Political thinkers have long declared that a populace in a democratic republic must be leery of the nefarious designs of its most ambitious leaders, who would twist the political institutions of a free people and manipulate the citizens' desires in an audacious attempt to attain sole rule—to turn a republic into a tyranny. Plato in his Republic has Socrates explain how the people, reveling in their protector's redistribution of wealth, might accept complacently his call for armed guards against the “enemies” his solicitousness for the people has sown against him. In this way might the people unwittingly abet a tyrant's rise to power.
The young Abraham Lincoln in his Lyceum Address of 1838 contemplates the difficulties the United States will face when the most ambitious of its citizens, those who also possess “the loftiest genius,” come to power. Such rare individuals, envious of the great glory of the Founders, and seeing no opportunity for themselves to be founders, will inevitably turn their attention to destruction.
“Towering genius,” says Lincoln, “disdains a beaten path” and cannot therefore be gratified in “maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others.” Such ambition “scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious.” To meet the existential danger posed by this superior individual, “the people” must “be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs,” he argues. Unlike Plato's Socrates, Lincoln does think that democracy inevitably degenerates into tyranny; but in order to prevent that disease to which democracy is so susceptible, he warns that the populace must retain two things: its attachment to the rule of law, and the insights of its members that can only come from a clear-eyed education.
In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Stephen Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, undertakes to use his deep knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare's plays to further our understanding of tyranny. His apparent goals are to enlighten us as to our current situation—which he assesses as an age of a tyranny—and to fortify us to resist. Greenblatt speaks through the Bard's histories and tragedies, among them the trilogy of Henry VI (whose authorship is contested), Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, A Winter's Tale, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus.
In the first chapter, entitled “Oblique Angles,” Greenblatt notes that the playwright throughout his career treated the “deeply unsettling question” of how it is “possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant.” Although William Shakespeare (1564-1616) lived in a tumultuous time in which treasonous plots flourished, justifying themselves by decrying the current regime as ungodly, unjust, and illegitimate, the plays maintained a studied distance from such contentious contemporary issues, Greenblatt observes. Nevertheless, he argues, Shakespeare's audience members gleaned for themselves the plays' meaning for their own personal and historical situations.
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