I’d like to think that BC was that cool.

In any event there are so many interesting ideas here, especially about this issue of the ethics of wielding authority. You could have some good debates on how sympathetic Shakespeare is to his flawed authority figures.

As I say, though, I never could figure out what Greenblatt was going on about.

The article makes it clear that Greenblatt reads both Shakespeare and Clinton, reading Shakespeare, as believing “no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate object,” and that Julius Caesar, Hamlet — even Henry V — demonstrate an “overarching skepticism about the ethics of wielding authority.” So he/they would disagree with your point (2).

I actually emailed Greenblatt when I wrote this post and invited him to comment. I was a bit shocked when he replied, though he declined to comment saying something along the lines that any further comment would only weaken it further. I think he thought I was laughing at him. SGx

Either (1) I’m fairly dense (most likely), (2) it doesn’t makes sense, or (3) it has alarming implications.

I won’t elaborate on (1), but with respect to (2), Macbeth did have boundless ambition and the object of his ambition was to be king of Scotland, which was the apex of his world. His ambition was not to kill everybody at first and that is what makes the play so great. Good guy goes bad Greek style. He went about achieving the ambition in an ethically challenged way, but there is nothing wrong about about aspiring to be king. So I don’t see why the object of his ambition should necessarily be characterised as ‘ethically inadequate.’

As far as (3), if my observations on (2) are wrong, then I guess that ‘object’ is meant to refer to the activity that the boundless ambition generated, and if that’s the case, calling mass murder an “ethically inadequate” response makes BC a master of understatement at best. (Maybe that explains his interpretation of what went on between him and Monica?)

I’m sure that there is some subtle linguistic point that I’m missing–after all, I couldn’t make any sense out of Greenblatt when I read him in a Rhetoric class–but I’d love to hear other peoples’ thoughts.