Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics QUOTES

1 " It is an heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t. (2.3.114–15) "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

2 " Finally, there a motley crowd of those who carry out his orders, some reluctantly but simply eager to avoid trouble; others with gusto, hoping to seize something along the way for themselves; still others enjoying the cruel game of making his targets, often high in the social hierarchy, suffer and die. The aspiring tyrant 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). "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

3 " Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

4 " In . . . Menenius Agrippa, Shakespeare draws a deft portrait of a successful conservative politician, altogether in the camp of the rich but adept at presenting himself as the people's friend. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

5 " The patricians urge [Coriolanus] to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in office, there will be plenty of time for him to resume his actual stance and to roll back the concessions that have been made to the poor. It is the most familiar of political games: the plutocrat, born into every privilege and inwardly contemptuous of those beneath him, who mouths the rhetoric of populism during the electoral campaign, abandoning it as soon as it has served his purposes. The Romans had boiled it all down to a conventional performance, comparable to a well-coiffed politician's donning of a hard hat at a rally held at a construction site... "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

6 " Shakespeare believed that . . . tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of . . . the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. 'What is the city but the people? "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

7 " He [Cade] promises to make England great again. How will he do that? He shows the crowd at once: he attacks education. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

8 " Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing the lives of underclasses... But he sees that they can be made to further his ambition. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

9 " Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm? "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

10 " It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

11 " The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

12 " 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? "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

13 " As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare's penchant for displacement. 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 the truth- to possess it fully and not perish of it- through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

14 " A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard's seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant's climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated threat to national security. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

15 " The absurdity of these campaign promises is not an impediment to their effectiveness. On the contrary: Cade keeps producing demonstrable falsehoods about his origins and making wild claims about the great things he will do, and the crowds eagerly swallow them. To be sure, his neighbors know that Cade is a congenital liar. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

16 " In ordinary times, when a public figure is caught in a lie or simply reveals blatant ignorance of the truth, his standing is diminished. But these are not ordinary times. If a dispassionate bystander were to point out all of Cade’s grotesque distortions, mistakes, and downright lies, the crowd’s anger would light on the skeptic and not on Cade. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

17 " Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restraints have all failed. The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

18 " It was Sir Thomas More, from whom Shakespeare borrowed so much of his portrait of Richard III, who put the matter most clearly almost a hundred years earlier: “When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world,” More wrote in Utopia, “I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

19 " IN DEPICTING THE aspiring tyrant’s strategy, Shakespeare carefully noted among the landed classes of his time the strong current of contempt for the masses and for democracy as a viable political possibility. Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable. But he sees that they can be made to further his ambitions. "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics

20 " 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? "

― Stephen Greenblatt , Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics