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Shakespeare's villains, he observed, never fell on the correct side of justice. Usurpers, conspirators, treacherous brothers or bastard half-brothers—of course they were doomed to fail. Their actions ran against the law, their attempts at power against the will of God. The natural order dictated that some were born to rule and others to serve, and with this logic the Bard agreed. After all, those who believed greatness could be thrust upon them were no more than fools.
But even these hapless villains had their lessons to teach. Iago and Edmund delivered master classes in sleight-of-hand, in how to signal betrayal in a misplaced handkerchief or forged letter. Cassius and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, those fine manipulators of other men's affections, taught how to flatter and how to feign, as required. Macbeth provided a study in absolute ruthlessness in the pursuit of power, sparked by destiny but executed bloodily by humanity. And Angelo demonstrated that a life could be bartered for even the most virtuous woman's chastity.
His father, who did not care for theater, slept with a copy of Il Principe at his bedside and drilled its teachings into his son with a relentless fervor that only Machiavelli could justify. Morality was a matter of opinion, but power was incontrovertible—and those who sought power must be ready to pursue it by any means necessary. As a boy, poring over the texts of Shakespeare's plays, he noted the actions of the antagonists carefully, weighed and considered the evil of such tactics against their utility, and tucked the flawed wisdom of these malefactors away for future use, determined to avoid their mistakes.
Perhaps all the world was a stage, but the darkened artifice of a theater allowed for illusions that reality could not sustain: marble statues drew breath, witches prophesied around cauldrons, true love sometimes thwarted death. The most preposterous of these illusions was that Brutus had hands stained the same red as those of Cassius, yet somehow remained the noblest Roman of them all. In the moonlit streets beyond the theater walls, conspirators muttered their treasons behind closed doors, startled by the sudden barks of dogs, as eager as Cassius to strike at power. They, too, met in desperate pursuit of a Roman Republic whose foundations would rest on the shattered debris of the old order, whose quicksand instability would bring the Eternal City once more crashing to her knees. There could be no nobility in such ambitions, whatever the poets might declare. (Artists, after all, had little recourse against the force of the law.)
And so he aligned himself with the order that had always presumed his right to domination, and he dedicated his services to the Crown and to God, and he quickly silenced the muttering voices who labelled him a hypocrite or worse. He would find his reward in Heaven, once the Papacy had been reinstated at St. Peter's and his loyalty had secured his divine blessings accordingly. In the meantime, though, he would take his earthly reward from the beautiful but contemptible women who dared to challenge his authority. It was only justice to remind the fairer sex that their purpose in life was not to foment revolution and abet dissent, but rather to marry and obediently serve. He would never marry, for romance and attachment made one despicably soft and weak—but he could certainly teach these unholy temptresses how to serve.
For all his studies of Shakespeare, though, he had forgotten that Macduff returned to Scotland to avenge his wife and children, that Elizabeth joined forces with the Tudors after losing her sons to the depths of the Tower, that a nameless but sympathetic servant slew Cornwall for plucking out the eyes of Gloucester. There will always be those who strike back all the harder upon witnessing such unabated cruelty. True, the fictitious women of Shakespeare's tragedies only ever drew their daggers against themselves. But perhaps he should have considered that, in the living world beyond the stage, it might not be impossible for a desperate woman—rendered equally vulnerable and powerful by the profundity of her paired misery and love—to take up a knife and choose to turn it on another.