Since I’m making my way through Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, I thought this, which looks at the different ways in which power is depicted in William Shakespeare’s plays, was interesting and thought-provoking. (Coincidentally, the essay is by Greenblatt himself.)

There is one other key principle, which will take us back to … Macbeth. Macbeth dreams of killing his guest, King Duncan, and seizing power. He wants the assassination to be swift, decisive, once-and-for-all: mission accomplished. The lure is strong enough, he says, to make him ignore the threat of divine judgment in the afterlife, but still for a fateful moment he holds back:

We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor.

This is, I think, Shakespeare’s central perception of governance, and it stands in the place of any more high-minded ethical object. The actions of those in power have consequences, long-term, inescapable, and impossible to control. “We still have judgement here”—it is not in some imagined other world that your actions will be judged; it is here and now. Judgment in effect means punishment: whatever violent or dishonest things you do will inevitably serve as a lesson for others to do to you. Shakespeare did not think that one’s good actions are necessarily or even usually rewarded, but he seems to have been convinced that one’s wicked actions always return, with interest.