In a brilliant op-ed piece in Sunday’s (yesterday’s) New York Times, titled “Shakespeare Explains the 2016 Election,” Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt likened one of Shakespeare’s three most unrelieved villains, King Richard III, to Donald J. Trump. The column is magnificent and is not to be missed, see www.nytimes.com/…
In the play, Gloucester, who becomes King Richard III, stops at nothing to attain the crown, killing his brothers, wives, and most famously his princely nephews, to get there. Prof. Greenblatt column wields a rapier, not a bludgeon, and never once mentions Trump by name and never even mentions our 2016 election except in the title. Here is just a teaser or two:
“In the early 1590s, Shakespeare sat down to write a play that addressed a problem: How could a great country wind up being governed by a sociopath? * * *
”Haunted by self-loathing . . . he found refuge in a feeling of entitlement, blustering overconfidence, misogyny and a merciless penchant for bullying. * * *
”There was no secret about his fathomless cynicism, cruelty and treacherousness, no glimpse of anything redeemable in him and no reason to believe that he could govern the country effectively.”
Yet, though everyone in the play realizes that Richard is a villain, and has committed unspeakable villainous acts, many around him enable him because it is easiest to do so, and they wrongly assume that everything soon enough will return to normal. As Prof. Greenblatt states, “there are those who cannot keep in focus that Richard is as bad as he seems to be. . . . They are drawn irresistibly to normalize what is not normal.” And Richard’s enablers include “those who feel frightened or impotent in the face of bullying.” And, tellingly, “it helps that he is an immensely wealthy and privileged man, accustomed to having his way, even when his way is in violation of every moral norm.”
The stunning nature of Prof. Greenblatt’s column chased me out of the house to go see a Sunday afternoon performance of Richard III. If you are in the NYC/NJ area you can catch a wonderful one over the next couple of weeks at www.shakespearenj.org/... I then came home and watched the second presidential debate. It was the most chilling, other-worldly experience of my 78-year-old life. I looked at the psychologically deformed, outsized, stalking orange sociopath on my TV screen and I saw Shakespeare’s version of the sociopath hunchback king who “served” from 1482-1485. The 2016 version is worse; at least the Hunchback King did not have any nuclear codes.
Professor Greenblatt’s op-ed piece, which should be read in its entirety, is here: www.nytimes.com/…
Full disclosure: I am a member of the board of the Young Shakespeare Players, Inc., in Madison, WI, and of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey.