Tyrant

Shakespeare On Power

Stephen Greenblatt author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:23rd May '19

Should be back in stock very soon

Tyrant cover

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?

'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
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 *

ISBN: 9781784707606

Dimensions: 197mm x 130mm x 14mm

Weight: 164g

224 pages