Tyrant: Shakespeare On Power

Description

An exploration of power in the plays of William Shakespeare that sheds light on our most urgent contemporary dilemmas. 'Brilliant' Sunday Times How does a truly disastrous leader - a sociopath, a demagogue, a tyrant - come to power? How, and why, does a tyrant hold on to power? And what goes on in the hidden recesses of the tyrant's soul? For help in understanding our most urgent contemporary dilemmas, William Shakespeare has no peer. 'Brilliant, timely' Margaret Atwood, on Twitter 'A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves' Nicholas Hytner

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve- How the World Became Modern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestseller Will in the World- How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and the classic university text Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, and has edited seven collections of literary criticism.

In this brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable study of Shakespeare's tyrants and their tyrannies-their dreadful narcissistic follies, their usurpations and their craziness and their cruelties, their arrogant incompetence, their paranoid viciousness, their falsehoods and their flattery hunger-Stephen Greenblatt manages to elucidate obliquely our own desperate (in Shakespeare's words) "general woe". -- PHILIP ROTH Brilliant, timely -- MARGARET ATWOOD, on Twitter A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves. -- Nicholas Hytner, former Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre Brisk and highly readable -- Jonathan Bate * New Statesman * Brilliant -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *