Shakespeare on Tyranny: Reading the Roman Plays

William Shakespeare, that great bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, was not a political theorist. But he had much to say about politics. Or, at least, his plays are often situated in the domain of the political. Individual plays stand out: Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth. Others are sweeping narratives connected by the vicissitudes of history that are intimately connected to politics: the Henriad and the Roman plays (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra). No series of dramas are more important to us than Shakespeare’s Roman plays, for in the Roman plays we find a world not that dissimilar from ours: a republic of liberty teetering between foreign threats and domestic turmoil, the want to defend liberty and the ambitions of dictatorship. The arc of history eventually consummates itself in tyranny guised under the veils of universal empire and “universal peace,” but at what cost?

What makes the Roman plays unique, much like the Henriad, is the sequential development of the themes that Shakespeare is playing with on the stage in those great dramas. The classics were part and parcel of Shakespeare’s being and world; the classics were also very much part of any educated person’s life and world during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Some of those classical names still stand out with us in the twenty-first century: Julius Caesar, Octavius (Augustus), Antony, Cleopatra, Brutus. Others are all but forgotten, like Coriolanus (along with so many other great classical heroes who were hailed as among the greatest men ever to have lived like Epaminondas of Thebes but that’s neither here nor there). This wasn’t the case, however, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Thus, it isn’t surprising that in the classical humanist revival and milieu he offers some of his profound insights for us reading 400 years later.

Politics, friendship, and death permeate the Roman plays. The political order known as Rome, both in its republican form and early imperial state, are center stage in the three plays. Friendship, too, is very much a central part of the plays—most famous being the friendship turned animus of Brutus and Caesar. Death, of course, like so many of Shakespeare’s great plays, come for almost all the principal characters except for Octavius Caesar (Augustus). Moreover, all three plays constitute a trilogy of historical tragedy as we witness the downfall of the Roman Republic into tyranny and empire. Yet the politics of one-man domination is part of all the plays. Coriolanus. Julius Caesar. Octavius. So much for the supposed republic. Is there any real declension, then, over the course of the plays?

There is a three-part movement of decline that is the cost of universal empire and peace; the triumph of tyranny comes with the dissolution of the family (Corionlanus), friendship (Julius Caesar), and love itself (Antony and Cleopatra). In this dissection and interrogation of how tyranny consummates itself, Shakespeare examines the slow decline of the spirits and institutions that tyranny corrupts before destroying. In Coriolanus, the relationship of the famous savior of Rome turned infamous traitor has with his mother and wife, Volumnia and Virgilia (family), is slowly ruined in his egoistic fall toward despotism. Julius Caesar, continuing this decline, examines the loss of the friendship that Brutus has with Julius Caesar and how friendship itself is eviscerated as tyranny manifests itself. This descent into tyranny—finally realizing itself in the universal empire of Octavius Caesar and the (false) promise of universal peace it portends—looks at how love itself (Eros) must eventually die (so Antony, Cleopatra, and their last trusted lieutenant, Eros, fade away into the dungy mud of the earth for the dream of universal empire to realize itself) in Antony and Cleopatra.

These three plays can, of course, be read independently of each other. Independent of each other, they each stand on their own pillars of genius and insight. None, perhaps more-so, than Julius Caesar (or at least this play is the most famous and widely remembered). Yet it is my belief, in agreement with far more eminent Shakespearean scholars than myself (I am not one though I hope the gentle reader entreat my passion for Shakespeare), that the Roman plays do represent a trilogy in-of-themselves and that it is far more profitable to read the Roman plays in unison from Coriolanus and Julius Caesar to Antony and Cleopatra.

Coriolanus begins in chaos. Men enter with clubs and spears ransacking through the streets of the city because of a grain shortage which they blame Coriolanus (in the early moments of the play, “Marcius”). Later, we meet Volumnia and Virgilia united in pious prayer for Coriolanus and the trials he is facing, both in the city and against the enemies of Rome who threaten the city. The scenes shift to the battlefield where Coriolanus and the Romans have won a great victory against their enemies, the Volscians. Coriolanus returns to Rome and is hailed a hero. The chaos has subsided, a foreign enemy is thwarted, our protagonist is welcomed as a savior. What can go wrong?

Chaos is dialectically paired against the piety of Volumnia and Virgilia, then there is Coriolanus, the man alone, aloof, isolated, caught between the maelstrom of public violence and the storm of the mob and the loving prayers of his family (notably, Volumnia and Virgilia are often together which represents that bond of love which the family constitutes). He, though, remains alone and aloof from it all, preferring, instead, to be the lonesome “hero” who is really a tyrant.

The tyrant, as conceived in Coriolanus by Shakespeare, is not merely the man who refuses to learn. (Though this is true of Coriolanus.) He is, moreover, the figure alone whose isolation breaks him away from the social fabric of his community and the loving relationships of his family. The drift into tyranny and the heart of the tyrant is in this isolation. He acts alone. He is alone. Alone, as such, he is deprived of the love that makes human life worthwhile. (Richard III is the most notable example of this as his slip into tyranny leads to the dissolution of all his relationships.)

Moreover, what is most striking about Coriolanus and his descent into the madness of his own tyranny is the pride of his own passion. Pride cometh before the fall. Pride also marks one out from the rest of the crowd and makes one most susceptible to the temptations of tyrannical lust. Pride feeds the passions. And not the passion of love but the passion of the self, the inflated sense of the self that leads one to think himself separated from the rest—which therefore furthers the loneliness that is so characteristic of the tyrant. He may be surrounded by confidants, but he ultimately has no relationship with his confidants; these confidants exist only to feed the tyrant’s pride and ego.

Not only does the pride of Coriolanus separate him from Rome, it causes a degradation of his relationship to his family. He shuns his mother and wife, the ultimate sin in a society where filial piety was the greatest of values and marks of any individual’s character and worth. In rejecting his family, and therefore Rome, Coriolanus turns to Rome’s enemies to feed his ego and lust for revenge. Having felt that he alone can save and transform Rome, he was banished and fled to the Volscians to seek revenge. (Here, too, is Shakespeare’s assertion that tyranny is often tied to lustful passions: envy, animosity, revenge.) Coriolanus returns to Rome intent on destruction and is greeted by his friends and family begging him to stop his desire for revenge and destruction.

Before his eventual murder, Coriolanus gets a moment with Volumnia and Virgilia. If the bonds of Rome have failed to persuade Coriolanus, perhaps family can persuade him to stop his lust for revenge and destruction. Yet he rejects the bond of family. “All bond and privilege of nature, break!” (5.3.25). Though Coriolanus is experiencing a certain humanization in this encounter and dialectic between himself and his mother and wife (and son), he fights against what they symbolize. “Tell me not wherein I seem unnatural,” he cries (5.3.83-84). Not even the intervention of his mother and wife, imploring him to return to the bonds of nature, the love offered in the family, the salvation and humanization represented by that heart, can save Coriolanus.

Volumnia’s speech highlights the importance of family and the love of family in preventing the slide into tyranny. In beseeching her son, she even pleads to him to make the Romans and Volscians one family as he is uniquely positioned to do so—now a traitor who has sought union with the Volscians to feed his revenge for expulsion but remaining the Roman hero that he was that has his roots planted in the city and the Roman citizenry.

While Coriolanus accepts Volumnia’s impassioned plea, his rejection of the bond of family seals his fate. Even here, Coriolanus acts alone for his own desires and ego. He heads to the Volscians to make peace but is killed as a traitor. To die a traitor is to die without a home, without a family, without the bond of love to be loyal to. Without that love one becomes a tyrant—unmoored and adrift which causes one to indulge in one’s own lusts and dark fantasies.

The action of Coriolanus was tied to the family of Coriolanus. The next episode of Rome’s decline and fall is tied to friendship. The friendship of Brutus and Julius Caesar to be specific. And we know how that turns out. Brutus will betray Julius Caesar and the revelation of a best friend’s betrayal causes the utterance of those infamous words forever seared in our consciousness: et tu Brute?

Is Julius Caesar really a tragedy about Julius Caesar? Or is it really the tragedy of friendship principally focused on Brutus who is the real protagonist and the psychological main character of the play?

Caesar is a tyrant. There is no romanticization of Caesar and his lusts. He is prideful too. And his pride, like with Coriolanus, causes him to be alone and isolated. That Caesar is a tyrant forces Brutus’s hand and heart to take action. He must forsake his friendship with the great Roman general to save the republic. Or so he thinks.

Shakespeare is offering commentary on how politics can change friendship. Prior to Caesar’s foray into the domain of the political and his movement toward tyrannical rule, Brutus and Caesar could be friends and were best of friends. Caesar’s entry into the domain of politics, the threat he poses to senatorial privilege, the consolidation of the monopoly of power that tyranny entails, forces the rupture of that loving friendship Caesar and Brutus had for each other prior to Caesar’s march toward despotism and Brutus’s acceptance of the need to be the one to destroy that friendship. Since politics seems to be a zero-sum game revolving around power, the benignity of friendship and the warm heart of love that friendship can manifest is necessarily expunged in politics. Politics doesn’t afford the possibility for love. It is a brutal game of domination. As Max Weber would say, politics is not the realm of saints.

To those who say Brutus never loved Caesar, a close reading of the play indicates otherwise. In the conspiracy to murder Caesar, in which Cassius seeks to enlist the aid of Brutus, Brutus initially balks. He is conflicted. “I would not, Cassius, yet I love him well,” Brutus declares (1.2.82). Cassius is the schemer and chief villain of the play when you examine his speeches. Cassius’s villainy breaks Brutus’s heart of friendship and Brutus’s various laments and psychological torment reveals as much, “Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar I have not slept” (2.1.61-62).

Brutus eventually succumbs to the temptations offered by Cassius and the conspirators to kill Caesar. Brutus, in succumbing to this temptation, justifies his abandonment of love in the false veils of honor, glory, and nobility. He is restoring honor, glory, and nobility to Roman politics in embracing the conspiracy and planning to kill the tyrant Caesar. “Let’s kill him boldly,” Brutus announces, “but not wrathfully” (2.1.172).

Shakespeare, here, seems to be uniquely exceptional in offering an inspection of the tyranny of Julius Caesar (himself prideful and arrogant) and the eventual acceptance of dark actions that destroy love and feed one’s own sense of pride through false veils of concepts of glory, honor, and nobility (Brutus). Brutus does, in fact, become a butcher no matter how he attempts to justify his actions. He wrathfully kills Caesar despite claiming his embrace of murder isn’t motivated by wrath. But it is. Brutus is able to deceive himself to claim his cruel actions are somehow noble and loving: love of Rome and the liberty that Caesar threatens. Thus not only does tyranny destroy friendships, tyranny causes murders and leads to tyrants to try and justify their cold and brutal actions (as is the case with Brutus).

Thus, the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon is simultaneously deconstructing two sides to tyranny: the arrogance and pride of the usual tyranny easily identifiable (Caesar) with the sophistry of nobility, honor, and glory that Brutus comes to mask the evident—he himself has also become a monster and has forsaken the love he formerly had with Caesar and becomes a sort of tyrant as well. Taken in its fullness, then, we also witness Shakespeare’s commentary on how tyranny destroys the love of friendship. And when Julius Caesar is read in the aftermath of Coriolanus, we also witness how tyranny has destroyed family and now destroys friendship. Those pillars and magnets of love which make life meaningful are beginning to disappear as tyranny becomes more and more acute and forceful. (Julius Caesar is a far more violent play than Coriolanus.)

With family and friendship ruined by drift into tyranny, love itself is the final pillar that is to be destroyed for the complete and utter, totalizing, consummation of tyranny to emerge. That is what Antony and Cleopatra is principally about.

I love Antony and Cleopatra. I find it to be a profound work of drama that also reveals the mature Shakespeare’s thoughts on love and politics. One must forsake politics if one is to live a life of love. After all, Coriolanus, Caesar, and Brutus were all intimate participants in the domain of politics and because of that they had the love which sustained their hearts soiled and turned to blackness and darkness. Antony speaks an incredible truth about how love is incompatible with politics when he makes love with Cleopatra in her bedchambers, “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space, kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike feeds beast as man…We stand up peerless” (1.133-36, 39).

Antony and Cleopatra are peerless in their love. Lovers stand apart from politicians and politicos precisely because they are lovers and not politicians (those cold, lonely, almost pitiable creatures if not for the fact they are cruel butchers and tyrants). Moreover, Antony and Cleopatra are passionate. Their passion reveals to us their love for each other and their abdication of the sterile nature of politics. Their speeches are passionate (at least when Antony is in the company of Cleopatra; for when he is in Rome and beside the Roman schemers, he becomes mechanical and heartless like them). The wisdom of the play is revealed by Antony and Cleopatra, not Octavius Caesar or his lackeys.

That love is the central spirit governing Antony and Cleopatra is also stated in their first spoken lines. “If it be love indeed, tell me how much,” Cleopatra says (1.1.13). Antony answers, “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned” (1.1.15). This love they share can offer a “new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17). The Roman Empire with its wide arches cannot. Lastly, the “space of play” in which Antony and Cleopatra are fully themselves is the space of love:

That time—O times!—
I laughed him out of patience; and that night
I laughed him into patience; and next morn,
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
I wore his sword Philippan (2.5.18-23).

In contrast to the passionate love of Antony and Cleopatra which offers a “new heaven” and “new earth” is the mechanical emptiness of Octavius Caesar and the bureaucratic empire of tyranny he embodies. He is cold and calculating where Antony and Cleopatra are intoxicating and erotic, passionate and moving. He is introduced like a bureaucrat, sitting at his desk going through plans and papers. The depiction of Octavius as a cold tyrant is the maturation of Shakespeare’s interrogation of the nature of tyranny. He never utters a single passionate line, never gives a passionate speech, is never involved in the thick of the exhilarating action.

Let us return to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar (and Brutus) ever so briefly at this moment of character contrasts. These were men of intense passion—much like Antony and Cleopatra. But their passion led them down the path of tyranny. Their egoistic lusts fed their insatiable appetite for political conquest and glory. Yet the lovers of those plays were equally passionate: Volumnia, Virgilia, even Brutus prior to his fall into the temptation of conspiratorial murder. What kept the passion of lovers different from the passion that befell the tyrants was relationships. Coriolanus’s passion is never tied to another—it is relegated purely to himself. (This is also true of Richard III.)

The passion of Volumnia and Virgilia is the passion induced because of the love of family. The passion of Brutus was in his friendship to Julius Caesar. The passion of Antony and Cleopatra are in each other’s arms and bosoms as lovers. The passion of the tyrants, Coriolanus, Caesar (and Brutus in his turn to murder) is that it is contained in only themselves. Their passion has no “other” to love, no beloved to direct the passion, no partner to tame the ego in the self-giving passion of self to other that is reciprocated in the dance of eros which makes our lives wholesome and meaningful. We all intuitively know this is true. We feel it inside our very souls. Those who are alone, despondent, they are the ones filled with that negative passion that makes them so frightening. Those who are in relationships laying and playing in the arms and bosoms of others are filled with a positive passion that produces joy and smiles.

Where does this leave Octavius then? Tyranny has been on the march for two plays, hundreds of years in the Roman timeline, now reaching its acme in Octavius. This, too, reveals the genius of Shakespeare. Octavius, in the continuity of the Roman plays, represents the new, mature, formalized manifestation of tyranny in its purest, unadulterated, complete, form.

The early emergence of tyranny and its march to completion begins in ecstasy, passion, and ego. We can look to the Bolshevik Revolution as the finest example of this reality in our near historical past. The passion of the Bolshevik Revolution, the October struggle, Lenin, Trotsky, et al. is darkly inspiring despite their crimes. (So, too, is Coriolanus and Caesar.) Yet after the passionate tyrannical beginning comes the empty, mechanical, cold totalitarianism of bureaucracy and the eradication of eros from the world. Think of Stalin as the other great example. So, here, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare prefigured the Bolshevik Revolution by 400 years. Octavius is a Stalin. He is a cold, empty, mechanical man who operates with lackeys who do his bidding as he sits at his desk and inside his office. He is not out in the streets, in the battlefields, like his tyrannical predecessors. He is walled up in his office, he operates through subordinates.

Let us, now, turn to another Shakespearean insight that invites deep intellectual consideration.

Love threatens the political. “Let Rome in Tiber melt!” Since love threatens the political (Volumnia and Virgilia’s love; the love of Caesar Brutus had before succumbing to the temptation of murder; the love of Antony and Cleopatra), the politics of tyranny and the false dream of “universal peace” (4.6.5) preached by Octavius must destroy love itself for its maniacal phantasmagoria to realize itself. Thus, Octavius wages his war against love and lovers: Antony and Cleopatra.

Note, here, that the love of Antony and Cleopatra prefigures a “new heaven, new earth.” The consummation of political ambition, per Octavius, doesn’t portend a “new heaven, new earth” but “universal peace.” How eerily prescient that statement is. How many of our tyrants, hiding their despotism, claim their efforts will bring lasting peace?

As Octavius and Agrippa and their forces close in on Antony and Cleopatra, ready to deliver the killing blow to love itself, Octavius declares those haunting lines, “The time of universal peace is near” (4.6.5). But universal peace is not passionate. The peace offered by Octavius’s tyranny is bland, mechanical, empty. It is cold. The triumph of tyranny, from Shakespeare’s magisterial vision, is empty. The world in all its majesty and humans in all their complexity has vanished. How many of the great books dealing with dystopian despotism since Shakespeare manifest that vision? Almost all. (It is usually an act of erotic love, true erotic love, that threatens the dark tyranny that dystopia represents.) Tyranny is cold and bleak. That is the quintessentially Shakespearean insight into politics and tyranny.

At the end of Antony and Cleopatra, with the world of love crumbling before their eyes, Eros is the final lieutenant who cannot come to deliver the sword into Antony’s chest. Eros kills himself. After Eros commits suicide (which is symbolic by the fact of the name choice), Antony and Cleopatra soon die as well. With love (Eros) finally dead, our lovers die. Tyranny is complete. The lonely, cold, bleak, tyrant has won.

What is tyranny according to Shakespeare? Isolation. Loneliness. Emptiness. A world in which family, friendship, and love itself have been eradicated. We who live in a supposedly free age without the pillars of family, friendship, and love—a feeling of isolation and loneliness with the dark and mechanical walls of nothingness enclosing around us—may well see through the façade of modern propaganda and find something profoundly prescient in Shakespeare. We who want life want love, like Antony and Cleopatra. In lovers’ arms we experience what it really means to be human.

Yet the tyrant has also lost. Antony declared that kingdoms are made of dungy clay, empty earth; the kingdoms of this world fall, love endures. We remember great lovers precisely because love is eternal and immortal. Politics is not. How fitting, then, in Shakespeare’s dissection of the march of tyranny in the Roman plays that he leaves us with the greatest lovers of Antiquity whose love still causes our own hearts to flutter and offers the only true escape from the politics of tyranny. Flee, flee from the empty promise of politics. Embrace the bedchamber of love. Be Antony and Cleopatra, Volumnia and Virgilia, or Brutus in his friendship with Julius Caesar. That life is the only life worth living. Everything else is counterfeit and ends in tragedy.

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