Shakespeare wrote about kings. Not, as the tour guide at the Globe Theatre told
me, because the nobility were the reality stars of their day and the masses
wanted to know all their business, but because Shakespeare, like his
near-contemporaries John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, was a serious political
philosopher. Here, in five essays on five very different regimes portrayed by
Shakespeare, Professor Timothy W. Burns of Skidmore College builds on this
notion.
Rulers who do well,
Burns writes, take special care to teach their subjects a respect for justice
and an awe for the divine. But they cannot rely on either if they wish to
survive. In Julius Caesar, for example, we begin with a tragedy of
self-government: Rome is in crisis, oddly, because it has produced too many
excellent men. Caesar, Antony, and Brutus all might make excellent kings, but
they have no established way to share power. The threat of tyranny is real, and
there is no way to prevent it, except, apparently, through murder. Where there
is no structural outlet for ambition, the principle of “might makes right”
prevails. Civil war breaks out, the strongest man wins, and a republic devolves
into an empire
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