Lincoln, Macbeth, and the Illusions of Tyranny

Abstract

What Shakespeare reveals in Macbeth is the all too human temptation to embrace tyranny. In exposing this temptation, however, Shakespeare also shows that the alleged inevitability of tyranny is a contradictory illusion that cannot survive the cycle of violence that it spawns. In comparable terms Abraham Lincoln exposed the tyranny of slavery as the hypocritical mockery of democracy which threatened the very survival of the American republic. Instead of teaching an illusory and despairing resignation to the tyrannies that plague human history, however, both Shakespeare and Lincoln defend a biblical standard of hope and justice (for all human beings) that is the very opposite of tyrannical illusions.

Notes

1. Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1:113–14 (editor's emphasis). All references will be cited as CW with volume and page number.

2. Lincoln, CW 1:111.

3. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London: HarperCollins, 1951), 3.1.90–94. All references to Macbeth are to this edition.

4. Lincoln, CW 2:278.

5. Lincoln, CW 1:112, 115.

6. Lincoln, CW 2:255.

7. Lincoln, CW 5:532–33.

8. Lincoln, CW 2:255.

9. Lincoln, CW 1:114.

10. Lincoln, CW 2:223 (editor's emphasis). The source of this passage is his “Fragment on Slavery” which he composed on July 1, 1854.

11. Lincoln, CW 8:333.

12. Lincoln, CW 7:368.

13. See Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln–Douglas Debates (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959), and A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

14. Harry Jaffa, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy (Claremont, CA: Claremont Institute, 2000), 7. He elaborates upon this thesis in his “Macbeth and the Moral Universe,” Claremont Review of Books 8.1 (Winter 2007).

15. Harry Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American Founding (Claremont, CA: Claremont Institute, 2002), 68.

16. See Brayton Polka, The Dialectic of Biblical Critique: Interpretation and Existence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

17. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, 217, 263–65, 345. I critique Jaffa's portrait of Lincoln in greater detail in my Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009), chaps. 3 and 5.

18. I discuss Lincoln's understanding of this demanding yet liberating biblical ethic in my Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love, chap. 3.

19. Lincoln, CW 4:236.

20. See Paul Gottfried, “Is Modern Democracy Warlike?” in The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories, ed. John V. Denson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), 425–31.

21. Lincoln, CW 8:333.