yet, as Greenblatt puts it with winning anachronism, the police were never called. If the maddened Lear said it, it was allowable. Sentiments that would have been dangerous to voice in the tavern could be broadcast at the Globe. Greenblatt is returning here to some of the questions that occupied him in the early criticism that made his name, and that established him as the leading light of new historicism. That critical movement specialised in audacious sallies of interpretation; in contrast, this book sticks to dutiful exegesis of Shakespeares dialogues. New historicism allowed critics to flourish their ingenuity by finding repressed meanings that their chosen authors had not themselves acknowledged. Now Greenblatt seems almost to believe in the playwrights intentions. Anyone who has struggled with Shakespeares earliest history plays, his Henry VI trilogy, will be pleased to find here a condensed account of the conspiracy and treachery they dramatise, including the terrifying rise and inevitable fall of the rebel Jack Cade. It is a story of the sadistic impulses shared by those who love power. These three plays were the prelude to Richard III, whose warped protagonist appals and captivates Greenblatt. Richards skill is the ability to force his way into the minds of those around him. He is definitive on Richards psychopathology. Sexual conquest excites him, but only for the endlessly reiterated proof that he can have anything he likes. Tyranny is a madness that becomes eloquent in Shakespeare. Not for him the banality of the despot. Macbeth may be a butcher, but no one speaks better. Leontes in A Winters Tale turns language itself into a fevered, flickering register of paranoia. In every way, these characters are compelling. As Greenblatt elegantly shows, Shakespeare dramatises the very exercise of power the ways in which subjects and collaborators are seduced or numbed into complicity. Those few who resist intrigue him. The books hero is the Duke of Cornwalls unnamed servant in King Lear who, with his master urged on by his wife Regan to pluck out Gloucesters eyes, calls on him to stop. The man has served Cornwall since I was a child, but now shows his better service by trying to stand between the torturer and his victim. A peasant stand up thus? is Regans contemptuous question, as she stabs him to death. Greenblatt is not unerring. He says that in Macbeth we witness the birth of a tyrant in the famous dialogue where Lady Macbeth goads her hesitating husband into murder. Yet the play is careful to let us know that the scheme to murder Duncan has been hatched some time before the play begins. The witches are not putting something into his head but reminding him of his own dark plans. He is already the would-be tyrant. There is also some uncertainty about what a tyrant is. We get a sharply observed chapter on Coriolanus, but its protagonist is revealed to be anything but a tyrant. He is disabled from wielding power by his distaste for the business of winning over the populace. As Greenblatt himself points out, Coriolanuss political opponents manipulate him precisely by depicting him to the people as a would-be tyrant. A better candidate for inclusion would surely have been Hamlets uncle Claudius, a ruler who can manage sweet reason in his speeches alongside utter ruthlessness in his orders. And what about the Puritan tyrant Angelo in Measure for Measure, soberly making others pay for what are in fact his own sins? The book may have begun as a newspaper article, drawing lessons from Shakespeare on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, but mostly the reader is left to draw his or her lessons for the present. There are some calculatedly anachronistic analogies: Mary Queen of Scots beheading is likened to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Greenblatt admires Shakespeare as the master of the oblique angle on power and wants to find that angle for himself. - John Mullan.