Rebels and Tyrants
Edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky
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Rebels and Tyrants
Edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky
Stony Brook University
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Contents
Introduction
by Nicholas Rzhevsky
1
Richard III
by William Shakespeare
Suggested Readings
5
156
Ivanhoe
by Sir Walter Scott
159
Suggested Readings422
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens
419
Suggested Readings572
Notes from the Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
575
Suggested Readings640
Introduction
Dr. Nicholas Rzhevsky
T
he texts included in this anthology all speak, with the particular force of the best literary works, to the themes of
rebellion and tyranny. In the most obvious sense, they address ever-present social and political events, sometimes
reflecting the authoritarian rulers and those who rebel against them in history, sometimes creating entirely new fictional
characters that come to define history through the author’s creative imagination.
But in addition to focusing and giving meaning to historical events, the gathered texts also exemplify other forms
of tyranny and rebellion in world culture. This cultural process involves the engagements of men and women of the
literary arts with what precedes them in terms of aesthetic norms, stereotypes, and mind-sets that they face as they begin
their work. All of the writers included here reacted to literary tradition in terms of their own particular rebellions. They
refused to accept the tyranny of the acceptable, and they created works of literary sedition pushing forward and changing
the course of literature. Each of them was influenced by the social, political, and economic events of their particular
historical context, but their contributions, if one is to honor their own choice of aesthetic endeavor, must be measured
in greatest part by what specific literary processes they engaged in their time, and by what subversions they created in
response to the authorities and dominant ideas and values of their profession.
Shakespeare’s Richard III is one of the canonical tyrants of world literature. Shakespeare’s uses of Holinshed, Hall,
and More for historical material have come to strongly influence the definition of English history itself, with Richard
as a leading figure in the legitimacy narratives of the English political establishment. Of course, the stage representation of Richard’s illegitimacy was a major concern for Shakespeare’s theater, situated as it was in the Elizabethan age
and given its dependence on the Tudor line of rulers whose claims to power involved in part denying the competing
claims of Richard’s House of York. But Shakespeare goes much further than providing skillfully written propaganda to
justify the existing political arrangement. Richard’s tyranny and villainy is a function of a greater tension between the
demands of a canonical aesthetic genre, that of tragedy, and the dominant cultural challenges of the times provided by
the Renaissance. Shakespeare subverts the stereotypical notions of villainy indulged by lesser writers by giving Richard
the Renaissance merits of intelligence, courage, secularization, and control of rather than submission to religion. These
attributes make him a true tragic hero, because he is both rebel and tyrant, and because his outstanding human capacities
are devastated by the tragic flaw provided by the Renaissance emphasis on free will and the moral choice of evil he makes
in the search for power.
Richard’s gifts are highlighted by Shakespeare’s metaliterary gesture in giving him a skillful control of language and
performance talent and demonstrating the uses he makes of them on behalf of his tyrannical course. The function of
literature and theater itself is thus introduced into the play, along with Shakespeare’s interest in not only the play of
literary language and acting skills but also in what their greater purpose is and what they are meant to accomplish.
Introduction |  | 1
Of the included works, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe perhaps has had the greatest impact on the popular images of
rebels and tyrants. The novel helped turn Robin of Locksley, soon to attain immortality as Robin Hood, and his opposite,
the fickle Prince John, into emblems of the abuses of power and of those who fight for freedom against oppression.
Numerous full-length feature films, television serials, and theater adaptations have made the two characters the stuff of
popular mythology for children, but also for the children who become adults. Scott uses folklore material and historical
sources with great relish to shape fictional constructs, such as the supposed division of what would become England into
Normans and Saxons at the end of the twelfth century. Some of these flights of imagination ultimately have little to do
with the historical reality they supposedly reflect, but all are important for creating a national image that persists to the
present day.
Scott’s greatest rebellion was also the source of his great popularity. His protagonists and plots, including most obviously Ivanhoe’s story, came out of the conventions of romance and included an inclination for the exotic, mysterious,
and supernatural, along with the merits of individualism and the pathos of its clashes with conventional society, found
in the romantic literary tradition. But Ivanhoe is a different type of rebel, who rejects the hallowed romance values
exemplified by the predilections of his king, Richard I, for glorious battle, adventure, and feats of courage. Instead, he
stands for stability and a well-run government, and in his personal life he is equally incapable of breaking free of his
ordinary self to fall in love with the gorgeously exotic Rebecca, rather than her rival, Rowena, and her expected and more
common charms. Such choices, of both protagonist and author alike, reflect middle-class principles close to the heart
of Scott’s developing readership. They encouraged the rebellion of the new literary tradition of realism against romantic
conventions.
Dickens’ Hard Times takes on and develops into a tyrannical world view a syndrome of ideas of central importance
in shaping social and political history and still crucial for the key principles of democratic and other governments.
Without the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the ways in which ruling structures have dealt with
such issues as the usefulness of the majority giving voice and some power to those in the minority would be far less clear
and certainly different. The obvious tyranny in Dickens’ novel reflects the evils of the developing industrial revolution
and capitalism as a function of utilitarianism, but his rebellion is more profound than those provided by exposés of
social and economic injustices. The greater tyranny the writer wants to expose in his most ideological novel is that of
prevailing mind-sets used to justify harshness and cruelty in the name of efficiency, selfishness in the name of progress,
and an apparent concern for the greatest good for the greatest number that diminishes the individual’s own value. The
writer calls upon literature to rebel against the prevailing social-political schemas that reduce psychological and moral
complexities and that make human experience simple enough to eliminate art, love, and personal responsibility.
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground creates one of the most notorious rebels of world literature, so powerfully
drawn as a fictional character that he has most often been interpreted to be a positive hero rather than the misogynist
caricature of progressive thought gone badly wrong that Dostoevsky intended. The underground man rebels against
the very values and ideas he holds to be true and appropriate for an educated person of his time. Progressive ideology,
for him, defines the ultimate complete tyranny, of scientific law and determinism, in which there is no such thing as
free choice or moral capability. His rebellion against these “laws of nature” is emotional and reflects Dostoevsky’s own
sphere of rebellion in the name of those complexities of human meaning and needs neglected by reductive definitions of
society and politics. That is not to say that Dostoevsky’s work is not relevant to social-political concerns. Notes from the
Underground address the fundamental process at the core of any society, which is the relationship between individuals
here focused through the underground man’s association with a prostitute.
Prostitution, thanks to prurient interest as well as true concern for female victims, Dostoevsky was well aware,
was a perennial topic for those who would change society. The success of the novel Dostoevsky parodied, Nikolai
2 | Rebels and Tyrants
Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, highlighted the popularity of the subject and provided a happy ending for social
programs by demonstrating the ease with which human beings, can be persuaded to change their unfortunate ways.
Dostoevsky questions such optimism by demonstrating how rebels in the name of social justice can turn into tyrants;
the underground man, in this regard, anticipates the prophetic motifs of the later novel, The Devils, which predicts the
historical course of Russian progressive thought as it became the tyranny of 20th century communism. The imposition
of one’s will and power over other individuals starting in the fundamentals of human psychology and interaction, is that
basic process, Dostoevsky suggests, which underlies social-political history in its broader sweeps.
Dostoevsky’s own revolt against literary conventions and set mentalities was marked by his rejection of the typical
realism that generally was moving in the direction of naturalism in Western literary history. For Dostoevsky, as the
underground man’s experience reveals, the point was not the inevitability of biological or even social causality, but the
extension of ideas to a “fantastic realism.” Literature, Dostoevsky argued, was best suited to play out at the extreme
the central values and ideas which tyrannized humanity and the writer’s job was to assert the prerogatives of fiction in
asserting the essential freedom of creative imagination and moral choice.
All of the included texts have important resonances in modern culture. Their influence might be most obvious in
theater, film, and television adaptations, but ultimately their most important effect is in the responses of their readers.
Among those readers one finds the new rebels of literature in the person of writers who continue the traditions set by
Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Each of them contribute to the particular subversions of the common
and less-talented that continue to mark literature, including the aesthetic drive for subversion itself that moves culture
forward and towards new vistas.
Nicholas Rzhevsky
Stony Brook
Introduction |  | 3