Imprint: Bodley Head
Published: 24/05/2018
ISBN: 9781847925046
Length: 224 Pages
Dimensions: 222mm x 24mm x 144mm
Weight: 362g
RRP: £16.99
'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.
As an ageing, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social and psychological roots and the twisted consequences of tyranny. What he discovered in his characters remains remarkably relevant today. With uncanny insight, he shone a spotlight on the infantile psychology and unquenchable narcissistic appetites of demagogues and imagined how they might be stopped.
In Tyrant, Stephen Greenblatt examines the themes of power and tyranny in some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays -- from the dominating figures of Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Coriolanus to the subtle tyranny found in Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale.
Tyrant is a highly relevant exploration of Shakespeare’s work that sheds new light on the workings of power.
Imprint: Bodley Head
Published: 24/05/2018
ISBN: 9781847925046
Length: 224 Pages
Dimensions: 222mm x 24mm x 144mm
Weight: 362g
RRP: £16.99
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”.
Brilliant, timely
A scintillating book, uncannily illuminating about current politics, as perceptive about the victims of tyranny as it is about the tyrants themselves.
Brisk and highly readable
Brilliant
[Tyrant] illuminates our present political situation by analysing the traits of Shakespearean tyrants – and their mobs … nimble and intriguing … The 45th president is not mentioned anywhere by name in Tyrant , but the analogies are clear … illuminating.
Excellent.
Ardent and involving ... Greenblatt's points are well made and the implicit parallels are easily drawn ... acutely observed.
Brilliant ... [a] spikily insightful book
A brilliant, vivid, incisive, resonant account of Shakespeare's analysis of politics, and the corruption and abuses of power. He does not need to make contemporary parallels, they are so evidently before us.