They beguile with cunning and daring, smile winningly as they show us how to woo the widow of a man they have just killed, or drive an honourable person to madness by playing on jealously. Villains make the most compelling roles because they combine great personal failings with charm and good fortune. More challenging is to understand the combination of guile and ability, skill with language and speed at grasping opportunity that carries a rogue to high office and enables them, for a while, to stay aloft. We only glimpse President Trump inside the Oval Office yet know he faces dilemmas explored by Shakespeare, and he may yet share the fate of theatre’s most egregious characters. The great wheel of fortune turns for all. The titles and locations change, yet court politics, trials at home and abroad, and tests of legitimacy face every regime. Yet when we tell sad tales of the death of kings, we distil what we know about power. A president is not a monarch, nor is a play reliable history. There is no Trump equivalent in Shakespeare, just speculation about rhetoric and authority, intention and consequence. Once more, it matters how a martinet gains and holds office, the mechanics of their regime, the meaning of their rise and fall.Īrt changes nothing in our world, but it offers a lens on the immediate. Yet the point was made: older texts can speak to the present. Conservatives complained, corporate sponsors hastily withdrew from the project, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. Others have been less subtle drawing parallels-a 2017 production of Julius Caesar in Central Park featured a ‘lead actor who bore an unmistakeable likeness to the forty-fifth president of the United States’ 2 replete with a long red tie and curious colouring. The printed word has not changed-Coriolanus, Iago and Macbeth remain the same flawed men-but the sense of threat is new. 1Īlthough Greenblatt avoids mention of Trump in Tyrant, we are invited to see contemporary resonance in an old narrative. Even reasonably stable societies possess few resources ‘to ward off damage from someone sufficiently ruthless and unscrupulous’. Revisiting the canon, Greenblatt found Shakespeare warning of chaos when leaders with no administrative capacity or constructive vision seize control. What could we learn about power from Richard III or from other tyrants in Shakespeare’s cast? They teach of cruelty, of the cynicism of authority in dangerous hands. Suddenly for Greenblatt the texts demanded a new urgency. The prospect of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt back to the texts of Shakespeare, thinking again about characters that seemed settled. Then the times shift ever so slightly and new readings appear. We rummage through familiar plays and books, images and songs, apparently secure in our understanding.
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