Editions

Tyrant

  • Imprint: Bodley Head

  • ISBN: 9781847925046

  • Length: 224  Pages

  • Dimensions: 222mm x 24mm x 144mm

  • Weight: 362g

  • RRP: £16.99

Tyrant

  • Shakespeare On Power

'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

  • ISBN: 9781847925046

  • Length: 224  Pages

  • Dimensions: 222mm x 24mm x 144mm

  • Weight: 362g

  • RRP: £16.99

Reviews

  • "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

  • "[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."

    Alasdair Lees, Independent

  • "Excellent."

    Eliot A. Cohen, Washington Post Sunday

  • "Ardent and involving ... Greenblatt's points are well made and the implicit parallels are easily drawn ... acutely observed."

    John Stubbs, Literary Review

  • "Brilliant ... [a] spikily insightful book"

    Daniel Swift, Spectator

  • "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."

    Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company

More from this Author

About the Author

Stephen Greenblatt

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.

Stephen Greenblatt

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