[This was posted before the recent U S election.  It is set out again because every word bears on how our worst fears have been realised since Trump took office.  In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman said the question is whether Trump is the dupe of Putin or a Mafia don running a protection racket.]

There is no such thing as evil.  It is not something that you can sprinkle on or detect in your fish and chips.  Rather, it is a label that we attach to some forms of conduct.  And what we usually have in mind are people who are ready, willing and able to hurt or kill other people for the sake of it – or, as the saying goes, for the hell of it.  There may be no other apparent motive.  The pickpocket, the drug dealer, the rapist, the blackmailer, the vengeful husband, the neo-Nazi – they all have a motive.  But the villain?

At the beginning of his lecture on Richard III, W H Auden said there is a difference between a criminal and what we call a villain.  ‘The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously and for its own sake.’  The leading examples in Shakespeare, apart from Richard III, are Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and Iago in Othello.

In ordinary language, an evil person is one who wants to do wrong by others.  Such a person gets called a villain.  That word has apparently come down to us from villein, the equivalent of the serf at the bottom of the medieval social ladder.  Brewer (Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) says that the notion of ‘rascality, wickedness and worthlessness now associated with villainis a result of aristocratic condescension and sense of superiority’.  That is very English.  (The editor cites a passage from the opening scene of As You Like It, where both meanings are in play in the one sentence.)

There is, at least in our literature, another type of villain, if I may be permitted that term.  Some characters are so made that they cannot stand goodness.  When in Paradise Lost, Satan comes across Adam and Eve, he ‘felt how awful goodness is’.  (And if Satan is not entitled to have a view on evil, no one is.)  Iago saw in Cassio a kind of ‘daily beauty’ that unsettled him.  The most gross example is John Claggart in Billy Budd – especially in the libretto of the opera.  Claggart is unmanned by the simple goodness of Billy. 

O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness!  
Would that I never encountered you!  
Would that I lived in my own world always,  
in that depravity to which I was born.  
There I found peace of a sort, there I established  
an order such as reigns in Hell…….
Having seen you, what choice remains to me?  
None, none! I’m doomed to annihilate you,  
I’m vowed to your destruction. ….
No, you cannot escape!  
With hate and envy, I’m stronger than love….

There is more.

But when we come to look at Richard III, we will see that some bad actors are driven by pure envy in looking at what others get in life that is certainly denied to them.  Iago drove Othello to be jealous of what he thought Cassio was up to with his wife, but Iago envied Cassio for his good fortune and success in life.  In the grizzly argot of our time, Iago, a man of ‘other ranks’ bitterly resented the elites.

In papers called Richard and Adolf and The Seduction of Seduction, I have looked at some of these issues, but here I wish to focus on what the play Richard III may tell us now about the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

But, first, I want to say something about the best-known character of Shakespeare – Sir John Falstaff.  Not in any order, Falstaff is a coward, a liar, a fraud, a womaniser, a drunk, and a rotten fat skunk.  And he is this playwright’s most popular and enduring character.  One reason is that he said things and did things to offend and upset the Establishment in ways that we would like to be able to do.  He put the boot into knighthood and chivalry as surely as Cervantes did with Don Quixote.  He was the champion of those who had missed out. 

Well, if you go to a MAGA rally, you will not find too many people successful in a profession, government, academe, or business.  (Nor will you find any at the bottom of the scale, sleeping rough.)

And we might here telegraph a warning about the significance of Falstaff.  Dr Johnson said the character was loaded with faults, ‘and with those faults that naturally produce contempt.’  But he concluded his remarks:

The moral to be drawn from this representation is that no man is more dangerous that he that with a will to corrupt hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.  (My emphasis.)

I see the seduction as the other way around, but the point remains.  What is it that attracts us to some complete ratbags?  How do we get sucked in – conned?

In discussing Richard III, Dr Johnson said that Shakespeare was careful to suggest that the wickedness of Richard proceeded from his deformity – and from the ‘envy that rose at the comparison of his own person with others, and which incited him to disturb the pleasures that he could not enjoy’.  There is a lot of that in the Austrian corporal who was rejected by both Vienna and the German High Command.  But at the beginning of Richard III, in his opening speech, Richard says that with all his obvious defects, he is ‘determined to prove a villain.’  The author had paved the way in the prior play (Henry VI, Part III, 3.2 and 5.6), when Richard told us that he can smile and murder while he smiles – which he later does while stabbing a king to death, while saying that he has ‘neither, pity, love, nor fear…. I am myself alone.’  By the end of the preceding play, Richard had happily compared himself to Judas – and you can’t go lower than that.

Here then is the triumph of the ego in the ultimate smiling assassin.  Now, that is a title that we would award to Vladimir Putin rather than Donald Trump, but that does not mean that we may not get some guidance on how to deal with the latter, from the insights into our humanity of the greatest playwright the world has known.

Here are some points of resemblance and distinction.

Each comes from a background that is on any view ‘privileged’ – and each knows little about the rest of the world, and each cares even less.  Neither really cares for anybody else.  The self is all in all.

Each is in his own way childlike.  Each has a view of the world that is at best superficial.  Neither could imagine a world without himself.  Nothing in the world is relevant unless it relates to him.  Somehow. the ordinary rules do not apply to him.

Each disdains anything remotely resembling book learning.

Richard, like Trump, did not care for others, but he could seduce them.  In this they both resemble Don Giovanni.  The seducer is amoral and it’s as if their victims had some sort of death wish.  If these seducers have any conscience, and it is a real issue for both, it just does not work.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!  (Richard III, 5.3.310-312)

That is the credo of the fascist.

People rarely get close or remain close to either of them.  They are mostly front.  Their egos do not allow much time out for others.  If someone breaks through, it is just a matter of time before they are ejected – with extreme prejudice.  Buckingham was Richard’s most loyal supporter in winning the crown.  When he feels the rift, he is ‘off while my fearful head is on’ (4.2.121).  With Trump, the rift comes when the lackey gets caught, and Trump drops him cold – and in the slammer.

You could not reason with either.  They create their own reality.  Both resemble spoiled children who never learned better, or grown up.

They enjoy the game of plotting to get power.  They are born gamblers.  Why not?  They take huge risks because they don’t mind if others get hurt.  But they are very bad on the job when they get it.  They were not made for responsibility in government – or anything else.  In this and other respects, they are like spoiled children who have not known what it is to be accountable.

Revenge for them is very personal.  This is because the loyalty they expect is very personal.  People owe loyalty not to the office or the nation, but to the leader personally.  This was the great error of the German High Command in dealing with Adolf Hitler, and it is the beginning of the shredding of anything like the rule of law.  What you get is personal power of someone above the law.  The old term was ‘tyrant’.

There was a beautiful example with the singer, Taylor Swift.  She was a threat because she might prove more popular than Trump.  And she had backed the other side.  Trump said there was ‘no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden’ and would never be ‘disloyal to the man who made her so much money’.  Congress had passed an act giving financial aid to singers, but to Trump, it never gets above the personal.  In Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, the last chapter is headed ‘The Grammatical Fiction.’  There is no such thing as ‘I’.  In the world of Donald Trump – and Richard III – it is the other way around.  There is ego – and that is that.  The Oxford English Dictionary happily defines egomania as ‘the insanity of self-exaltation’. 

The personal nature of the rule, and the grubby means by which these people come to power, feeds on and promotes division and conflict, and simple hate.  They are a form of cancer on the community.  Indeed, that is the underlying thread of these plays leading to and from the Wars of the Roses.  Trump just went one further by denying that he had ever lost power.

These people appeal to those who feel they have missed out in the race of life.  This is more Trump’s schtick than that of Richard.  The scenes where Richard says that he has to be enlisted for the benefit of the common weal are frankly comical – but, in truth, no more incredible than what Trump’s ‘base’ salutes him for.  His followers think that they have been treated unfairly, and that this gives them a moral right to seek retribution.  And they are quick to identify those who they think should answer for their ill treatment – although they do not use the word ‘scapegoats.’  Their leaders go along with this.  It brings the loudest cheers at the rallies.  This is more like Jack Cade than Richard.  The oppressed believe that their leader is the one to look after them, and preserve what they have managed to retain from the wreckage wrought by their opponents.

They both play rough.  They know no other way.  They just ride roughshod over any doubter or opponent who gets in their way.  Bluff is built into their persona.  And if you are going to lie, lie big.  It is as if there is nothing left solid in the relative ether, and people have always preferred fiction to history.  This braggadocio is just another part of the intimidation, and it is always the scheme of the dictator to involve as many as possible in the dirty work, so that they get locked in by their own complicity.  There is the sleight of hand of those we used to call mountebanks.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

A vendor of quack medicines at fairs…who attracts the crowd by his tricks and antics; hence any charlatan or self-advertising pretender.  The bank, or bench, was the counter on which traders displayed their goods, and street vendors used to mount on their bank to patter to the public.

That description brings us from the post-medieval morality plays and commedia dell’arte to Richard III – and it is also very apt for a MAGA rally.

Now for some differences. 

Richard was a worthy soldier in battle, and prepared to do his own murders.  But Richard does not delude himself as Trump appears to do.  On the contrary, he takes great pride in his machinations and the pure malice that drives them.  When he seduces Anne, a process that is revolting, he challenges the audience to come with him.  He is celebrating a win for the misfits.  ‘And yet to win her, all the world to nothing’ (1.2.237) Auden said (in 1946) of the opening monologue of Richard that it was ‘not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939 in its utter lack of self-deception.’  That is a remarkable analogy.  Some were more than troubled by the apocalyptic and brazen tripe of Trump in his (first) inaugural.  Was this the same nation that gave the world Abraham Lincoln? 

Auden also said that Richard was not ambitious in the ordinary sense of that term.  ‘He’s not interested in becoming king for the position of power, but because becoming king is so difficult.’  Well, others might put differently that description of the pursuit of the prize. 

But we come now to the bad news.  Dr Johnson, as we saw, warned against the dangers in succumbing to the whiles of Falstaff.  Sir Anthony Quayle played Falstaff and fairly described him as ‘frankly vicious.’  Why do we fall for him?

The problem is that Richard takes the audience with him and at least in part seduces the audience.  I referred above to the old morality plays.  They appeared in England in the 15^th and 16^th centuries – to set up the triumph of virtue over vice.  Vice was a central character – generally named after a particular vice, like pride or greed, who wore a cap with asses’ ears (so prefiguring Bottom). 

Richard expressly makes a reference to Vice.  ‘Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralise two meanings in one word’ (3.1.82-83).  I need to set out what Tony Tanner says here in full.

The Vice was the self-avowed mischief-maker, if not chaos-bringer, and we should remember that one of his Satanic privileges was to inveigle the audience into laughing at evil.  The figure of the Vice was clearly invaluable to Shakespeare when it came to depicting inexplicable evil, evil which seems gratuitous, unmotivated, simply for its own sake.  From any point of view, Richard’s behaviour is profoundly irrational, and is finally both horrifying and incomprehensible even to his closest accomplices (in fact, no one is close to him at all; simply some accompany him further into his evils than others.)  Richard is, as he has told us, an expert Machiavel; he is also a Senecan tyrant and a Marlovian villain (closest to Barabbas in The Jew of Malta).  But he is primarily a Vice.  However – and this is crucial – he is a Vice who acquires (no matter how foully) the legitimate robes of a king.

Those insights round off this discussion.  ‘Chaos-bringer’ is so apt.  And remember just how vicious, how horrifying, Richard is.  The murderer of the children is unmanned by this ‘most arch deed of piteous massacre’ (4.3.2).  The king can hardly wait until after supper to hear ‘the process of their death.’

It is then that we recall that the playwright has subjected us to hours of flirtation with our taste for violence and deceit.  It is followed by a set piece of our theatre – the judgment of the Furies, the mother and two wronged queens, one of whom is a world authority on cursing.  We need to remember that Richard got to the crown not by guile or rebellion, but by murder in cold blood.  It makes The Godfather look pale – but we get a kick out of that, too.

So, as we watch in trepidation the possible revival of Donald Trump, despite all his offences against humanity, we should ask again – just why do we fall for some kinds of ratbag? 

And while doing so, we might recall that it does not require anything like the incandescent genius of Shakespeare, or the craftiness of Satan, to induce our undoing.  And despite his trysts with the ghosts, Richard goes down swinging, like Don Giovanni, but sans cheval.  And there were some in the cinema who cheered him on even there.

May I finally say something about the condition of the United States now?  In discussing Julius Caesar, Auden said that Rome was not doomed by the passions of selfish individuals, but ‘by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of dealing with its situation’   Angela Merkel said that ‘Sometimes my greatest fear is that we have somehow lost the inner strength to stand up for our way of life’.  The phrase ‘inner strength’ catches the eye.  A German man called Stephen Haffner lived through the twenties and thirties and the rise of Hitler.  He described the failure of Germany in very simple terms as a kind of ‘nervous breakdown’ that flowed from the want of a ‘solid inner kernel.’

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…

That is just how major battles and sporting events are won and lost.  Sadly, it does not help either us or the U S that we have seen it all before.