Shakespeare the soothsayer

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.

Greenblatt wasn’t so sure.

“I’m no prophet and I have no special insight, but we drove up to Vermont a lot because we have a place up there,” says Greenblatt, who was born in Boston and raised in Newton. “I would see all these Bernie [Sanders] signs. But when Bernie withdrew, they weren’t replaced with Hillary signs. I thought that was ominous.”

(As empirical evidence-gathering goes, it wasn’t particularly scientific, but it proved to be spectacularly prescient.)

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.

In the column, Greenblatt noted that Richard III’s self-loathing led to his “feeling of entitlement, blustering overconfidence, misogyny and a merciless penchant for bullying.”

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.

The column, published one month before the election, warned that Richard’s citizenry suffered “from the catastrophically mistaken belief that there is no real difference between Richard and the alternatives… Not speaking out – simply not voting – is enough to bring the monster to power.”

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.

“He expects absolute loyalty, but he is incapable of gratitude,” he writes. “The feelings of others mean nothing to him. He has no natural grace, no sense of shared humanity, no decency.”

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?

“I’m not optimistic about a quick change” in the presidency, says Greenblatt. “But what do I know?”

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.

“He plays a bigger role in people’s lives than they may know,” says Greenblatt. “There are phrases, sentiments and concepts that we use on a daily basis that come from Shakespeare. He’s more present in our lives than we know.”

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.

“He lived more than 400 years ago, so what he thought of his own political world, we do not know,” says Greenblatt. “We do know that Shakespeare has been enthusiastically claimed by all [political] parties. And we can say with some certainty that he despised cruelty, he hated bullying and he detested violence. He thought that the ruler of a country has an obligation to think about the poor and vulnerable.”

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.

“Shakespeare provides a way for me to take a deep breath,” says Greenblatt, which he finds particularly handy these days. “The daily news cycle is so overpowering and noisy that it becomes deafening. There’s this barrage of stories. Monday’s outrage leads to Tuesday’s scandal, which leads to Wednesday’s astonishment. It can make you feel blind and deaf.”

Greenblatt finds perspective in Shakespeare’s work. “Sometimes,” he says, “with distance comes clarity.”