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Tyrant

byStephen Greenblatt

Shakespeare On Power

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'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

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

About Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

He is the author of fifteen 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.

A prize-winning author and celebrated scholar, he has been studying, thinking and writing about Renaissance literature for his entire working life.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • ISBN: 9781784707606
  • Length: 224 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 15mm x 130mm
  • Weight: 161g
  • Price: £10.99
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