Shakespeare wrote a great deal about power — how people get it, what it does to them, and how badly it goes when it’s handed over carelessly.
Most of it reads as uncomfortably current. Here are four plays that are, among other things, about running an organisation.
King Lear: succession done badly
A founder decides to retire. He divides the enterprise between his three daughters, allocating shares according to how well each one tells him she loves him.
Two perform the speech beautifully. The third, Cordelia, declines — she loves him as a daughter should, no more and no less. He disinherits her on the spot. “Nothing will come of nothing,” he tells her.
Then he discovers the part he hadn’t thought through. He’s given away the power and kept the title, and the two daughters who flattered him have no further use for the arrangement. He wanted to stop carrying the responsibility while keeping the authority and the deference, and it turns out those don’t separate.
The founder version is familiar: handing over operations while expecting to still be the one people defer to. Lear spends the rest of the play discovering that respect attached to his position rather than his person, and that he gave the position away.
The other lesson is about the selection. He chose on the basis of who was best at telling him what he wanted to hear, which reliably selects for the wrong person. The one who told him the truth was the one worth having, and her refusal to perform was the evidence.
Measure for Measure: delegation without a test
A duke leaves the city and hands authority to Angelo, a deputy with an unimpeachable reputation and no track record of actually holding power.
Angelo immediately begins enforcing dormant laws with severity, and within a short time is using his new authority to coerce a woman who has come to plead for her brother’s life.
The play is interested in what authority reveals. Angelo wasn’t secretly corrupt — he had never been tested, and his reputation was built entirely in circumstances where nothing was at stake for him.
The practical version: promoting someone on the strength of technical excellence and good character, without ever having seen them hold power over anybody. Those are different capacities, and the second one only shows up once it’s granted.
Which is the argument for handing authority over in increments and watching what happens, rather than leaving for a month and finding out afterwards.
Macbeth: ambition with no plan for afterwards
Macbeth is told he’ll be king, decides to accelerate matters, and gets exactly what he wanted.
The rest of the play is about the fact that he has no idea what to do next. Every subsequent action is defensive — eliminating threats, managing suspicion, consolidating something he cannot enjoy. He acknowledges it himself before he starts, describing “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.”
The recognisable version isn’t murder. It’s the acquisition, the expansion, the deal pursued hard for years by someone who never worked out what the business looks like afterwards. Then it arrives, and the whole operation reorganises around defending a position nobody actually wanted to occupy.
Worth asking, of anything you’re chasing: what does the week after getting it look like? If you can’t describe it, that’s information.
Henry IV and Henry V: the cost of the role
Henry IV, unable to sleep, envies his own subjects their rest and concludes: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
It’s the most quoted line here and usually deployed as self-pity. In context it’s more precise than that — he’s noticing that the people below him sleep because someone else is carrying the decisions, and that he is that someone.
His son Henry V gets the more interesting treatment. On the night before Agincourt he walks among his own soldiers in disguise, and hears what they actually think about the war he’s leading them into. It’s the only way to get an honest answer, and he has to conceal his identity to do it.
Anyone who has tried to find out what their team genuinely thinks recognises the problem. The moment they know it’s you asking, you get the managed version — and the more senior you are, the more managed it becomes.
Julius Caesar: the line everyone gets wrong
The widely-circulated version is “it is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves,” which sounds like a motivational poster and isn’t what Shakespeare wrote.
Cassius actually says: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Two things change with the real line. It’s blunter — the fault is ours, and our subordinate position is the evidence. And it’s spoken by a man in the middle of persuading a friend to join a conspiracy to commit murder.
Which is a useful reminder about quotation generally. The line is doing rhetorical work for a character with an agenda, not delivering Shakespeare’s advice for living. Half the “inspirational” Shakespeare in circulation is spoken by villains, fools, or people being manipulated.
If you’re going to use a quote, know who says it and why. Otherwise you may be quoting the con.
Why any of this is useful
Not because Shakespeare wrote a management manual — he didn’t, and forcing the plays into one flattens them.
But he was unusually interested in a specific question: what happens to people when they acquire power over others, and what happens when they give it away. Four hundred years on, the failures he described are the failures that still occur, which suggests they’re features of the situation rather than of any particular era.
Lear’s is the one worth sitting with longest, because it’s the one most founders will eventually face. He wanted to hand over the work and keep the standing. He chose successors on the basis of who praised him most. And he discovered, far too late, that the thing that made people listen to him was the position, and he’d already signed it away.
More on handing over a business you built and giving people real decision rights.
