Greatness, Goodness, and the Tragic Body Politic
(with Shakespeare’s ghost looking on) Greatness is not goodness. This ought to be obvious, and once stated plainly it usually is — yet modern politics repeatedly collapses the two, either moralising power or shrinking it into harmlessness. Tragedy never made this mistake. Shakespeare, in particular, understood that greatness is a matter of scale and consequence, not virtue, and that the body — frail, foolish, mortal — always waits beneath the robes. Tragedy asks a simple, brutal question: What happens when a human flaw is given enormous reach? In King Lear, Lear begins convinced that authority entitles him to love. He stages a performance of affection and mistakes words for truth. Power, here, destroys perception before it destroys anything else. The Fool — the only figure permitted to speak honestly — tells him bluntly: > “See better, Lear.” It is the play’s moral command. Lear cannot see while power cushions him. Only when stripped of crown, shelter, and dignity does knowledge arr...