The Tyrant’s ‘Restless Ecstasy’
Truth has been turned on its head, the ‘unnatural’ has become the natural, the injured call for redress. Shakespeare’s Scotland is in a sickly state. Much like ours. Today’s pundits could drown an ocean as they hark back through history to understand our troubled times. Literature, in contrast, is seldom considered. Yet its pages can peer into “the seeds of time” and offer insight into our troubles. The Bard’s world was monarchy. Ours democracy. But that’s the lesser point. The thrust here is ambition unbridled attended by fury and chaos.
Power baits Macbeth. He contemplates whether to murder King Duncan, but conscience nettles him. Macbeth knows that a villain cannot outrun his crime. “Bloody instructions…return / To plague the inventor.” Lady Macbeth also schemes villainy, but without apparent regard for conscience. Upon hearing that King Duncan is coming to visit the castle where she resides with her husband, Lady Macbeth’s mental wheels begin to spin. The goal – regicide. When Macbeth wavers, she goads him, ‘When you durst do it, then you were a man’. She presses further: ‘I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me. / I would while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.’ But bravado is crushed under the weight of conscience, and she goes mad.
Macbeth finally goes through with the bloody deed. Hunger for power and the wife’s entreaties prompt him to act. With the murder done, the world goes off kilter. The night of the stabbings, the heavens are ill-tempered. Happenings “unnatural” have occurred. A “mousing owl hawked at and killed” a falcon. The king’s horses – “Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race / Turned wild in nature…[Made] war with mankind” – and ended their fevered riot by cannibalizing each other.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth like Picasso’s Guernica capture worlds reduced to black and white. At this, Trump’s second term, chaos gallops across our land like Duncan’s horses. The order that has sustained us for over two hundred years is under threat. And within the minds of many, color has been drained to black and white.
Shakespeare, in King Lear, reminds us, “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.” As long as we breathe, the tyrant cannot rest. And herein lies the despot’s dilemma. A Vladimir Putin, a Kim Jun Un, a Mao must murder and torture because the foundations upon which he stands are never secure. As murder and torture, lies, and betrayals multiply, blood, first a trickle, turns torrential. One murder necessarily leads to another. Macbeth becomes so wearied that at one point he laments, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Paranoia metastasizes. No one can be trusted. Even the closest aides can turn on him. Likewise, those surrounding Trump fly on a prayer. Their fall from grace can be swift. They walk a fine thread. They attempt to ensure their safety by filling the would-be oligarch’s ear with ‘sweetmeats’. The tyrant gorges, his ego bloats. He begins to believe in his invincibility. But hubris is folly. Once crowned, Macbeth’s world comes to cannibalize him. Guilt prevents him from uttering ‘Amen’ at a prayer’s end. Nightmares plague him. At a dinner he hosts, Macbeth sees one of his murdered victims seated at the meal. Madness has taken a seat in the psyche. Is our President any less mad?
Macbeth’s grab for power turns into the dust of dreams. His wife dies possessed by demons unleashed by her role in the plot. As the English army and its allies approach Macbeth’s castle, the usurper’s soldiers hightail. Macbeth is left to stand alone. The weight of what he has carried has been great. He has lived – if ‘lived’ it be - in “restless ecstasy.” In the end, he arrives at a fateful epiphany.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Donald Trump would be wise to pay heed. But our President is not a reader. The upheaval he has caused, the grab for power, has for many made his name synonymous with villainy. You do not have to believe in heaven and hell to believe in Dante’s fourth circle of hell. Trump is already there. Junk food numbs him. His grab for things of this world is bottomless. Once dead, he will turn to dust having left a legacy of infamy that will outlive his gold. The end will be tortured. The wrongs he has done are too great for it to be otherwise. Akira Kurosawa’s masterful samurai reimagining of Macbeth tells us as much. The final scene in Throne of Blood - the arrow scene - is a gruesome marvel of staging and psychology. A sea of arrows arch across the sky towards one target – General Washizu (Macbeth). The arrows whistle like heralds of death. The arrow that pierces and lodges in the tyrant’s neck is for his most dastardly crime - the murder of Lord Tsuzuki. Washizu’s mouth is open, but nothing comes out. The eyes are terror-stricken. That final dance with death is a macabre affair - a human pincushion spun round-and-round by arrows. It is a window into mind more than body. He has played and lost to forces no human can contain. It is redress for treason and betrayal on a grand scale.
July 2025
Sources
Alan Feuer and Christine Haughney, Standing Accused: A Pillar of Finance and Charity, New York Times, Dec. 13, 2008
Jennifer Sangalang and John Bisognano, “What is the Trump diet? Fast food, lots of snacking, little vegetables, news reports say,” Nov. 25, 2024, https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2024/11/25/trump-diet-fast-food-mcdonalds-ice-cream-diet-coke-mar-lago/76297238007/.
Kurosawa, Akira, Throne of Blood, The Criterion Collection, 1957.
Miller, Max, Al Capone’s Soup Kitchen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxUSzM29Y3M
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, The Folger Shakespeare Library, 2013.
Why Literature
Paying for a therapist when you’ve been kicked off your parents’ insurance…yikes.
Literature prompts us to reflect on the human condition. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth we meet a man who craves power. Once attained, he discovers it brings with it a force as consequential as Aeolus’s bag of wind. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God connects us to a woman of color set on freeing herself from the shackles of patriarchy. Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (Antes que anochezca) lets us in on LGBT community’s resilience in the face of authoritarianism.
Literature is more than the sum of its parts. A voice within it speaks to us. Listen and let it take you. Where? Read and find out. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, offers his readers extraordinary panoramas of past, present, and future in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 probes authoritarianism’s ultimate failure to subjugate the spirit of inquiry. We read literature because minds require knowledge for growth. Left unfed the mind withers. But too often politics dilute or erase literature’s potential. Classrooms, libraries, and media become the victims of gatekeepers.
Literature folds into the arms of the Humanist Tradition, that product of the Enlightenment and ancient Greece’s tradition of democracy and open inquiry. It can incite pushback against the sentinels of propriety by offering voices old and new that speak to the most fundamental questions of our existence. To read works by voices from different races and ethnicities, different gender and sexual identities, different aesthetics and ideological perspectives opens dimensions that could otherwise stay closed. For humans to blossom, literature must be unbound.