There’s something about a Renaissance man with a God complex that just won’t die. Whether he’s summoning devils (Doctor Faustus), murdering kings (Macbeth), or designing a theocracy under the guise of morality (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Commander), you can practically hear the self-belief whirring. The centuries change, the tights become trousers, but the hubris? Eternal.
The Renaissance promised Man as Limitless: discovery, humanism, intellect, art, reason. But it also gave us the cautionary tale of what happens when knowledge outruns conscience. Divine Right has become Checks and Balances – same impulse, new branding. Faustus doesn’t just crave learning; he craves dominion. Macbeth wants mastery. Both start with curiosity and end with carnage. The “Renaissance ideal” becomes the “Renaissance delusion”, the belief that man can master everything, even morality.
Enter the Commander – the 20th-century echo of this beautifully bad tradition. He’s what happens when the Renaissance man swaps Latin for data and theology for policy, dressing ambition up as piety. Atwood’s genius lies in showing that the urge to control hasn’t vanished; it’s simply rebranded. The Commander is Faustus with a Bible app, Macbeth with a moral alibi. No devils, no daggers – just memos and meetings. But the effect is the same: dehumanisation disguised as order.
In his study (heavy with secrets, and self-delusion), the Commander plays Scrabble as though rediscovering culture while policing women’s bodies. It’s the Renaissance study reimagined: intellect hoarded by men, fenced off from those it oppresses. Atwood borrows Marlowe’s iconography – the scholar’s chamber, the flicker of candlelight, the illusion of mastery. Enlightenment becomes enforcement.
This is why context isn’t the dry bit you cram for marks. It’s the live wire running beneath every text. Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition’, Faustus’s hunger for forbidden knowledge, the Commander’s cool, bureaucratic tyranny – they’re all versions of the same performance: men overreaching, mistaking authority for wisdom, and dragging everyone else down with them.
The Renaissance may have ended around 1600, but its men are still with us. Watch out.
