Quote of the Day (Shakespeare’s Richard III, on Political Ambition)

“Why then I do but dream on sovereignty,

Like one that stands upon a promontory

And spies a far-off shore where he would tread,

Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,

And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,

Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way:

So do I wish the crown, being so far off,

And so I chide the means that keeps me from it,

And so, I say, I'll cut the causes off,

Flattering me with impossibilities,

My eye's too quick, my heart o'erweens too much,

Unless my hand and strength could equal them.”—Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the future King Richard III), in English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI, Part 3 (1591)

Several months ago, bored during a TV commercial break, I switched channels and came across, on a PBS station, The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses. I watched transfixed for about a half hour. Nearly 40 years after first encountering this multitude of characters on the printed page, the pitch-dark political vision of William Shakespeare began to make sense to me. I resolved to watch the whole thing on DVD as soon as I had the chance. This past week, I finally did.

If you want to understand much of the creative inspiration for Game of Thrones, with its rival houses plunging entire kingdoms into division, chaos and violence, you can start here. (GOT novelist George R.R. Martin admitted as much in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone Magazine’s Mikal Gilmore.)

At the same time, I can’t help but think that this nine-hour BBC miniseries, combining Richard III with its less well-known predecessors, the three parts of Henry VI, took much of its look—notably, its stress on location shooting and bloody battle scenes—from the long-running HBO series. (And this was only the second half of this TV treatment of Shakespeare’s English history plays—the first half covered Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V.)

In any case, Dominic Cook and Sam Mendes—director and executive producer, respectively, of The Hollow Crown—have made me look at Shakespeare’s “Wars of the Roses” tetralogy in a way I never imagined when I took a college course on The Bard nearly 40 years ago. The course was an academic sprint that felt like a marathon: all of the playwright’s 37 plays, plus his poetry, compressed into two semesters. Some plays received extensive treatment; others, barely a mention. I only took the first semester, on Shakespeare’s early career. I can’t say I missed taking the other semester.

Among the works shortchanged in all of this were the Henry VI plays. I didn’t appreciate either their rich language or their complex, compelling characters until I saw the magic that Cook conjured with the help of his all-star British cast, which included Hugh Bonneville, Sophie Okonedo, Judi Dench and Tom Sturridge.

Oh, yes: and Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III (in the image accompanying this post). Though Shakespeare named this early portion of his play cycle after Henry VI, this last of the Lancaster monarchs increasingly is overshadowed by the hunchbacked villain.

From the moment he first appears onscreen, with his character’s misshapen form blocking out the sun as he lurches through a doorway, Cumberbatch (beloved by thousands of mystery fans as Sherlock) convincingly depicts Richard as a demon of the dark, desperate to fill his psychic void with increasingly bold grasps for power.

In the passage quoted here, Richard is all too aware of the obstacles blocking him from the English throne, which at this point appears “so far off” (including, at this point, the possibility that his brother, King Edward IV, and his wife Lady Anne Grey might produce heirs). Previously ruthless but at least indefatigable and brave in battle fighting on behalf of his family, the House of York, he now reveals that he hopes to seize the throne himself—even if that involves the removal of his brothers and Edward’s young children.

Energy and audacity, channeled constructively, can lead to accomplishment and fame. But through Richard (whose soliloquys continually invite us into his schemes), Shakespeare shows how those qualities can be warped by the unscrupulous pursuit and retention of power.

Along with being a master psychologist, Shakespeare also unravels the conditions that set the table for authoritarians: vacillating and/or innocent current leaders (such as King Henry), people in the orbit of a usurper who are gulled by his brazen lies, despite themselves (Anne Neville, who agrees to wed Richard), and the enablers (Hastings, Catesby, and Buckingham) who mistakenly believe they can aid his rise without falling victim to his machinations themselves.

What stands between Richard and his current counterparts around the world are a series of restraints on power, which can indeed, as he notes, look as formidable as a sea. That makes all the more astonishing his resolve to “lade [i.e., drain] it dry to have his way.” It’s a frightening metaphor for a process that leaves the security and liberty of a nation as void as its would-be authoritarian’s own emotional and spiritual resources.

As Abraham Lincoln scholar Douglas L. Wilson’s Winter 2012 article in The American Scholar noted, America’s 16^th President was a fan of Richard III. He thoroughly absorbed its lesson that a leader’s energy had to be tempered by integrity and compassion in using power. If he ever got around to seeing or watching Shakespeare (itself a doubtful proposition), Lincoln’s current GOP successor in the White House long since forgot that message.