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Susan’s Bookshelves: The Hollow Crown, Shakespeare on how leaders, rise, rule and fall by Eliot. A Cohen

Shakespeare’s plays are full of leaders who are often Kings. Eliot A Cohen is a highly experienced and eminent US government adviser and academic. His 2023 book discusses the characters, words and actions of Shakespeare’s leaders and draws parallels – often uncannily close ones – with real-life examples. Power is the common factor, whether it is inherited, seized, acquired and/or lost.

Macbeth, for example, has deep-seated ambition beyond his proven competence on the battle field. Then ideas simmer, with input from the witches and his wife. Note that they can’t make him do what he does. They simply stir. The final decision to kill the king is his own although he still, at that point, has a few qualms of conscience. This however is the man who was capable of ruthlessly “unseaming” an enemy from “nave [groin?]  to chops” so he stabs King Duncan to death. And thereafter the killing quickly escalates until the perpetrator, or the one who gives the orders, is steadily dehumanised. Cohen compares him with Vladamir Putin.

It isn’t just kings and world leaders who have power. It could be the head of a business or club. Firing someone is a metaphorical murder, Cohen observes. When I was about half way through this fascinating book I was told a real life story by two friends. The organisation they both belong to as a way of pursuing a hobby (I’m deliberately fudging the details here) pays a professional to lead their activity. Last term their new chap proved unsatisfactory. So, awkward as it was, they fired him, to which he responded with steely but pitiful charm and bought them all farewell gifts. As I listened to this tale, Cohen’s book very much in my mind, I thought: “This is pure Julius Caesar, with a whiff of Richard II. The committee, which both my friends are on, are the conspirators, and the membership at large, who voted unanimously for his dismissal, are the mob baying for blood.” And it made me respect Shakespeare’s timeless perspicacity in a new light.

Then there’s the relinquishing of power. Is it possible to do it with grace?  Think of Margaret Thatcher grimly clinging on. Cohen observes that it’s very hard to watch someone else doing the leadership  job you painstakingly built up. Wise university deans (it would be vice-chancellors in the UK)  move right away and buy a house in the country when they retire. King Lear doesn’t understand this. Neither do many captains of industry, head teachers and the like. Prospero, on the other hand, deliberately destroys the magical tools which gave him the power which seems a strange decision. The whole question of magic, whatever we now mean by it, interests Cohen too. Obama, for example, had it in spades and it brought him many followers although, in Cohen’s view he didn’t achieve much as president.

Then there are leaders who have so much charisma and brilliant command of rhetoric that they can literally entrance their followers and persuade them of almost anything. Think of Mark Antony at Caesar’s funeral or Henry V before Agincourt – and of Adolf Hilter.

Cohen is pretty scathing about Henry V whom he regards as wily, manipulative, calculating and ruthless. I used to teach this play to A level students. If I were doing so now I would be insisting the my students read, and then discuss with me and each other, every word that Cohen has to say on Henry V because he comes up with things I’d never thought of.  Is there a pornographic element in the level of lurid detail in the threats to the Mayor and people of Harfleur? Does Henry actually enjoy the violence? Well, not in the 1989 Branagh film he doesn’t but you could think of half a dozen modern aggressors and play it that way. And why, given his fluency at every other point in the play is he so tongue-tied with Katharine to whom marriage is, anyway, a done deal? Surely it’s just an act? Note too, the sexual innuendoes he uses.

It’s a thought-provoking read to which my comments here probably don’t do justice. If you care about Shakespeare and or the dynamics of power in general The Hollow Crown is a must.

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Susan Elkin Susan Elkin is an education journalist, author and former secondary teacher of English. She was Education and Training Editor at The Stage from 2005 - 2016
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