Introduction

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the works of Shakespeare as having relevance to today’s world of business. Numerous books and essays have been written in which episodes from the plays of Shakespeare have been adroitly applied to the corporate world of today.

The question that is posed by this re-examination of Shakespeare is this, can the plays of Shakespeare with their incomparable insights into the human condition teach us anything about corporate leadership, about the issues that are relevant to today’s corporate world, about the consequences of decisions made today by CEOs, about management techniques and how the use of power can help a society as well as the abuse of power be harmful to both a society and to the leader wielding it?

In this paper, I will attempt to answer these questions by applying well known scenes in a few of Shakespeare’s plays to the problems faced by our leaders today, both corporate as well as political.

Et tu Brute

Julius Caesar is the most political of all of the plays of Shakespeare. The story of Caesar is well known. He is one of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. He was a soldier, a politician, a writer and a historian. He was the first of a long line of great Romans. The date of his assassination, the Ides of March, (which by coincidence happens to be today’s date) is well known to everyone. Shakespeare’s play that treats of his assassination and the civil wars that followed that event is the first introduction to Shakespeare by many a high school student.

However, the Caesar portrayed by Shakespeare is both morally and physically degenerate. There is only a hint of his greatness in this play. He comes off as arrogant, egotistical and is easily seduced by the sycophants, like Marc Anthony, who form part of his entourage.

In our first encounter in the play he tells Marc Anthony:

I rather tell thee what is to be feared

Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.

[ Act I Scene II, 218-219]

In a later scene Decius Brutus says of Caesar:

But when I tell him he hates flatterers,

He says he does, being then most flattered.

[Act II Scene I, 220-221]

In Act III, within moments of his assassination, Caesar tells his cohort how he sees himself:

But I am constant as the Northern Star,

Of whose true-fixed and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament.

The skies are painted with unnumb’red sparks,

They are all fire, and every one doth shine;

But there’s but one in all doth hold his place.

So in the world; ‘tis furnished well with men,

And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;

Yet in the number I do not know but one

That unassailable holds his rank,

Unshaked of motion; and that I am he.

[Act III Scene I 65-75]

Shakespeare’s Caesar is the archetype CEO or political leader who has outlived his usefulness. He has come to actually believe the propaganda about himself, his alleged greatness and most of all that he is indispensable to his corporation or his country. He is not totally lacking in insight and recognizes that there are those around him who are jealous and envious, but he dismisses them. Thus he says of the green with envy Cassius:

Such men as he be never at heart’s ease

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,

And therefore they are very dangerous.

I rather tell thee what is to be feared

Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.

[Act I, Scene II 215-219]

The stage is thus set for his assassination or coup by two types of plotters. The first represented by Cassius plots Caesar’s death not out of devotion to liberty and freedom as he often states in the play but because he is simply jealous of Caesar and cannot abide his presence any longer. As Cassius tells Brutus early in the play:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

[Act I, Scene II 141-144]

The other type of plotter as exemplified by Brutus who bears no personal enmity towards Caesar but is concerned for what is best for Rome. He mulls over in his mind the murder of Caesar admitting that Caesar has as yet done nothing to merit his execution, but who knows what he is capable of becoming once he has been crowned:

It must be by his death; and for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

But for the general. He would be crowned.

How that might change his nature, there’s the question.

[Act II, Scene I, 10-13]

Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,

Would run to these and these extremities;

And therefore think of him as a serpent’s egg,

Which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous,

And kill him in the shell.

[Act II, Scene I, 30-34]

Throughout history many a king/ruler has been removed by plotters who were motivated by the reasons given above. And in modern times CEO’s in such corporations as Apple, Ford, GE and others have been replaced for the same reasons.

After Caesar has been assassinated the assassins philosophize that future generations may re-enact this scene perhaps in corporate board rooms, however, without the blood :

How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over

In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

[Act III, Scene I, 121-123]

At the end of the play, after Brutus has committed suicide, Anthony pays tribute to him and recognizes that his motives for assassinating Caesar, while misguided, were pure:

This was the noblest Roman of them all.

All the conspirators save only he

Did what they did in envy of great Caesar;

He, only in a general honest thought

And common good to all, made one of them.

His life was gentle, and the elements

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, “This was a man!”

[Act V, Scene V, 75-81]

Richard III

Richard III is one of the great Shakespearean villains and one of the greatest villains of all time. His treachery, murders, cheating and lying seems to know no bounds. The simple fact is that he is a man who wants to become King, but there are members of his own family, including two young nephews that stand in his way. However, since he has no scruples or a conscience he does not hesitate to eliminate them one by one until the “golden round” is his. He is the precursor of a Hitler, Saddam Hussein or a Ken Lay.

In the first scene of the play, he tells the audience just what he is up to:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days, (of peace)

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the King

In deadly hate the one against the other;

And if King Edward be as true and just

As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,

This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up

[Act I, Scene I, 28-38]

In this same scene he glories in his physical deformities:

I—that am rudely stamp’d and want love’s majesty

--- Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.

[Act I, Scene I, 15-23]

I believe that in this soliloquy Shakespeare is describing not only Richard’s physical deformities, but his mental ones as well. He is a classic sociopath, devoid of all empathy and ruthless in getting what he wants. This is a description of many a modern ruler or CEO, such as the presidents of big tobacco, who kill 3,000,000 persons worldwide every year without ever batting an eyelash or the Ford executives who decided to let the Ford Pinto on the market with its’ faulty gas tank knowing full well that people would be burned to death in certain kinds of crashes.

Richard III also is a precursor of the modern CEO as propagandist or spin doctor. After Richard has gotten rid of all the members of his family that stood in his way to the throne and now he is the logical choice to become King, he has his sycophants bring the English leaders to him in a monastery and beg him to become King.

They encounter him between two monks holding a prayer book in his hands and his cohort the Duke of Buckingham says of him:

Ah ha, my lord, this prince is not an Edward

He is not lolling on a lewd love-bed;

--- But meditating with two deep devines;

--- Happy were England would this virtuous prince

Take on his Grace the sovereignty thereof;

But, sure, I fear we shall not win him to it.

[Act IV, Scene VII, 69-79]

After many entreaties from the English leaders and many refusals by Richard, he finally gives in and accepts:

Richard: For God doth know, and you may partly see,

How far I am from the desire of this. (to be King)

Mayor: God bless your Grace! We see it, and will say it.

Richard: In saying so, you shall but say the truth.

[Act IV, 233-238]

When one reads the entire scene of the English leaders wooing Richard to accept the:

The supreme seat, the throne majestical,

The scept’red office of your ancestors.

[Act III, Scene VII, 117-118]

you realize that no sophisticated spin doctor today such as an Ari Fleisher, a Martha Stewart or a Condi Rice could ever hope to match this for bold faced deception and chicanery without conscience or scruples.

Unsex Me Here

What about women as CEO’s? How does Shakespeare portray them? Even though Shakespeare wrote most of his plays during the reign of Elizabeth I, the first modern female ruler, he wrote no plays about her or any other Queen. Queens abound in his plays but only as appendages to their husband Kings.

When he created the character of Lady Macbeth, he portrays her as the driving force behind her husband’s plot to kill King Duncan so that he might become King himself and thus she would become Queen.

After she has been told that the three witches have prophesied that her husband will become King, she realizes what she has to do to make sure that he does indeed become King.

She knows her husband well and is worried that he might be too lily livered to take the direct route to the throne and so she thinks out loud:

Yet I do fear thy nature,

It is too full of the milk of human kindness

To take the nearest way.

Thou wouldst be great,

Are not without ambition,

But without the illness should attend it.

[Act I, Scene IV, 18-23]

Lady Macbeth is not “without the illness” of blind ambition, but she realizes that she is only a woman and that she has to take on the accepted male qualities in order to participate in the murder of Duncan.

In the following scene she calls on “evil spirits” to give her manly qualities so that she can do what needs to be done. One could imagine a Margaret Thatcher reciting these lines as she entered Number 10 Downing St. for the first time as Prime Minister or Imelda Marcos urging her husband on to a new atrocity.

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of

Duncan under my battlements.

Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts!

Unsex me here, and fill me, from the crown to the toe,

Topful of direst cruelty!

Make thick my blood,

Stop up the access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose.

--- Come to my woman’s breasts,

and take my milk for gall,

you murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature’s mischief!

[Act I, Scene IV, 39-51]

Macbeth murders the King with Lady Macbeth’s help and thus they have sewn the seeds of their own destruction. Macbeth does become King, but he realizes very quickly that “to be thus is to be nothing.” So the rest of the play is devoted to the horrible consequences that he and his Queen, Lady Macbeth, must suffer as a result of this act of regicide.

While murdering King Duncan, Macbeth imagines he hears a voice:

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep,”

---‘Glamis has murdered sleep,

and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more,

Macbeth shall sleep no more.’

Lady Macbeth develops a hand washing obsession. As she is washing her hands for the umpteenth time she says:

Out, damned spot! Out I say!

Yet who would have thought the old man

To have had so much blood in him?

--- What! Will these hands ne’er be clean?

--- Here’s the smell of blood still;

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten

This little hand. Oh! Oh! Oh!

[Act V, Scene I, 38-56]

In these scenes in Macbeth not only does Shakespeare show us the consequences we suffer as a result of us deliberately harming others to advance ourselves, but he shows us that we are our own worst enemies. This is a theme that runs through all of his plays. He reminds us that we might be tempted to screw over everyone in sight as we climb the corporate ladder of success, but we will suffer consequences in the end. Maybe these consequences won’t be known to the public at large, just as only a few people knew that Macbeth could sleep no more or that Lady Macbeth could not get rid of that “damned spot” of blood on her hands.

Recently I read that Mrs. Thatcher needed massive doses of Vitamin B12 and many a glass of whisky to get her through each day while she was Prime Minister of England. Maybe this was her Lady Macbeth hand washing ritual. Who knows?

Francis W. Reuterman

Rota, Spain

March 2003

Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown