Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt saw a sign. Or, more accurately, he didn’t.
As the 2016 presidential election was stumbling toward the finish line, the pollsters, number crunchers and media outlets that had so accurately predicted the 2012 presidential election, confidently forecasted a victory for Hillary Clinton.
So Greenblatt consulted one of his most trusted political analysts – William Shakespeare. In “Richard III,” Greenblatt found troubling parallels with that tyrant’s rise to power and the way the election was unfolding. Inspired by the modern-day relevance of Shakespeare’s insights, Greenblatt wrote an astonishing op-ed piece for the New York Times.
The play explores how Richard III, against all odds, attains the throne, “a position for which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely no aptitude,” wrote Greenblatt.
Election Day arrived, and the rest, as they say, is history.
That predictive column clearly served as the seed for Greenblatt’s new book, “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.” In it, Greenblatt digs deeper into Shakespeare’s views on tyrants – what motivates them, how they come to power, and the crucial role played by the mute or indifferent crowds that fail to stop the runaway train.
For his source material, Greenblatt draws from many of the plays, including “Macbeth,” “Coriolanus” and “Julius Caesar,” but “Richard III” remains at the heart of his argument.
In a particularly insightful section at the start of Chapter 4, Greenblatt credits Shakespeare with defining the characteristics of a would-be tyrant.
That may be how the story of a tyrant starts, but the question now is: How does it all end?
In his “Downfall and Resurgence” chapter, Greenblatt writes, “Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted for very long.” Does that apply to today?
Instead, Greenblatt is looking to the midterm elections and the possibility of “some serious erosion” of the president’s party.
As a Shakespeare scholar, Greenblatt lives with the writer on a daily basis. Shakespeare is not only Greenblatt’s political consultant, he’s also a life coach, a voice at the dinner table, a constant companion.
Greenblatt says, in fact, that Shakespeare is omnipresent for all of us, even if we don’t realize it.
Greenblatt also spends time thinking about Shakespeare, the man. In fact, that was the ambitious goal of his exquisite book, “Will in the World,” a must-read for any Shakespeare fan.
Shakespeare’s life is shrouded in mystery (we have no Shakespeare journal, no letters, no autobiography), so it’s hard to know for sure what he thought about, say, Elizabeth I, much less say Elizabeth II, or, more to the point, any one of the array of modern despots who currently strut (while we fret) upon the world stage.
Shakespeare may not only have predicted the 2016 election, he may also offer a way to get through the consequences of that election for people who are distressed by the result.