![Emily Clarke as Daenerys](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000196434263_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNJjoeBT78QIaYdkJdEY4CnGTJFJS74MYhNY6w3GNbO8.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Emily Clarke as Daenerys](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000196434263_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNJjoeBT78QIaYdkJdEY4CnGTJFJS74MYhNY6w3GNbO8.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Culture, of course, got there first. Not only are literature and its adaptations fissured with mad kings, but the prophets of the arts had already reimagined a couple of the best of them as figures awfully reminiscent of the 45th President of the United States of America well before he brought chaos to the heart of American democracy this week.
In 2017, the Donmar Warehouse in London put on a new version of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by American playwright and chronicler of now Bruce Norris riddled with allusions to Donald Trump. The eponymous despot (played by Lenny Henry) even spoke the line: “I’m going to make this country great again.” Brecht’s play is a barely disguised allegory of the rise of Hitler, in which fawning and supine advisers enable a maniacal mob leader to achieve control of the cauliflower racket, whereupon he descends into a frenetic rule by terror. Here, Ui castigated “losers” and complained of a city overrun by immigrants.
In the same year in New York, a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar depicted the Roman ruler –deemed by some so power-crazed he must be assassinated – as a blond man in a red tie, with a slim Slovenian wife on his arm. One night Trump fans stormed the production to protest, stopping the show. Its corporate sponsors pulled out.
The everlasting relevance of the great Victorian historian Lord Acton’s aphorism, that all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, never ceases to be striking. But it is through the prism of literature that we have perhaps been offered the best illuminations of this fatal human flaw. Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, gave us the blueprints: Lear, and his shadow, Macbeth.
Lear so surrounded himself with sycophants that when he learnt that the world was not actually as his obsequious, lying daughters had portrayed it, and further that the giving away of his power had made him as vulnerable to the four winds as a beggar, his mind broke.
![The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui at the Donmar Warehouse](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000127518247_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Here is the ultimate lesson for despots in how consulting only with “yes men” engenders such a misunderstanding of the world it can prove fatal. Moreover, Shakespeare’s ability to paint Lear as incontinently despotic and yet sympathetic as he comes – through madness – to realise his delusions is one of the great achievements of literature. It’s almost as if we are being shown that the insidious ravages of power will have this effect on any mind: beware those who desire it, for it could undo us all.
Macbeth, in parallel, teaches that devotion to power, particularly with a hefty dosage of paranoia, will only ever lead to more carnage. The character has a conscience too, of course, which is the thing that sends him nuts: hallucinations set in early as the ghost of Banquo, his first victim in his drive to be king of Scotland, comes to dine with him. Though perhaps the prickings of conscience have not such a relevance to events Stateside.
Kings can preside over all sorts of kingdoms. Just the command of a boat can be enough to tip some over the edge: take the sea captain Ahab on his demented chase of the great white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. There’s nothing like a singularity of aim combined with dreadful food and being stuck in the middle of nowhere to send the powerful round the bend.
![Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000248174510_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqr3wFXRJf43GEnVryW1_pMdDNqS4DTIyz4dd9VFYMBwA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Which brings us to Kurtz, seedy colossus of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and its cinematic homage, Apocalypse Now, where he is played by Marlon Brando. Kurtz, in the Conrad, is in the jungle of the Belgian Congo to acquire ivory – of which he gains so much his wealth and his power induce the locals to worship him. In Francis Ford Coppola’s film he’s waging war for its own sake. In both, he is mad.
He lives in an atmosphere both literally and metaphorically fetid. Is it his own abuse of power, or the pliability of humanity to go along with him, that induces him to pronounce, in both book and film, “The horror! The horror!” as he dies?
My feeling is that it is his disgust at the lucid perception of his own degeneracy – in amongst the delirium. This lifts Kurtz to the tragic. Thus Conrad and Shakespeare, with the artists’ talent for finding transcendence in disaster, redeem their mad kings through self awareness. The most vividly crazed rulers of more recent fantasy have not been so lucky.
![Patrick Stewart as Macbeth at the Gielgud Theatre](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2021/01/07/TELEMMGLPICT000001974116_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq9AcAAGJ7ECModYDWwOSuTDsLW_jEcMGLyvBk-muVrg0.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Tolkien gave us an excellent one, Denethor, in The Lord of the Rings, made insane by the pressing evil of the incarnation of total demonic power, Sauron, and by grief. But flying above them all is Daenerys Targaryen, the mad queen of Game of Thrones, herself the daughter of Aerys, known indeed as simply the mad king, who tried to burn down his capital, King’s Landing, and everyone in it.
Daenerys is dubbed the mother of dragons for her control over three of the creatures, the only dragons surviving from ancient times into creator George RR Martin’s faux-medieval world. She is the great hope for salvation from the inept rulers that control Martin’s central focus, the Britain-like Westeros. The single overall trajectory of the seven series of the biggest TV drama yet made was Daenerys’s quest for power, and the throne that was hers by rightful inheritance.
It took a single episode in the last season for this quest to mutate from the noble to the degenerate, as she charged her dragons to create a firestorm that would complete what her father had begun and destroy King’s Landing. Fans felt cheated at the sudden volte face, but wasn’t this just a fault of execution, an overly speedy plot development from showrunners in a hurry, rather than a case of implausibility? Wouldn’t the possession of fire-breathing dragons – shorthand for unassailable, thus absolute, power if ever there was one – make anyone lose their grip on the qualities of restraint, fairness and justice required for the best rulers?
They would have undone any of the cast of this article, that is sure. I can picture them laying waste to the Capitol now.
From Shakespeare to Game of Thrones, culture has always shown us how power corrodes
King Lear, Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness: these long ago charted how easily we are intoxicated by being in charge