“Hell’s black intelligencer”: Hannah Arendt, Auschwitz, and Richard Gloucester

Abstract

The theatre of Shakespeare, the artist of the “invention of the human” (Bloom 1999), stands at the opposite side of the dehumanizing practices pursued by the Nazi perpetrators. In an often-quoted statement Arendt portrays Eichmann, one of the main criminal minds behind the ‘Final Solution’ as a petty bureaucrat, far from the devilish grandeur of Shakespere’s Richard Gloucester, king Richard III. All the more so, since, unlike Richard, Eichmann was doubly subordinate to Himmler, and to Hitler. And yet, I argue, Shakespeare’s dramatic experiments in English history can still contribute to our understanding of the radical extremity of the Shoah and of the Nazi leader. By developing the character of Richard Gloucester play after play, Shakespeare explores the experience of the evil king both as “hell’s black intelligencer” and as a hystrionic orator, who artfully seduces his audience. The tragedy of the Shoah has retrospectively shed a new sinister light on Richard’s perverting journey to the throne, witnessing to the shifting mutability of Shakespeare’s theatre and to its enduring capacity to resonate with the evil of history.