The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall

Few writers on Shakespeare can open a book the way Eliot A. Cohen does: “It is all very well to see Richard II, Goneril, and Iago on the stage. I, however, have had to work with some of those people.” The claim is earned. Cohen is a military historian and a former Counsellor of the US Department of State under Condoleezza Rice. Hearing Cardinal Wolsey’s farewell to all his greatness, Cohen saw in it the eminent figures of Washington who had swum on their sea of glory far beyond their depth.

The central puzzle is why a dramatist who left no trace of his own political views should remain one of the most penetrating guides to how power actually works. Cohen’s answer is that Shakespeare understood two things that political science often misses. The first is that character drives politics: individuals matter profoundly and power changes them. The second is that power is always exercised through a kind of theatre. One consequence is striking. Cohen says that leaders do not necessarily grow more cautious with age; they change for better or for worse.

The organising idea of The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall is the arc of power. Cohen arranges the book around how power is acquired (by inheritance, acquisition and seizure), how it is exercised (by inspiration, manipulation and murder) and how it is lost (through innocence and arrogance, magic and self-deception or by walking away). This unique structure lets him set characters from different plays side by side. The method throughout is empathy, as he argues that “If there is one quality essential for understanding politics it is empathy.” The tone of what follows is dark: the more he has seen of power, the more convinced he has become that it damages human relationships and the souls of those who wield it without restraint.

Cohen’s experience with the State Department persuades him that courts are universal: “Strip away the trappings of robes, crowns, and scepters, and one realizes that today as well courts run almost all human organizations.” Cohen shows that inheritance is not confined to monarchies but runs through corporations, political parties and universities. Steve Jobs’s grooming of Tim Cook is his example of a succession that worked. Cohen draws the lesson that the hardest thing about grooming a successor is the incumbent’s own ego.

Cohen then follows Henry Bolingbroke, who gets the crown by alternating humility and veiled threats and has Richard II murdered without ever quite giving the order. Strikingly, Cohen compares him to Lincoln, an infinitely greater man but one who also had an engine of ambition. Both paths end sadly: “The tragedy of a Bolingbroke or a Lincoln lies in the melancholy of their realism”, while the tragedy of a Coriolanus lies in his fragility in the face of ingratitude.

Seizing power is bloodier still. Cohen breaks down the mixed motives of the conspirators against Caesar. He compares Octavius to Viktor Orbán, who keeps the forms of a republic while emptying them of substance, and concludes that, “those who defeat one kind of treachery, in other words, may end by begetting new forms of treachery.” Macbeth, by contrast, sees from the start that one murder will lead to others, and goes ahead anyway. Cohen’s modern parallel for Macbeth is Paul Kagame.

On exercising power, Cohen distinguishes three components of leadership: management, which business schools can teach; command, which can be learned with more effort; and inspiration. “Inspiration, however, is an altogether subtler art,” more gift than skill. Henry V has it in abundance. He follows Henry’s shift from the personal pronoun of aristocratic honour to the royal plural and then to the fraternal plural of the band of brothers. He shows how Henry turns his army’s weakness into pride and promises the survivors a kind of equality with gentlemen that he will never actually grant. His most striking modern example is Volodymyr Zelensky, whose choice of set, costume and audience-specific speeches to foreign parliaments made theatrical skill into a weapon of national survival.

Inspiration has a shadow. Cohen argues that political manipulation resembles stage magic: the trick is less concealment than control of the audience’s attention. Henry V is again the master. He threatens Harfleur with rape and massacre while disclaiming responsibility for his soldiers. Cohen reads the Chorus as a sycophantic press corps that distracts the audience from the darker acts of the king. His conclusion is uncomfortable but honest: “All of politics, and indeed all leadership, involves to some extent the manipulation of human beings.”

Cohen uses Machiavelli’s distinction between cruelties well used, done at a stroke and then abandoned, and cruelties badly used, which grow with time. Henry IV belongs to the first kind; Richard III and Macbeth to the second. Cohen traces the same escalation in Hitler, from the Night of the Long Knives to mass extermination and in Vladimir Putin’s war. “Rule by murder is quite literally addictive,” he concludes, and those who practise it lose their sense of reality along with their humanity.

Cohen starts from his own experience of pulling his punches the first time he briefed President George W. Bush. He then reads the neglected Henry VI plays as a study of a weak king who can see but does not understand. The modern parallels are Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, a brilliant scholar who could not hold his state together, and Margaret Thatcher’s fall in 1990. “It is the nature of power to be fragile and contingent, and it is the nature of powerful men and women to forget that fact.”

Equally original, Cohen takes seriously something most political analysts ignore: the non-rational aura that surrounds power. Glendower, who believes in his own supernatural birth, is the prototype of what Cohen calls ‘Glendower syndrome’. Cohen’s most contentious modern case is Barack Obama, whose belief in his own gifts led to a magical thinking in which good policy was expected to prevail without persuasion or deal-making. The lesson Cohen draws from Richard II’s late recognition that he too lives on bread is that “at the center of power, as Shakespeare reminds us, there always and only resides a fallible human being.”

Of those who walk away, Prospero is the one ruler who lays down power well. He finally breaks his staff and drowns his book, because “Prospero knows that power and the most important relationships of our lives are incompatible.” Cohen’s real-world counterparts are Churchill, who stayed in office too long because he distrusted Eden, and George Washington, who resigned his commission and then the presidency.

Shakespeare, Cohen argues, keeps returning to the tension between legitimate and effective power, to the gap between elites and masses, and to the possibility of real greatness in a cynical, post-heroic age. Shakespeare is neither monarchist nor republican, and he writes about power so well. “He teaches us that power is necessary and unavoidable, but it always comes with a price.” The book ends where it began, with Cardinal Wolsey, who finds in his fall a self-knowledge and peace.

This is an elegant and often moving book. Cohen writes with the authority of someone who has sat in the rooms where power has been exercised. His arc of power is a genuinely useful framework for thinking about how leaders change over time. His close readings of Henry V, Richard III and Prospero would serve any course in political theory or leadership. The book is as accessible to the general reader as to the specialist.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.